Shelf Life: The Hand-Me-Downs

My Shelf Life column for May 2020.

Other people’s clothes can be prickly things, fulfilling neither the wearer’s desire nor the giver’s expectation of gratitude.

In Vinod Kumar Shukla's magnificent 1979 novel Naukar ki Kameez, a low-level desk employee in a government office is forced to do duty at the big boss's home. In his spare, masterful style, Shukla condenses his narrator's class-ridden predicament into a single object: a shirt. The sahib's first servant, we are told, wore ill-fitting clothes, obviously belonging to someone larger than him. So a thick white shirt was stitched for him. But the servant didn't last. His replacement, too, was fired soon. The shirt, like the position, now lies empty, awaiting someone who can fit into it. “Naukar ki kameez ek saancha tha, jisse adarsh naukaron ki pehchaan hoti,” writes Shukla: 'The servant's shirt was a mould, which would help identify the ideal servant'.

In an unsettling episode, Shukla's naive young narrator Santu is tricked into visiting the big boss's home, and physically held down until his own “bush-shirt” has been exchanged for the servant's waiting white kameez. Forced to wear it home, Santu returns the next day in his own clothes. When made to take his boss's wife shopping or conduct other semi-domestic duties, he goes along reluctantly. He doesn't see how else to keep his job. His resistance condenses into not wearing the servant's shirt.

The attempt to preserve one's self while being compelled to wear someone else's clothes is also the theme of the Hyderabadi writer Wajida Tabassum's famous story 'Utran' ('Cast-Offs'), translated by Sayeeda S. Hameed and Sughra Mehdi for Parwaaz, a now-classic volume of Urdu short stories by women. 'Utran' features a servant, too – but Chamki is the epitome of insubordination from the very first scene in which we meet her, as a seven-year-old who wants to exchange dupattas with her much richer playmate and 'become sisters'.
Her mother Anna Bi is wet-nurse to an aristocratic family, and so Chamki receives all of Shahzadi Pasha's innumerable cast-offs. But where Shahzadi's hand-me-downs leave Anna Bi thrilled and grateful, the one-way traffic only makes Chamki angrier: “Ammini! I am prettier than Bi Pasha. Then why doesn't she wear my cast-offs?”

 It is no surprise that the single saffron-coloured outfit that the mistress has tailored for Chamki, though it is of cheaper material than Shahzadi would ever wear, becomes the girl's favourite. Those clothes “elevate her to the heavens”, giving her a heady confidence that leads to the story's denouement.

And yet, there can also be confidence in wearing someone's old clothes. Upendranath Ashk's 1961 Hindi story 'The Ambassador' demonstrates this perfectly. It begins with a man arriving at the narrator's well-appointed bungalow in “a dirty shirt with no buttons, a loose coat full of holes, baggy trousers patched and torn, and boots that seemed worn down by centuries of use.” The houseboy is chasing the stranger away when he stretches out his hand, says “Hello, Bakshi” and advises the narrator, in perfect English, to fire his impolite servant.

By the end of Ashk's tale, the narrator's old roommate – for that is who he is – has eaten a sumptuous meal, wiped his dirty hands on his tattered clothes and demanded a set of clean old ones. As he walks away with them thrown casually over his arm, the narrator is struck that he hasn't even said 'thank you'.

Is this what makes old clothes so fraught? Those who receive them might use them, they might even be glad to have them. But the giver's demand for gratitude, wanting to be thanked for a 'gift' that the receiver knows to be mere surplus: that can cause heartburn.

And yet, clothes are often so powerfully desired that someone else's clothes can also become fetishised, objects of illicit passion. In Saadat Hasan Manto's story 'Kali Shalwar', a prostitute down on her luck tells her new lover that she really wants a new black shalwar for Muharram. When he actually brings her one, Sultana is very happy. It is just like the satin one her friend Anwari recently got made. Then she realises it is the same one.

Published in 1942 in the Lahore-based journal Adab-i-Latif, its frank portrayal of the margins of polite society got it banned for obscenity. But in fact the story displays Manto's characteristic combination of deceptively casual plotting and rare emotional subtlety.

If coveting a black shalwar brings Sultana quiet sorrow, coveting a dead sister's wedding trousseau brings grand gothic tragedy in Henry James' 1868 story 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes'. Two New England sisters find themselves, as the daughters of 19th century gentry apparently often did, vying for the same man. One marries him, but dies soon after giving birth. The second, Rosalind, promptly inveigles herself into the widower's life, becoming the new Mrs. Lloyd. It is interesting that James seems to judge her less for wanting her dead sister's husband than for desiring her locked-away wardrobe. Of course, like a good gothic tale, when Rosalind opens the forbidden trunk, her sister's spirit finds a way to punish her. 

