I will wear boots through this winter. My first winter since I have returned to Delhi, though this time it is not to the house that the divorce decree had called my matrimonial home. No one in my government office wears boots, not even the young. My boots, I can see, might be viewed as ridiculous. Not so to me. All three – a powder blue suede, a knee-length black, and a yellow (the yellow is quite unusual, my favourite) – are Italian. I also wear big hoop earrings and my colleagues assume that they too are Italian, to which I nod smiling. This is a lie, but it doesn’t feel so to me. What holds importance to me is that these objects that make me visible – the boots, the hoops – have a provenance somewhere else. It seems as if I don’t want to belong; that would wear me down. Like bare feet leaden inside water-soaked loam.
The knee-length, open-collar jacket, its colour a deep fuchsia – that is from my early days in Rome. I bought it at a thrift shop and it was outmoded even then, in the style of the sixties, something I imagined Audrey Hepburn could have worn. Its pockets are lumpy, brittle, and I have given up repairing them. The seams on its black, fashionably tapering lapel won’t hold out much longer. The jacket stays on its hanger in my wardrobe after being used once this winter. I air it occasionally; less often than I did in Mumbai – the place of my last posting – whose muggy air left the best of my clothes mouldy.
But I had given away the best of my clothes before reaching Mumbai – along with kitchen utensils, old laptops, furniture, bedsheets, paintings, books. There was a sense of finality to the move, there being no more postings save the final one, just before retirement, to Delhi. Not that the weeding-out was particularly mindful. A fortnight before the packers were to come in, I pulled out all my clothes and piled them into two heaps, one of which was transported to my office for distribution. Much later, I learned that in Japan, de-cluttering follows a philosophy – the word KonMari has a lofty ring to it, the capital M in the middle of the word giving it a definite aura – but I couldn’t claim that mine did. But perhaps, the weeding-out wasn’t so unmindful either, because I did keep a burgundy sweater, handed down from my mother. The memory of my mother’s smiling face from one winter afternoon was best frozen in that sweater as she enjoyed her favourite tutti-frutti ice-cream at the Kwality’s. She was too happy to upbraid my nine-year old self for spitting out on the table, the candied fruits, red and green, from each spoonful she fed me. As if, eating an ice-cream in winter was for her, an act of triumphant defiance.
What thrilled me after I put out my belongings for distribution in the office, was how fast the clothes, particularly my saris, around sixty to seventy of them, got picked up. I was stepping out for a meeting that day, when I saw that Maria, the office assistant, had picked my chanderi sari. She stood posing with the sari on her shoulder, its wispy, blush zari pallu fluttering with each swish of the pedestal fan, and I stopped to admire the sari with her, in a way that I had not admired it the only time I wore it. Maybe because my wedding was on a hot May afternoon, and although the sheer cloth made the sari ideal for summer, all I recollect is the discomfort, the desire to tear it off my body. After that one use, the sari had remained with my mother (as had the wedding jewellery) because chanderi silk demands a care that I couldn’t provide but she could, although she was herself a working woman. Until one angry afternoon, a May just as hot as eighteen years before, she flung it at me as I was leaving, screaming, ‘It’s time you grew up!’ I was already forty then.
On young Maria, the sari looked ethereal; it had clearly withstood time in a way my marriage couldn’t. Maybe that too could have done with some airing, like the sari, for a marriage is perhaps just as fragile, brittle, and liable to crack along the creases, but then which of the two of us, both in our early twenties, could have thought of that? We were from the same parish, brought together by two families, all planetary constellations matched, and surely that was enough. When we did begin airing, it was too late, and every attempt to re-fold our relationship left it more frayed.
The last time I had weeded out clothes on such a scale was twelve years back, when I was about to leave on a posting to Rome. This happened parallel to a buying frenzy, though it would hardly redeem me, if I were to list my purchases – ikat bedsheets, Jaipur quilts, sambar powder, coconut oil, ghee, achar, even a broom, three of them in fact – the slice of my Indian life that I wanted to recreate in that foreign city. But a stronger urge was to shed, and hence the weeding out. And to flee. As for my mother, she hoped that the change in geography, an inter-continental relocation, would reset me, my ‘roiled brain or whatever is up there,’ she said, pressing her finger to my temple. My husband, however, wasn’t so naïve.
