When your mother, sister, wife, or concubine remonstrates against your slovenliness, you barely take notice. But when your only child – who, just a year ago, thought you were as glamorous as Suga of BTS fame – passes a fatwa on your attending the annual parent-teacher mash-up, you evaluate your sartorial style. As a consolation, I remembered that I had asked the same of my father 40 years ago. In my father’s case, it was the opposite. I was afraid he would get his bow tie out once more, like Karan Thapar.
I have held the firm belief that sartorially I could carry anything off. Here, my idol was Saul Bellow, who was said to be always dressed like a tout at the racetracks while giving lectures. My style has been basic, based on comfort and frugality. As a younger son, I wore cast-offs from my father and brother. I certainly knew what Eliot meant when he wrote in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: ‘I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’
In university in the mid-1990s and thereafter, my style was Urban Cowboy meets Miami Vice. I had the check shirt, snap-buttoned, round-neck plaid t-shirt, and Wrangler jeans look down pat. While I had light tan boots, uncomfortable to wear, made for my father by a demented Chinese shoemaker in Calcutta in the late 1970s, I couldn’t afford the linen jacket worn by Don Johnson.
In the Delhi winter, I would wear, over this ensemble, a denim jacket or a tweed coat. Sometimes, both at the same time, with a moth-eaten tartan muffler. And over the years, the style hasn’t changed. I still wear shirts and t-shirts that I wore in college. The more frayed they become, the more beloved they are.
The first time I noticed a change in my daughter’s attitude was around the time my black round-neck t-shirt, which had a graphic of a psychedelic Bob Dylan on its front, went missing. It was my early morning writing t-shirt, threadbare around the neck and with three strategic holes at the sides for ventilation. Its disappearance had a catastrophic effect on my writing schedule. Think of Mohinder Amarnath going out to face Malcolm Marshall at Sabina Park and, before taking guard, he finds that his talismanic red handkerchief is missing.I looked for my Dylan t-shirt everywhere. I asked the dhobi and my neighbours. They all remembered the t-shirt, but were clueless about its whereabouts. I meditated on the disappearance and set about solving it as if it were a structural problem in a short story I was writing. After a while, it came to me that I had dropped my daughter off at the bus stop twice that week wearing the t-shirt.
The first time I had done that, she had warned me: ‘You can’t wear that outside the house.’ But three days later, I had repeated the mistake. I was in the throes of composing a haiku and had been too tardy to change. This had to be my daughter’s doing. I had solved the structural problem.
The moment she came back from school, I confronted her. She coolly went to the storeroom and brought back my t-shirt. I had learnt my lesson. I quickly wore my t-shirt and finished that wretched haiku.
With this new fatwa about attending the parent-teacher meet at school, I thought of the incendiary wisdom of the poet Shakti Chattopadhyay, who, it is said, miffed after one more amorous rejection in Patna, wrote the immortal line from Calcutta, ‘Jete pari, kintu keno jaabo?’ (I can surely go, but why should I?)