Aspiring for more can seem ungrateful. The sahib of Shukla's novel knew what he was doing: scotching desire. “I would never give my own shirt to the servant,” he tells his head clerk. “The tastes we know, they should never know. If they do, they will be ungrateful.”

Seen through the eyes of those who rule, even old clothes can disrupt status quo.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 21 May 2020.

Bought on and Sold on Mutton Street

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Our columnist takes a historical detour through the antique pleasures of Pila House.

Last Monday I went to Mutton Street. I had spent a week in Mumbai, setting up 'work' meetings that were really an excuse to wander the city as a happy, giddy tourist of the Delhi variety. But one item on my Bombay agenda remained - a trip to Chor Bazaar: several streets' worth of dusty antiques. 

But at Mumbai Central, cab drivers seemed mystified by my desire to go to Chor Bazaar. Then, gently but firmly, one deposited me on a road lined with hardware shops, saying this was Chor Bazaar and I better find this Mutton Street myself.

I did. Having burrowed into uncarry-able and unaffordable mountains of old things, I settled not unhappily on two 1970s print advertisements. The genuinely non-sleazy shop man took me to an ATM on his scooter, past an old theatre showing a Mithun film with brilliant hand-painted poster. Only on my way out did I realise what I had walked down was called Patthe Bapurao Marg. That was when it finally clicked. I'd been walking on Falkland Road.

From dates.sites, (a must-have compendium for film nerds and Mumbai fans, published by the Cinema City project), I knew that Patthe Bapurao was born a Brahmin, named Shridhar Krishnaji Kulkarni, underwent caste conversion in order to work in tamasha and married a Mahar dancer called Pawala. Among the other impressive acts to his name is a visit to Ambedkar in 1927, when, “flanked by two women dancers dressed in finery”, Bapurao offered to contribute the proceedings of eight Tamasha shows to the Mahar Satyagraha Fund, a campaign for the entry of Dalits into temples. Ambedkar rejected the offer on moral grounds.

Bapurao died in poverty in 1941. In 1950, the Marathi director/actor Raja Nene made a highly successful biopic. As one of the central arteries of what was for many years Mumbai's entertainment district, Pila House, it seems only fitting that Falkland Road was renamed Patthe Bapurao Marg. 

Here's the entry in dates.sites: “Pila House-hybridisation of Play House-a cluster of theatres staging Parsi theatre plays and Tamasha performances - bordered on the east by red light area of Kamathipura (named after the Telugu-speaking community of masons), and on the west by migrant courtesans and other entertainment artists at Congress House (named after the office of the Congress Party nearby-is at its peak at the turn of the century.”

While the theatres – the 'play houses' set up in the 1800s - gave the area its name, Falkland Road's association with an even older form of entertainment dates back to the 1700s. That was when brothels first emerged in the area, catering to soldiers.

In an essay called 'F**kland Road' (in another Project Cinema City volume), Bishakha Datta makes the connection explicit. She cites the background note of a (proposed) Union of Entertainment Workers of India that refers to the Arthashastra placing courtesans and sex workers alongside actors, dancers, musicians and bards. The note continues: “It is common knowledge that... sex...work is a form of intimate entertaining communication, involving some very subtle and complex combinations of gesture, language, play and relaxation.”

This is, of course, true - though the argument might find few takers in the hypocritical modern world, where even bar dancers are refused their rights as workers.

But even if the cinema-sex equivalence is unlikely to fly with most people, Pila House has plied generations of (mostly) male, (mostly) migrant clients with both. Built before cinema existed, the 'play houses' are some of the last theatres still projecting film prints. They have specialisations, too: Nishat shows Bhojpuri blockbusters, New Roshan devotes itself to Mithun, Silver to sex films.

There was a time when the brothels of Kamathipura not only lived next to cinema, but in Bombay's cinematic imaginary. Realistic depiction was never the point. Even Gulzar's Mausam, or Sudhir Mishra's Chameli can only be called 'good efforts'. But the girls in the cages of Falkland Road were a legendary sight – when I interviewed her a couple of years ago, Deepti Naval described, with alternate shudders of excitement and distaste, her trip in the 80s to see them. Naval ended up spending half the night in a Nepali sex worker's room, and the experience inspired a performance years later.

Naval got me thinking: has any mainstream Hindi film ever let a girl from a “good family” meet a prostitute? Well, very recently. But of course Kangana Ranaut must travel all the way to Amsterdam to hang with an Indian sex worker, and make the startling discovery that she's not an alien. 

