Hemantha Kalam - 108 "Memories Rekindled"

It’s been sometime since I had been to or was at Pondy Bazaar, in Chennai. In fact I haven’t been to Pondy Bazaar in about past eight years or so or even more for that matter. As we are about to go abroad to visit our daughter, my wife wanted me to accompany her to do a bit of shopping for some knick knacks.

So she took me to Pondy Bazaar. I left her to do her shopping and stepped in to meet my old college mate and the proprietor of the Instore, in there. It’s been about half a century since I last saw him and as expected, he could not recognise me. And he did not make any pretention of it either. But once I could convince him that I, indeed, was his college mate and the years of our study tallied, that he loosened up and we started chatting about some old incidents, had some laughs and some crying over too over guys who were in a hurry to leave us and this earth and who no longer wanted to be around us.

While sitting there, I was thinking of ‘Swarnam Store’ which was just a couple of shops away from Instore, but folded down long time ago. Yet, I have a very fond corner, for this shop, in my memories, because this was the first shop and the only shop for a long time in my life which was helping me with my dressing fashion. And the fashion designer was none other than my beloved father.

Just a few days before Sankranthi, the harvest festival which is the primary festival for us, my father used to come home early, take a bath, wear some fresh clothes and ask my mother to get prepared and prepare myself too, for an outing.

Once this was done, we used to leisurely saunter towards Pondy Bazaar and eventually drift towards Swarnam Stores.  

As soon as we entered the shop, all the staff members used to welcome my father to their counters, with beaming smiles. My father could always become one with them, crack jokes that appealed to them and change even a charged atmosphere into an enjoyable one and instantly, at that.

My father used to go to either the pants’ section or the shirts’ section first and start looking at the clothes. His choices were based first on the material, longevity, cost per metre, colour and brand. Brand normally used to be that of the Binny only.  The material could be consul, drill or plain cotton for pants and poplin or pure cotton for shirts. Those days, material like Terylene and Tery-cotton were yet to be known. Those were the simple days of brocades, cotton (handloom or mill), mull, mulmul, poplin, satin, velvet, voil, and of course silk etc.

At this point, I have to make a confession that two important things in my life,, and both starting with the letter ‘C’ could become nightmarish to others.

One is my Curriculum Vitae (CV). I have patiently built-up my CV such a way that very few in the world can match it. It can be a boon or a bane. Mostly it has proven to be a bane that for decades, the HR Managers seemed to have decided to make their lives that much easier by just rejecting to even go through any CV which is more than one or at the maximum two sheets, even if the other CVs could be promising. So when I make a CV of 20 to 25 pages, I think it is a bit of fat desire for me to expect to be noticed. So most of the times (99.99% of the times, my CV has been given a go by and used to probably land in the general file aka dustbin, rather in a hurry). I have this strong and nagging doubt that in my present assignment, my grey beard could have helped me more than my CV.  Period! I wonder whether the powers that are, have ever gone through my CV.

Now the second ‘C’ is my Couture. My tastes of clothes and dressing sense are at two extremes. Thanks to my dad, I can really dress well, if I wish to. Yes, in one of my previous employments, I was even titled as the “Well dressed male of the office”. But at the same time, if I am in that ‘who the hell cares’ mood, I can dress garishly too.

And another issue is that due to my atypical physical measurements, excepting for T shirts, I cannot get proper fit of/from any of the ready-made stuff. So mostly, I have to get clothes and get them stitched to suit my shape and sizes. Since India has been fast aping the Americas, getting good and skilled tailors is becoming a premium issue, and if at all we are lucky to get one nearby, s/he seems to charge a bomb nowadays. I am thankful that for men, the costs still seem to be manageable. For the women, it is literally astronomical and just a matter of match fixing. Costs vs the styles in demand. As one of the old English/Tamil multilingual song claimed some forty years ago, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBI_WV4vsSA) sleeveless blouses and what next blouse less sleeves? Thankfully feminism is active and women are mostly self-reliant to meet such changes and the expenses.

But my dad, being my beloved dad that he was, and who I think, also loved me very well, used to spend considerable time in choosing the best possible clothes for me to ensure that I will always stand-out from the rest of the crowd in my class and in school. His choice will be pastels and what in those days were called ‘British colours’. He was always averse to garish colours and even in a freaky moment if I wanted any such colours, he used to put up a snout at me and negate it. His choices mostly were light colours, pastels, pin stripes and micro checks.  Since I was a runt of a boy he always use to aver that larger checks could swallow my appearance and make me look even shorter.

So this match-making went on till he was alive and could make it to a shop. Of course, in the later years, it became common for me to buy clothes for him than he coming with me. He never ever used to complain on the clothes I used to buy him. Every time I used to return from my sojourns abroad, I used to bring him really freaking out T shirts which he used to wear with a glee.

I am now in abroad with my first daughter and when I brought her a new sari of a light colour, she was asking that I choose mostly light colours, don’t I. Yes, I do, because this has been injected into me, by my dear father, over the years, but who chose to leave me for better hunting grounds, this day seven years back.

Now, as I am skimming through the streets of Singapore, I realised that I made the worst blunder of never taking him abroad. I am sure that he would have enjoyed these places as would a small kid who has been given his first YoYo!

Yes, he is not there physically with me, sure, but he is there with me and in me, through some of his practices and always in my fashion.

So, until the next, I remain with,

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya and Nepalese), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic and Sudanese), Shukriya (Urdu), Sthoothiy (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai), Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish), Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian, Bahasa Malay and Singaporean) and Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea), Malo (Tongan), Vinaka Vaka Levu (Fijian)

 

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India