Clothing

Somewhere between fashion whim and utility you sort through clothes to take on any journey. Whatever the selection it must be able to be moved in a one trip. No turning back for a second load. When the Astors and the Vanderbilts wandered from watering hole to watering hole, they took their steamer trunks and even in the last half of the twentieth century, I’ve see an individual move with seven pieces of luggage, one being an acoustic guitar, but really it is a time when we can think in terms of small being beautiful. Not what do you want, not what can I use, but what is the basic need. Five shirts, skivvies, pairs of socks, one or two pair of pants (the second pair can double as long johns,) a sweater (one of Man’s greatest inventions, they stretch like skin rather than confine,) a light parka for temperate climates. If you need gloves or anything more, buy it in the country. The gloves that you’d buy in the U.S. are probably made in that country anyway. Towels are nice things to have but if you pack it wet and travel, you may have second thoughts. They can serve as scarves or parka hood liners. In India finding towels, soap, and toilet paper in a hotel room probably means that you are paying more for the room than you needed to. A fellow traveler once told a bunch of young people that should they ever leave the United States to take a few of anything they expected to use and then replace the small supply rather than take a lifetime supply. The little bottle of aspirin will do.

Rachel and I talked over the matter of fashion. I have a pair of slacks that I intended to wear. She shook her head. She believed that anyone with a pack should wear jeans. Dress pants are for other occasions. I wear jeans.

I traveled in Europe before the washer/dryer combination became common…and I’m assuming in the past half century that they are now more common. But in the fifties Dacron and other wash and wear fabrics came on the market. An evening chore before or after the shower was to wash out what you wore. I repeated this in Goa but found a sign in this hotel in Kodaikanal asking us not to wash our clothes.

Among the Untouchables there is a sub-caste that is made up of dhobi-wallahs, washer fellows. The day I rode into Kodaikanal, the sun shown. There were acres of clothes drying on the hillside. The dhobi-wallah is a luxury that everybody affords. I suspect that I afford the luxury more than a Tamil speaker but…. Shorts, socks, shirt, and skivvies run Rs. 40 or ten rupees per item or the four for a dollar a day. You may remember the lady I met in the backwater jungle at Kochi. She laughed and said, “I washing,” and she whacked a wet piece of clothing against a rough rock. I believe that I got a trade off at least once. The tee shirt I received had a trademark I don’t remember and about a dozen holes but other than being awakened at an early daylight hour by the dhobi-wallah a knocking at my door, the system works pretty well. On rare occasions I let him have a shot at the jeans and it is then that I know he is earning those ten rupees.

India has affirmative action and this favors the Untouchables and the tribesmen who still live in the wilderness. Yes, wilderness and the government does not burn them out! These folks are called the Adivasi. So proportions are drawn up and if you are running an office, you will have the gazetted number of the “under class.” Everybody agrees that the system should be tossed. What nobody agrees on is when. There are still people living in the bush and there are still dhobi-wallahs that want a better life. One day in the future….

The caste system is most easily explained by who may feed whom. Brahmans do not always want to go into the priesthood and since they are the “cleanest” of any caste, they often are the cooks and food handlers. Nehru kept one in his entourage as his cook. Since the caste makes up only about three or four percent of the population, a problem arises because there are not enough Brahmans to feed everybody. You just have to run an establishment the best you can. The Astoria just down the street has even hired a Christian as a cook!

At the bottom of the occupations are the “night soil” removers. After all somebody has to do it. Baskets were invented before bowls and imagine how the baskets leaked when set upon a person’s head. And that is why the Untouchables were so called. In America the Untouchable is the poor. They must be stupid or lazy or they wouldn’t be poor, the thinking goes. What is amusing to me is that there are many hugely rich Untouchable families. Given a sector of population, there will be some who are thinking and who succeed. An example of an Untouchable task is cremating the dead. There is a family in Varanasi, who has more money than anyone reading this article because they monopolize the burning ghats! Transfer this to the U.S. and imagine some one family, who has a monopoly on all the funeral homes in New Jersey. So while Untouchables may or may not be rich, it is the task they are born to, not their bank account, that defines them. In the case of the dhobi-wallah he gets classified as an Untouchable because he handles dirty laundry. There might be menstrual blood on a garment and while that is not in the same category as packing the contents of a latrine in a basket balance on your head, it keeps you out of the food handling business or moonlighting as a priest.