Ironically, just before Queen, Ranaut played a Kamathipura sex worker called Rajjo in a bizarrely retro film called Rajjo, where the token 'contemporary' event is the brothel torn down by an evil consortium of politicians and builders to build a mall. Small industries have indeed replaced most Kamathipura brothels, with owners cutting their losses and leaving as the buildings they rented become prized real estate.

Whether Kareena was a convincing sex worker or not, at least Reema Kagti shot Talaash in Kamathipura. Rajjo chose to spend 5 crores 'recreating' Pila House on a four-acre-plot in Borivali.

Perhaps the last two films about Kamathipura -- one acts as if the place is already gone, and the other is a ghost movie. No Rani could ever show up to meet a Rajjo. In Falkland Road, there may soon be no more sex workers to meet. Not even the ghosts of them.

Post Facto -- Used Goods: Cities, capitalism and the obsolescence of things

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight:

	mong the numerous imaginative triumphs of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is Leonia, the city which refashions itself every day. "[E]very morning people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck." "It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new," wrote Calvino. In his brilliantly prescient fashion, Calvino seemed to see how the world of high capitalism was weirdly beginning to echo one of the oldest forms of economic activity, one that that it had derided as irrational and in fact banned — the Native American practice of potlatch, in which your status was measured by how much you could give away, or sometimes, destroy. The vision that Calvino conjured up in 1972 — of a world in which the enjoyment of newness is built upon the pleasure of discarding the old — is no longer one we need to see in our imaginations. We all live in Leonia now. The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair, and the throwing away of objects as outdated even if they are still in perfect working order, is integral to hypermodernity. And yet, it's not entirely clear to me that the things we throw away should be seen as being outside capitalism. It's probably true that the used-goods market operates on the fringes of capitalist production proper, but surely the very idea of the second-hand emerges from a capitalist vision of the world in which things aren't automatically assumed to be passed on through generations, a vision that marks these goods as having a (perceived-as-illegitimate) second life? { The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair. In Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, among the most remarkable texts ever published about a 19th century city, the second-hand market already occupies a fair bit of space. Originally published in 1851, Mayhew's mammoth three-volume exploration of Victorian London is among the most detailed, illuminating and entertaining sociological records of the street life of any modern city. The desire to create an exhaustive urban compendium marks Mayhew as a man of his time: he categorised the "street folk", "those who obtain a living in the streets of the metropolis", into six types: street-sellers; street-buyers; street-finders; street-performers, artists and showmen; street-artisans, or working pedlars; and street-labourers. The street sellers include separate sections on sellers of second-hand metal articles, second-hand musical instruments, second-hand weapons, second-hand telescopes and pocket glasses, second-hand curiosities (which seems to mean coins, buckles and shells like the cowrie which were "money in India, for his father was a soldier and had been there and saw it"), and a huge section on second-hand clothes that was further subdivided by neighbourhood, wholesale or retail, and so on.
	ut this encyclopaedic bent led neither to a dull listing of facts, nor lofty theorising. Instead, the book displays a marvelous ability to turn each encounter into a vignette. Mayhew had begun his writing career as a dramatist, which may account for his superb ear for dialogue—the attention he gives a memorable turn of phrase, the fearless mimicking of accents. And it is in his recounting of something a second-hand clothes seller says to him that we find this telling detail: "If people gets to wear them low-figured things, more and more, as they possibly may, why where's the second hand things to come from?" Already then, in the 1840s, the complaint about thinner and poorer cloth is linked to things that are seen as being in vogue — "them new-fashioned named things often is so—and so they show when hard-worn". The second-hand market today seems either to cater to the highest-end consumer, whose desire is for objects whose survival in time has somehow lifted them out of their older economic circuits and placed them on a different plane of value — or to the lowest-end consumer, who cannot afford the new, even the cheapest, mass-produced new. But even as the second-hand object, the reusable whole, gets rarer, what we have more and more of is trash—stuff that must be dismantled, torn apart into its various constituents, in order to be plugged back into the cycle of production: recycled. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, probably among the most remarkable texts yet produced about a 21st century city, the recycler's gaze is pervasive. A boy wears a shiny oval belt buckle "of promising recyclable weight"; a stretch of the airport road is "unhelpfully clean"; a hotel brochure advertising for a New Year's party is printed on "glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees per kilo". The scavengers and waste-pickers of Annawadi have no access to the products (or lifestyles) advertised in the post-globalisation megacity—until they have been turned into garbage. In imaginary Leonia, the street cleaners were welcomed like angels. In our all-too-real version, they have been banished beyond the city's borders, only allowed in take away the trash.

Cheap Dates, or Budget Nights in Delhi

Broke but still intrepid, Trisha Gupta finds an alternative to evenings spent on friends’ terraces. 

(Published in Time Out Delhi, Issue 2. Friday, April 20, 2007)

(A piece I wrote for Time Out Delhi as part of their cover story 'Night City' in 2007.)

