On days when things look grim, I settle my clothes shelf. My clothes shelf has taken a lot of settling these days. I order things: kurtas in this pile, shirts in that one, trousers here and T-shirts there, underwear in this bag, socks in that one. I look at the whole lot and think: how did I end up with so many clothes?
When I was in school, I had two uniform shirts and two pairs of shorts to go with them. There were two ‘home’ T-shirts and two ‘play’ T-shirts. I had a pair of canvas shoes for playtime and for sports day at school and a pair of leather shoes for the rest of the time. I had a pair of long trousers and a shirt to go with it for Sunday mass and for parties and other occasions.
Replacements came at fixed times of the year: birthday, Christmas and the reopening of school in June. At this point, my wardrobe would fill out with a pair of ‘rainy shoes’. We were not poor; I never went to bed hungry; but most middle-class children had about as many clothes.
When I went to college, my father gave me money to buy clothes. I used it to buy books and wore my school shirts and trousers to college. Those shirts wore out in the first year and I don’t remember how I replaced them but I suspect it was the usual middle-class melange of hand-me-downs from senior (and richer) cousins and street purchases. And yet at three weddings there I am in a red-and-black checked shirt and black trousers.
At generosity’s end
So how did I become the man who owns 30 shirts? Why do I need 30 shirts? Actually there are some historical accidents that I have been involved in. My friend and yoga teacher, Jehangir Palkhivala, once decided that he needed only three shirts. He gave the others away; I got some. I have a cousin, Allwyn, younger and richer, and he throws out a lot of shirts; I got some that way.
But then there is also ethical buying. I am indifferent to the lures of retail for which I am devoutly grateful. I can walk through most malls and admire the energy and effort that goes into trying to make me believe that I need a suit that costs a lakh or two. I can look at all those adverts for new phones that will make me so much happier, not because I can get in touch with people I love, but because I can record the person I love most, me, me, ME.
One’s own call
I feel no hint of moral outrage at the thought that you can buy men’s underwear at $500 a pair. If you have that kind of money and want to spend it on that kind of thing, that’s your call. The fact of the matter is that you could spend ₹20,000 a year, (about 60% of that) to support a child displaced by the Narmada Valley Dam and keep her in school for a year, but you’re the kind of person who gave in the office, right? I get it.
What I find difficult to resist is a good cause. Some of my too-many-clothes come from Welfare of Stray Dogs, a cause close to my heart. Some come from Urmul (completing 28 years of participatory development in the Thar). Some come from Last Forest (the marketing initiative of the Keystone Foundation, ‘working in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR) with indigenous communities on improving their lives’.) I have no truck with fast fashion; my clothes last me years because I handwash them with yellow soap, which comes from a Yusuf Meherally Centre. Even my three Anokhi shirts have lasted me years.
Looking better
Yes, I know that designer things make one look better. Only, my question is: how much better? It’s a 10% mark up on what you’ve got and for that you pay a 1,000% mark up.
Some designers do give back to their community which is nice and good but I have one Wendell Rodricks shirt, a beautiful blue thing, and I have never been able to get myself to go and buy another.
Perhaps that’s why Ashima was shocked when she came over for lunch. She looked at the plate in which she was serving herself and did a double take.
“This is a lovely plate, Jerry,” she said and her tone of voice was accusing. It was. It had a black duck on it, a duck painted in tribal style and it was being sold at a fund-raiser for Aseema (Every child has a right to an education). I explained that to her and she nodded her head, satisfied that I had not gone out and bought something that had no social value.
When her birthday came around, I thought I might go and find her a set of the same plates. Aseema and Ashima, get it? There was even a pun involved. I called Aseema and asked if I might buy some plates. They had none. Some good soul had done them a run and they had now run out of them. But they had spiral-bound notebooks, would I care for some?
Actually, I would not. I don’t like spiral bound notebooks and I have too many notebooks. I buy my notebooks at ethical places but I am beginning to wonder if I have got things wrong.
The problem is that for me a notebook is a book in which I make notes. This might seem obvious but it is not obvious to those who sell ethical notebooks. They make notebooks with leaves or bits of flower trapped in the paper. This is wonderful for a 13-year-old who wants to make a diary entry in purple ink with a calligraphic nib about the meaninglessness of the cosmos. It is not so good for a man of a certain age who wants to scribble down an idea for a short story.
Then there are the notebooks which are wonderful on the outside — an organisation once tried to sell me a notebook that had been bound in old denim. They had collected loads of old jeans and had cut up the unusable ones and had bound up some notebooks. Only the paper quality inside was abysmal. You could only write on one side because the shadow of your words appeared on the verso. My elephant poo notebooks also blotted and blurred and made writing difficult.
Then Allwyn, my cousin mentioned above, came back from Qatar where he teaches. He had spent an evening in the abandoned campus, collecting notebooks his students had junked. These were all Moleskine notebooks, most had had only a few pages used and then the students had thrown them away.
The new translation is being written into a Moleskine notebook. It is heaven and it is ethical.
The writer apologises in advance if this seems like virtue signalling.
