December 09, 2004

Mujhe Door Koi Kheenche...

Whoever decided that women’s clothes did not need pockets was either:
- Completely Dumb
- A Man
(Research is yet to prove that the latter is not a subset of the former)

A pocket is not for storing Y-chromosomes and suchlike. It is for storing your wallet, keys, handkerchief, cellphone, movie tickets, and random bits of paper whose business is to get lost at important moments. I need a place to store these things as much as men do!

So I shop in the men’s section of Fabindia, or force tailors to stitch pockets into my kurtas. Then my pockets are used - and abused. The poor things are bursting with my worldly belongings on most days.

But this is just the beginning on the story. When I walk through a doorway, I am usually concentrating on where I am going, and am totally oblivious to the fact that the doorknob has made its way into my gaping pocket, has been unable to decide whether it wants to stay on with the door or go with me, and has solved the problem by ripping my pocket and part of my kurta apart.

A krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr tells me that another precious dress will now need to be darned/cellotaped/donated. A hole in my pocket makes another hole in my pocket as I set off to buy new clothes.

How to deal with doors pulling at my pockets is beyond me. Advice is welcome.

Note: Yesterday was my Naani’s birthday. A snapshot of the personality she used to be:
65-year-old Naani takes off to Connaught Place for a weekend lunch on her own. She has difficulties crossing the iron chain that encircles the Inner Circle. She asks a cool dude standing nearby to help her. Dude says: “If you can’t walk, why do you step out of your home?” Nonplussed Naani says: “I step out because I know you have stepped out and are going to be standing here doing nothing. Now give me a hand.”

This one-fourth of my gene pool is sadly recessive.

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