A little while ago, I bought a pair of wooden chooriyan holder stands and, on a quiet afternoon, assembled them myself. Screws slipped through my untrained fingers and rolled across the floor. Instructions lay discarded halfway through. Once ready, they stood upright in my room – tall, sturdy things, made of smooth pale wood. They looked almost ceremonial, as if they were waiting for something holy to be placed upon them. Like the wooden and carved rehel for the Quran Shareef. I smiled and began sliding my bangles onto each circular, rod one by one. First glass, then metal, then lacquered ones edged with gold. Three shades of pink followed by two shades of green, orange and purple and milk-white and mirror-worked. Bangles that were a gift someone got me from Swat; others that I had stolen from my mother’s drawer and claimed as my own; and the ones I had bought impulsively at roadside stalls, that felt more special. Each stack settled into place with a clink.

The soft clink and chime of chooriyan touching one another is a music people around me have learned to associate with me, the way I have about myself. When I was done with the stands they were full, blooming with color, loud even in their stillness. I stepped back and realized I had built an archive of my becoming, with my own two untrained hands that were often (if not always) adorned with chooriyan.

It feels strange to write that down, because not too long ago I hated bangles. I was a girl who didn’t like dressing up in desi clothes for weddings. I never wore bangles unless forced to. Their sound made me hyperaware of my own being, the clink of glass announcing my presence before I arrived. They were too feminine, too loud and announcing, drawing attention to my wrists, my movements, my softness. I wanted my hands bare, neutral, unmarked and unreadable. Unfeminine. At family gatherings, I paid attention to how women’s hands moved. Their wrists spoke before their mouths did. I studied how easily femininity sat on them, how it chimed naturally. I decided it wasn’t a language I could be fluent in – I wasn’t woman enough, or pretty enough. Chooriyan were an inheritance I wasn’t ready to claim.

They reminded me that I was a girl in a world which only loved boys. There is a certain cruelty in growing up female in a world that watches you closely and then blames you for being seen. Having bangles on was too joyful and indulgent, an act of taking up space. And I wanted to shrink and make invisible parts of myself.

At Eid, I politely accepted the chooriyan that relatives gifted me, but I didn’t put them on. I looked at them in my mother’s dresser drawer, where they lived like secrets. Arranged in mismatched bundles, wrapped in old newspaper, smelling faintly of metal and time. There were red ones made of glass with two thick chunkier bangles at each side that she had worn on her own wedding day; green chooriyan from her mehndi; and thin gold-edged bangles that she still wore to every wedding we attended. I opened the drawer and gazed at the treasure but never touched. Touching would have been like crossing a line. Those were not for me; I wanted my presence to go unnoticed, or at least unremarked. I did not then have words like choice or reclamation or agency. All I knew was that bangles made me feel readable, and choosing their absence would give me a sense of control. And so I stopped wearing any and my mother, too, no longer insisted upon it.

I don’t remember the exact day I began loving bangles. There was no ceremonial letting go of my old thoughts, no conscious decision. They came to me quietly, without asking permission. The wrists I used to hide became sites of color. What had once felt like mere decoration began to feel like a declaration. The bangles were a sound of my own, and an accessory attached to my being.

I do know that it happened while I was at university. I was studying literature, spending my days surrounded by language that took feelings seriously and insisted that interior lives mattered. I was learning how to read canon closely, and in the process, I began reading myself with the same attentiveness. I started asking what made me feel present in my body rather than hidden from it. Dressing up began to feel like an extension of that study. It wasn’t vanity or performance. It almost felt like a service. And somewhere between lectures and libraries, I allowed myself to want beauty without justification.

At first, it was clothes. I moved between western and eastern attire with the experimental confidence of someone learning a new dialect. Jeans and kurtis; long shirts with cigarette pants; skirts; dupattas worn loosely and sometimes not at all. And I noticed that every time I wore desi clothes, it felt unfinished, as if I had stepped out mid-sentence. There was that itchy feeling of a thought left un-thought. It was my wrists; they felt bare in a way that was no longer comforting. The absence I had once loved was now unwanted.