A colleague who had been to London early in his career, around a decade earlier, had dismissed my anxiety about the shift to Rome. ‘Just another transfer, really. And a good one.’ Which was how it seemed in the beginning. My days would begin with drawing up a list of things to do, which over its course, I would cross out, one by one, with a thick black pen. The longer the list, the greater the satisfaction. And that seemed enough to keep me through the day, and I would miss meals, surviving on a cornetti-macchiato combo, a habit that was noticed with appreciation as a sign that I had taken to my Roman life with ease. That summer, the nights were warm – warmer than usual I was told – and I would stay awake sweating in the service apartment, muffling out the cries of seagulls with my pillows. Nights were hard after an exhausting day. Exhausting because they had to be traversed smiling, upbeat, as if the job and the city were a breeze that buoyed my sails, always guarding against the slightest lull that might strand me in worn reality. Despite my efforts, some manifestations could no longer be hidden. One was a tick – my index finger had turned rogue and would set off on a continuous loop of eights in the air, as if powered by an invisible motor, so rapid and beyond my control that my younger son, only eight back then, made it his habit to sit on my right only to hold my hand even while seated.
Slowly, as I settled into the city and routine, my horizons started to expand beyond the boundaries of work. I met Sara and Wanja at a book club one Sunday. They were the fashionistas of the office, but at the book club, they focused on books and nothing else. I was an aspiring writer back then, but I didn’t share my fancy with them. The way the days stretched out, it didn’t seem as though writing would ever happen. Something else happened instead.
‘How about shopping next Saturday?’ Sara offered that Sunday.
We agreed to meet at the Spanish Steps, and that alone should have portended that we were headed to the tony shops on Via Condotti, which on earlier occasions, I had hurried past, finding it unimaginable to even peep into such a fashion mecca. Sara had already set her eyes on a 360 euro coat from Max Mara, a Ludmilla Icon, and soon, I was drawn in too, no more than a nudge from them got me started on squandering my euros. Back home, I sneaked in the clothes – a woollen suit, a short skirt and three shirts – and stowed them away in the cupboard. That’s how it started. Next week, I was back at Mac on Via Condotti, where a young make-up artist spent over an hour painting my face. It would have been a shame not to buy what I bought, after all that labour, but back home, I wiped the make-up off my face with coconut oil. I never used the make-up, and it lay bundled in a thin plastic bag, hidden in a drawer, to be discarded five years later after I found that make-up, too, comes with an expiry date.
I had lost weight because of which I looked a lot younger than my age – forty-four. Yet, I couldn’t get myself to wear the suit I’d bought from Max Mara until three months later, when the days had become too warm for a woollen suit. And all it took was for my help – whom I had hired for a day only because I couldn’t figure out how to use the cleaning equipment in my newly-rented apartment – to draw in the air an appreciative curve as a gesture of approval (She was from Costa Rica and didn’t speak English) for me to take that monumental step next day and wear my Max Mara suit to work.
How ridiculous a wannabe I must have looked that day! That suit worn on my Indian body, I felt, set me apart, like none of my own clothes could. But on the train to work, I realised that I was invisible to the world around me, even in my Max Mara suit. Through the day, this feeling grew inside me displacing the initial dread. It felt as though I had been pulled deep underwater without ever having swum before in my life, only to learn that I couldn’t choke, at least no more than I did already, and that to breathe was to be oblivious of the breath. A thought I would have loved to share with a friend, except that I had none, and even if I had, they would have laughed it off with, ‘That’s what you think. Wait till you come back up from the water. You will choke on land.’ Now what good would such wisdom have done me?
My husband joined us in the spring break, and we planned an obligatory holiday. Before leaving for Lucca, he took me shopping and I bought, on sale, my first boots, the black knee-length ones, from a shop near the Pantheon. I had been coveting them, but I would never have bought the boots but for the nudge from my husband. Yet, I was glum walking back home with the boots, and then at the crossing to our lane, he called me b*tch. I can’t recall what had led to this name-calling, not that it worries me much, so long as I don’t forget that he did call me a b*tch.
By the time he returned for Christmas, I had bought two more pairs of boots. And we were no longer pretending, no family trips either. After he left, I took my sons to Venice for the carnival. We painted our faces and joined in the procession. A man I had befriended, a consultant in the office, had said to me the day before, ‘You be careful. Men seduce beautiful women there. Someone will plant a hasty kiss.’ He was from Veneto; he would know about the carnival, as he would about seduction. Nothing of that sort happened, the seduction and kissing, I mean, but I wasn’t disappointed. My sons were very excited, that I remember.
Over lunch the next day, I shared this with Astrid, whom I had met in the Italian class I was taking.
