On Dressing Up
I like dressing up occasionally. I’m not a fan of shimmer and brocade, but on the odd occasion, I enjoy my shiny bangles from Charminar’s Chudi Bazaar and the earrings I buy online when the fancy seizes me, or when I travel. From the schoolgirl with the standard parent-bought gold studs, I’ve gone to picking up pieces that catch my imagination or seek to please a particular mood. G. does his bit by bringing back necklaces, bangles, and earrings from his travels, enriching my collection with pieces such as a pair of giraffes from Malawi and beads from Myanmar.
Chennai is a good place for annual outings that require you to dress up. You can show off your best clothes at kutcheri sabhas and weddings. Pressed cotton and silk kurtas and sarees are divested of their moth balls on these occasions. We flick our hair, preen, look out of the corner of the eyes to see if anyone else is noticing us, and carefully arrange our clothes around us as we sit gingerly on shaky plastic chairs, or sink into seats that someone has to extricate us from at the end of a concert. Paper cups of grape juice or coffee are held at arm’s length, and leaning over to sip from them can be quite an exercise — imagine the horror of getting a drop on your clothes! (Which reminds me, I managed to stain a silk dress with water. I have talent.)
Spilling food and drink is a genuine consideration when choosing clothes. I personally haven’t bought anything fancy in years, because (1) I work from home and have no “ethnic day” or festival obligations, and (2) almost all my cousins and friends are married. For sabhas, the AC settings demand stoles or shawls (gone are my days of winter hardiness), so why bother? Besides, I like to eat my mirchi bajji and keera vadai without fear of staining my dress. You go to a kutcheri to destress; why ruin your peace of mind with all that fuss over your clothes, then?
Instead of worrying about my own clothes, I prefer to watch others; there is material in the self-conscious expression of the lady in the parrot-green saree, or joy in the confidence of the woman with the large earrings. And then there are friends to consult when it comes to the all-important matter of lipstick. A friend, B., once told me that I should be bolder with my pink lipstick if I wanted to — I looked like I’d applied it meaning to be loud with it, then chickened off before the last stroke. Which I had. It is only over the last few years that I’ve experimented with turquoise eyeliner and violet lipstick. These are brave moves for somebody who first wore makeup in college: kajal and lip gloss, which continued to remain my staple into work. This was partly because I didn’t have friends who dressed up much either, and I was lazy to learn or do much with makeup.
Dressing up is fun, but not so much at the end of the day when you have to take off the accessories and put them back in their places. After a concert or home from a wedding, all I want to do is soak in the memories and the energy of all the people-watching. I want to stay in the high of the music and the interactions with strangers, when you share a fleeting smile or a nod. How I miss these gatherings, both for the people pleasure and for the dressing up! Time for my cousins’ kids to grow up, so that their parents can send invitations to an aunt they barely remember — a few months on, of course.
