Clothes Maketh the Clan

The other day S and I went to have lunch at Empire on Church Street and then walked to Blossom Books. I was thinking of how Church Street has changed over the years. I remember going to a mallu tailor called Raghavan who had a small shop where the present Pollution Control building is. It was a given among the clan that they would give business as far as possible to other mallus. So clothes were stitched by Raghavan, for shoes we went to Escorts Shoes in Ulsoor. I begged mom to let me buy Bata shoes since they had a compass fixed inside at the heel, I told her that it would help me in finding my way to and from school. Her reply was that school was about 500 metres from home at the end of the street and she didn’t see how I could lose my way. She listed out the advantages of buying from Escorts, ‘You can tell them the design (how much of design can you do on a black school shoe?), you can also tell them to add more heel (she would have anyway told Escorts Ungle to make it like a clog so that it didn’t wear out quickly) you can also get it repaired if required (why would I want to wear those ugly shoes for more than its stipulated life span?)”. 

The three of us were most often dressed in similar clothes, dad bought cloth by the bolt when he came from Qatar. There was black stretch-long for knickers (mallus call shorts knickers), olive green polyester ’shirt material’. My brother was lucky, he got a pair of shorts and a trouser (because he was in his teens). This meant that the black knickers became like second skin to me, even after I outgrew mine I still had to get through my brother’s pair when he graduated to trousers. Like my favorite comic book hero of those times ‘the ghost who never died’, my black shorts lived on forever. It must have seemed indestructible to others, I heard Cedric’s dad say, ‘imported stuff really lasts unlike the bloody Indian shit we get’. The humiliation did not stop there, dad also gifted the material to my cousins. It was quite easy to spot the kids of our family at weddings or at church. Occasionally I got pulled up for things that my cousins did like toppling drinking glasses or running in the flower beds.

My need to be different can be traced to those traumatic times. And so I wore long navy stockings that I folded into a thick pad just under my knees and had a white kerchief sticking out of my ‘front pocket’. How much it helped I cannot debate on. However, I saw an old black and white pic of mine recently and I must say it was not a very pretty sight.