So I bought a dozen chooriyan. Just one plain set, in black. I wore them once and took them off again. But they didn’t feel like exposure anymore. They felt like completion. I realized that I wanted to be soft. Soft as in receptive, allowing myself ornamentation without apology. Around the same time, I was also in love. Or at least learning how to be. Loving another made me look at myself differently. It made me want to show up gently, to dress in ways that mirrored the tenderness I was beginning to feel. Femininity no longer felt like a liability, but like a shared language with other women.

One dozen bangles became two, then three, and in a variety of colors. A drawer slowly filled up as my chooriyan took up space. Eid arrived and with it the desire to match two dozen chooriyan to all of my five dresses – pink with pink, lilac with lilac. I added silver when I wanted to feel anchored and look desi while looking modern. Chooriyan stopped being occasional on me and began becoming expected of me. Shalwar qameez and frock pajamas were no longer complete without them. And then, almost accidentally, I began wearing them with western clothes too – with dresses and long skirts. With things that were not supposed to carry that sound. I liked the contradiction, and that I had loosened the rules. When the drawer could no longer hold all of my bangles, I understood the change: I was no longer afraid of being seen, I was no longer trying to make my body soundless. The girl who once chose bare wrists for safety had grown into a woman who let her presence announce itself – softly, beautifully, in color.

Loving, both myself and others, did not just soften me; it gave me an identity.

The man I loved looked at my wrists stacked with bangles and said, half laughing, half wondering, “Tum puri ki puri larki ho.” You are completely a girl. It wasn’t an insult or a judgment. It was an observation stemming from love. To be told that I was unmistakably feminine felt like being seen without being reduced.

Now, chooriyan are a particular part of me the way a person’s laugh is. People say I always have matching bangles with every outfit, as if it is an accident rather than a skill. They don’t know that each stack I end up buying is an argument I lost with myself at a chooriyan stall where I was crowned both the loser and the winner, and I couldn’t have been happier at the result. People know this about me, that chooriyan make me the happiest. They confidently gift them to me, knowing they can’t go wrong with it. And they don’t. Any color or texture will do. Any story attached to them. I receive them the way one receives recognition. And when I don’t wear them people ask if I am okay. I didn’t plan for chooriyan to become a measure of my emotional weather, but that’s what they are now.

There are still places where this version of me does not entirely fit. At work, I have been asked not to wear them. They are unprofessional, I’m told. Distracting. I comply, mostly. I wear them on the way and take them off before stepping inside, arranging them carefully in my bag like contraband softness. I keep them on while teaching my university classes because, in that setting, I can be whoever I want. I also wear them on the way back home after school. I let them announce my arrival into myself before I enter a space that demands restraint, and I let them return to me as I leave. This small rebellion feels necessary. A reminder that professionalism need not come at the cost of personhood.

Lately, when every day has felt like a new emotional episode, the act of buying chooriyan has steadied me. I’ve been doing it more often than before. The process of choosing a color, holding the glass circles, listening to the familiar sound they make when I lift my hand. It is coping, but it is also care. Sometimes, survival looks like standing at a roadside stall, slipping bangles onto your wrist, and feeling your breath slow down. I let little girls come near me as they reach for my wrists instinctively, their fingers tracing the circles. They slide a bangle up and down my arm, listening to the sound with wide eyed wonder. I want them to know early what it took me years to learn, that femininity can be joyful, chosen, and expansive.

When I look at the two wooden chooriyan stands in my room, I don’t just see color. I see time arranged carefully around itself. Glass and metal holding arguments I have settled and past selves I have outgrown. Each circle carries a version of me: quiet child, careful student, fearless lover, lecturer, teacher, writer, grieving lover. A woman. All of them present without hierarchy, allowed to exist at once. The sound they make when I reach for one set is a reassurance that I am here and I take up space. I am allowed to be seen.