Now back to the affirmative action matter, since the law says that there will be a certain number of the Untouchable going to the best universities, those scholars who are crowed out by the system, apply for demotion into a lower caste so as to use their abilities to find a place in the institution of higher learning. In my next life I may return as a snake charmer then who knows, I may wind up with a scholarship to Harvard Law School. Nothing is simple in India. No wonder Buddha found a tree where it was quiet to think it all out.

Men and women here wear sandals. They don’t protect stubbed toes as well as I like. They are not as warm as shoes. Probably your feet get dustier and there is always the chance of stepping on a “land mine” but there are things that crawl into damp, dark shoe leather. It could be that fresh air and sunshine are preferable. This is a test. This is only a test. But I’m trying out the open air approach at the moment. Possibly more on this later should one of these damned cab drivers runs over my toes

Later… the first pair had a light plastic fitting, which held the strap over the top of the foot. The fitting lasted four or five days before breaking. The sandals were designed in Italy. Isn’t that where the Ferrari is manufactured? I had my receipt; I had the sandals; I got a replacement that I have hopes of lasting two weeks.

Later…later…the sandals did not last two weeks but about three days. I dropped them on the merchant’s floor and said in effect, “Forget it!” Sha-bah-rat, a Kashmiri friend, went down and talked to the merchant. Today a salesman chased me down in the street and invited me to the shop. The other salesman ran for tea. The merchant was ashamed of himself…a little. He said that he had called Bata and said that the design was faulty and that they needed to make good. Well the outcome is now I am wearing a more expensive pair of sandals for a week and then if they are still in one piece, I pay the difference. In other words he has sold me a more expensive pair of shoes. Want a lesson in salesmanship? Come to the East.

American hippies are in short supply in India. Israel provides them. I thought Palestine got through that stage with John, the Baptist, but the locust and wild honey has been replaced by bhang and mushrooms. The local lost tribe is also the chief experimenters in wearing traditional Indian clothing or it could be a creative mix of clothing of different regions. Dreadlocks may come from John Marnie or it could be they learned the sadhu’s secret hair spray, cow dung.

The individual Indian enjoys prosperity that I don’t remember forty years back. Many Indian women, especially from the lower income brackets, wear the most flamboyant fabrics. Yesterday was New Year’s Day. I took a walk down by the lake and some of the saris looked to be fashioned after the fireworks of the night before. This is not hyperbola. Once the sewing in of bits of mirrors into the cloth was regional. I believe it came out of Gujarat. A good idea spreads. There is the safety factor. Should the women be wearing such a fabric at night, the motorist (assuming he is driving with his headlights on) can certainly see the pedestrian ahead if she lights up like an exploding aerial bomb. But with the prosperity comes the thought, “When I get some money, I’m going to dress like a movie star.” Actually many of the movie stars dress western and with much more conservative colors. It could be that nobody has taken the time to notice. The lady, who makes my breakfast, wears a sari fit for a First Family. To my way of looking at it, it is both funny and pathetic. On the one hand my short order cook could be just as easily be wearing a formal evening gown. She could drop the egg turner and hurry off to a reception for the prime minister. And if that is not an inappropriate dress, check out the lady who does service as a wheelbarrow. She loads rock in a basket (yes, one that would leak were the soil and rock wet,) sets this on her head, and walks off to dump it where ever the foreman tells her to drop it.

On the other hand in the US, I’ve met people, who lived among the plastics, who come from the hard times of the Great Depression. When you have wondered if you will find a slice of bread for supper and you’ve worked hard, you deserve double-wide luxury. And if what you always wanted was a pretty dress like movie stars once wore and you’ve packed dirt and rock on your head, then the sari is the payoff.

One day I noticed a woman in her late twenties/early thirties. She wore slacks, a sweater, short sleeved, a scarf thrown across her throat, the ends of which fell back across each shoulder. She wore her hair in the traditional braid. Her clothes were of quiet browns. Nothing day-glow. No reflectors. She looked capable of jumping a collapsed sewer line, detouring around building material stacked on a sidewalk, or stepping over a pile of rubbish. She dressed like she knew where she lived and how best to live in it. It could be that she, rather than the come-to-life-siren-out-of-a-Mogul-miniature, is and will be the new face of India.

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