The thirty-something couple at the Kolkata Hot Kathi Roll stall look utterly content. The man is tucking into his mutton biryani, while his salwar-kameezed companion munches happily on her single-anda-double-mutton roll. It’s 6.30pm and the 15-odd stalls are doing their usual brisk business at Chittaranjan Park’s Market No 1. Since the evening’s just beginning, we ignore the Rs 40 Bengali thali at Annapurna Hotel and instead sample some of the bread-crumbed delights that emerged from the combined Bengali and British culinary preference for food fried to a crisp. We are spoilt for choice: mochaar chop (made with banana flower), fish chops, mutton or prawn cutlets. We follow this up with some of the best real Bengali sweets in town at Kamala Sweets. To complete the Bengali culture-fest, we head over to Video Palace to drool over the Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak DVDs.

Having sated our senses with sights and smells Bengali, we take an auto to GK-II. Contrary to expectations, M Block Market is a haven for budget-bound drinking: there’s Soul Punjab, Flames and M-52. Tonight, we’re headed to 4S Bar & Restaurant, which lays claim to the longest happy hours in Delhi – from noon to 10.45pm. There are few tables and not the most exciting décor (unless you count the Punjabi “village scenes” on the walls), but at Rs 75 for a bottle of Kingfisher, we’re not complaining.

If you’re in the mood for a movie and don’t want to shell out Rs 150 at a multiplex, head over to nearby Paras cinema at Nehru Place. Settle into a balcony seat (Rs 60) and watch the latest Hindi blockbuster with middle class families from neighbouring colonies. (And if you ever get to Paras on an empty stomach, there’s a little dhaba with red plastic tables to the left of the hall. And there’s a government liquor shop next door. No, we’re not suggesting anything.)

Tonight, however, we’re not in movie mode. Our next stop is a bit further away; Main Bazaar, Paharganj. As we come to a stop in front of New Delhi Railway Station, there can be no doubt: this is where the action really is. All manner of touts, hotel-finders, restaurant waiters and drug-pushers are waiting to sell you your heart’s desire. (And you must desire something, surely, since you’re here?) But it takes all of seven minutes for them to realise we’re not potential customers. Then we’re free to wander down Main Bazaar’s main street, still buzzing at 10.15pm. The place is a treasure trove for silver jewellery, slinky clothes for budget tourists and fashionable but cheap footwear: kolhapuri chappals and embroidered juttis are available at half the Janpath rates. We bought some pretty neat strappy sandals for Rs 150.

We peep into the enticingly relaxed Everest Café where pony-tailed tourists are browsing through their Lonely Planets over coffee. The friendly woman behind the counter offers us chicken momos. But there isn’t a table free, so we move on, only to stop and browse at Jackson’s Books, a tiny stall with an incredible stock of second-hand books left behind by departing tourists.

Heading in the direction of Chuna Mandi, we find the famous Malhotra Restaurant, “highly recommended by Lonely Planet, Rough, Routard and Let’s Go Guide Books”. But we give it a miss tonight, in favour of the surprisingly pleasant rooftop restaurant at Metropolis. We think we’re the only Indians there until we notice the godman (straggly beard, orange kurta, tilak on forehead) who’s here with a firang couple. Stray bits of the conversation waft our way – “Kali is a very angry goddess. How you say, bloodthirsty?” “Did he just say ‘hungry goddess’?” asks my companion mildly. “That’s me,” I say happily, attacking my minute steak.

After dinner, we figure the 9.30pm film at nearby Imperial Cinema should be ending, but no post-film crowd emerges. It turns out the hall screens Bollywood reruns for the princely sum of Rs 20. It’s past 12.30 now, and all the bars have shut shop. So we head to the first “open 24 hours” sign we see – the lobby at Ajay Guesthouse has a billiards table and a German bakery that stays open all night. But you can linger only so long over a slice of date and walnut cake (Rs 35), however large it may be. So at 1am, we finally call it a night.

4S Bar & Restaurant: M-31 GK-II, M Block Market (4166-4317).

Ajay Guesthouse: 5084-A Main Bazaar, Paharganj (2358-3125). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Everest Café: 824 Multani Dhanda, Arakashan Road, Paharganj (4166-4317). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Flames: First floor, M-61 GK-II, M Block Market (4163-7000).


M-52: M-52 GK-II, M Block Market (2922-5252).


Malhotra Restaurant: Lok Narayan Street, Paharganj, opposite Imperial Cinema (2358-9371). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Metropolis: 1634, Main Bazaar, Paharganj, near Imperial cinema (2356-1782). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Soul Punjab: M-6 GK-II, M Block Market (6660-6666).