‘What did you wear?’ she asked.
‘Coat zipped up to my nose, what else?’ I said.
‘It’s funny,’ she said, pulling her wispy brown hair behind her ears, her blue Norwegian eyes smiling, her eyes on my grey jeans, ‘one day you wear some fancy jacket and then you are like this, a tramp!’
The fancy jacket she alluded to was my elegantly fitted firan. A black knee length firan with mehendi-green Kashmiri embroidery. Over that year, I had lost so much weight that my clothes had to be refitted more than once. And I began to frequent a tailor whom someone at work had recommended. I would take to her my clothes, always in batches of no more than one or two, to stretch out this interaction. She was quite taciturn, now that I look back, but watching her busy at work, so much in control, meant something to me. Then she would take measurements, her gentle touch also meant something. The black firan she re-fitted was really her oeuvre. She shaped it with carefully placed tucks and added pads on the shoulder, and it flattered my slender body perfectly when I wore it with my black knee-length boots.
I told my friend, the consultant from Veneto, about this tailor and he too got his tuxedo refitted by her. He was to wear the tuxedo for a dance for which we practiced a few times in the neighbouring park, but he changed his mind a day before the event and took some other woman instead. Someone much younger, an Italian. Or so I presumed, although I didn’t meet him after that. What did I do that night? I used to be very tired those days, and I must have slept early; I could sleep through worse. And would have been better off the next day for that rest. But now as I recall the incident, I feel sad for me, but sadder for what he lost. I am quite a dancer, you know.
A week before the dance, this friend had taken me to a music bar. I walked to the bar – I had taken to walking a lot – and a man who passed by in a car called out to me and blew a kiss. I was in a three-euro t-shirt and jeans, so it wasn’t the clothes. It may have had something to do with joy (although I am not one to use such words lightly) because this friend, the consultant, met me at the entrance to the bar and exclaimed, ‘You look so pretty!’ He seemed truly surprised. I told him about the man in the car and he said he had never seen something like this happen to a woman before. He was lying but I didn’t know that back then. We parted at Ponte Sublicio and I danced on my toes in the powder-blue suede boots to the jazz playing in my head all the way home.
A week after this man had stood me up, I got my hair done at an upscale hairstylist. Mario spoke no English, but he ran his fingers gently through my curls and let them drop. He did it again. And again. That was lovely. A month later, I got my hair highlighted. Hair matters, I realised. That summer was dedicated to hairstyles – short, shorter, shortest – and highlights, of course, and the many visits to Mario these entailed. On each visit, he would run his fingers through my hair, never less than thrice, sometimes four or five times, with his eyes shut, as if meditating. My own finger remained still at Mario’s, tamed, not rogue at all, as though it had never made air-eights.
And then my husband came for Christmas. He didn’t say anything at the airport but that evening after dinner, he said, ‘What’s with you? You are unrecognisable.’ His eyes were on my hair.
I couldn’t sleep that night and checked myself in the mirror. I was in fact unrecognisable. And I liked her, I did, this unrecognisable woman who I knew could do what the other woman she had displaced, couldn’t. After my husband left, I told my younger son, who turned ten that year, that I couldn’t live with his father anymore. He burst into tears, but I shushed him, ‘Shh ... shh, you will be with me. I can’t live without you, baby!’ That didn’t help him much, so I lay him down beside me, his tears wetting my shirt, and soon, we were asleep. That wasn’t the first time I had asked for separation from my husband (and been denied), but now that I had told my son, and he told his elder brother, the matter was sealed. There was no going back (we returned to India eight months later and it would take six more years for the divorce).
That woollen suit, the short skirt, the shirts, even the firan – I don’t fit into those clothes anymore, now that I have gained around ten kilos. The kind of maintenance my aging body demands would eat into the time I steal for writing. But those boots, they are just as good. My younger son is amused when I step out to work in my boots. He is twenty now and it is no surprise that I amuse him.
When did I outgrow those clothes, I wonder? Certainly before I turned fifty-two. On a quiet afternoon, I must have come up for air, upside down, my yellow boots the first to emerge from the water, my feet flapping in air to a music that plays from a place that is not here. The rest of what I had lugged with me, may have sloughed off, bit-by-bit, into the water.
*
Rebecca Mathai is a civil servant based in Delhi. She is currently editing a novel, the concept of which was a winning entry in the iWrite contest at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2020. Her work has been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Bangalore Review, Usawa, Commonwealth adda, Kitaab, and in an anthology of the Written Circle.