The Purple Lipstick

I knew that day, that the red lipstick had given her a little nudge, had bestowed upon her some purpose, an inner resistance to the outer fragility, an anesthetic to the disfiguration, a figment of a previously held routine yet untouched by tragedy, a color, a whim, a flight, a momentary escape.

A few neighbors had begun their gaze upon her, with pity and sorrow, then meandering to askance, as they registered the redness of her lips. Amongst the many things that the red lipstick wasn’t and could have been, on that day, anachronistic – it wasn’t. It was her reconciliation with the day after death, and it was fully her choice, and hers alone, to be engulfed in a blaze of red.

The lipstick has been an object of confounding identity for a long time now – an excess, an intransigence, a wilful mutiny, a serious affront, ‘only the hookers paint their lips’, ‘you look like a slut’, ‘you want the boys to look at you, huh?’, of the dominatrix, blasphemy, an appellation, unholy, coquettish, unsavory and ungood – ‘good girls that came from good families did not do this.’

The lipstick, that today in 2020, was either a ‘Ruby Woo’, or an ‘all fired up’ or ‘lady danger’, had had a very murky history, with very strident cultural demons to combat and slay.

In Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the woman and the unwoman, both trapped in prisons of hierarchy and power labyrinths, were not allowed to wear lipstick in Gilead. Gilead had banned the lipstick – and magazines. Any form of self-decoration was suspect, any form of material that delivered the aspiration for self-decoration was suspect. For a woman to be dismantled, stripped of agency, shredded, and finally un-selfed – lipstick seemed to be the shining tip of the underlying iceberg. Gilead – the dystopian world of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which gained a second, more prominent round of applause after hibernation in the woods with a burial amongst old newspapers and the swirling dust motes of the aging library, was distilled into prominence, a second life when the pro-choice debate in the U.S gained momentum as part of the fifth wave feminism. Atwood had written this modest 200-page novel, looking out from her window, in 1989, gazing at the aftermath of history and its painful inheritance, of the Berlin Wall that had just fallen, to tell a story, an idea that had seized her, from the throes of the cold war, of the ineluctability of a sudden collapse, of all things seen, smelt and lived, with political brinkmanship that left all of the freedom tottering and worn thin.

Gilead was somewhere in the U.S. – where a biowarfare and a coup had stripped the Constitution of America, bare and null and avoid. Armed militants roamed the streets, commanders were the men in charge, and all women were infertile – except for a few Handmaids that were tossed from one powerful household of the Commanders to the other, to bear them children, through a very complicated ‘ceremony’ where the commander and the handmaid had sex, in the presence of the wife – in a very galling position of discomfort where the handmaid, sprouted from in between the legs of the wife and the husband stared at the face of his wife while doing ‘it’ with the handmaid. And nobody was allowed the lipstick, of course – not the handmaid, for obvious reasons, Gilead couldn’t afford any real feelings between the Commander and the Handmaid, the wife – No, because it was the wife’s moral duty to praise the Lord, for the bread, the hearth, the glory of being the Commander’s wife – and all this praying and thanking of the Lord, had to be done minus the lipstick.

And No, the Commander – in his spine-stiffening uniform, gleaming boot leather, insignia, shiny lapels, and gnarled voices, wasn’t allowed the lipstick either.

But like every black market, every little island of contraband and the ungoverned, Gilead too had a little place, far away from the grim and the grey and stark monotone, where women dazzled in sequins and stilettos and tiaras from the Great Gatsby era – where the Commanders got away for debauchery, of course. Here, the lipstick embellished every face, every line of worry, with a bold flourish and was vested with the greatest of significance.

In the concluding part to Gilead, in the prologue of ‘Testaments’ – the Booker Prize winner of 2019, Aunt Lydia, a key character of the book writes to us Readers, solemnly, through the fourth wall, saying, “If you are reading this, then I understand that Gilead is no more and the world has indeed been restored.

I sincerely hope the lipstick has made a comeback.”

What the lipstick truly gives a woman, is agency. In a world designed by men, for men – objects like lipstick and the little black dress (LBD) have long been mishandled, bestowing upon them scant respect and fanciful notions. They have incorrectly been believed to be objects of snare, of wilful desire, of enticement – but little does the man know that when the woman peers into the mirror, curves her lips, and splashes that little verve, she commences the day, the moment, that piece of destiny- on her terms.

I see Cortez, in her furious dissent, slicing through incompetence or coruscating lies – I see her eyes blazing/ piercing right through, her thick black glasses screaming, and there in that envelope of detail, is her red lipstick. My friend and I call it the Cortez Red. My friend wore it to a Kimchi festival, and sent me a selfie, captioning it – ‘My Kimchi needed some Cortez Sass’. Every time I’ve needed a sprinkling of nerve, I’ve solicited the unfailing services of the red. The weekend before my surgery, when I was terrified at the prospect of spending a night at the hospital, I tried on the red lipstick for the first ever time, despite all sorts of hitherto pronouncements and verdicts – ‘your skin is too brown for a red, perhaps?’, ‘well you can’t wear that red to work, the optics don’t look great, you know what people think of the single woman anyway…’,’ Don’t wear it on your first date, you don’t want to give the wrong signals’, and other trailing thoughts of ellipsis, where you formed your own conclusions.

But that weekend, before the surgery, I had given up on caring, and had reached the highest strata of pushing the world and its denigrating, maligning components into oblivion, the rules and prohibitions seemed pointless and futile – what use were rules when one was confronted with the highest form of deep personal conflict? the one that required of you, your nerves for the inter-galactic coldness of a hospital bed? what use was the conventional wisdom of symmetry? – that red didn’t go with brown skin, that a fat person shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes or big flowered patterns, or that a pixie cut made your nose larger?

What use were opinions? Of any sort.

The only thing that mattered, right then, was knowing the unknowable. How I looked in a red – and that was a truth, I wanted to stare at in the mirror, before I stepped on the threshold, in a morbid green overall, the shafts of light twisting and turning my reality, scissors and sharp objects laid out on a palette, the surgeon with his face half-veiled, and strong hands of precision and dedication, beckoning – to the end of this physical composition, this stasis of mitochondrial flurry, the switchbacks of the SIRTUINs – to the next, the altered insides and intestines, to the altered life, the aftermath.

I was 31, when I was permanently and conclusively anointed with the red lipstick.