Confessions of a shopaholic

Sometimes an article you read in the paper can help you change for the better. Or so I thought as I put down the novelist Ann Patchett’s wonderful account of giving up shopping for clothes and electronics last year and being much the happier for it.

I figured keeping such a New Year resolution would be easy because I grew up on hand-me-downs and that trick of flipping a collar that had frayed in the Kolkata of the 1970s. In many ways though, thanks to Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh and countless entrepreneurs, India is a different country since 1991. My joyless procurement of a single blue shirt for interviews at Chotirmalls in Kolkata is a thing of the past. Instead, every neighbourhood in the Delhi I returned to in 2013 seemed to boast an Anokhi. I discovered block prints devised by a genius in geometry on cotton so light that it made summers of 45 C preferable to winter.

Once you start down the slope of admiring Indian handloom weaves and block-printed cotton and understand a little of the science behind the art, it becomes an addiction. I was among the first in at the Delhi Crafts Council sale in October, a few bolts of cloth away from this newspaper’s office, buying contemporary takes on the Durga Puja Lal Paar saree or jamdanis. The Maheshwari dupattas nearby prompted another armload of purchases as they make for stylish summer wraps for friends living overseas. Few countries mistreat their women the way we do, but someone forgot to tell our weavers, who regard them as goddesses. There is nothing at such sales for men. Still, I once spotted ikat from Andhra so extraordinary that it must have been a blueprint for designing the zebra. It ended up as car seat covers. My Honda Brio was sold with the condition that the buyer could not change them.

Thus, a ‘no shopping’ resolution should have marked a return to sanity. And, all was going well until …January 5. I was at my dentist in Bengaluru when, having inserted a crown on a tooth, he told me to come back in an hour. The nearest diversion was an exhibition by The Good Loom. I returned shame-faced with a candy-floss pink Maheshwari saree for my sister-in-law and muslin shirts with jamdani motifs for myself.

Such compulsive behaviour attracts attention. At a handloom sale a couple of years ago, a stranger came up to me and said she and her friend had been wondering “who the lucky woman” married to me was. I am single, but the spotlights in the hall suddenly felt as if they had been turned on me. It made me question why I shop. In part, it is to fill the void of a Kolkata childhood I can no longer return to where sarees were so routine that even our eccentric cat positioned herself under the bed every morning to pounce on yards of cotton twirling by before rugby-tackling the pleats in a bid to prevent my mother from going to work. The more practical reason is I am indebted to several women friends who indulge me in more ways than I can count.

As rationalisations go, both are credible but for the problem that these women have far better taste -- and net worths much larger than mine. One childhood friend runs a Mumbai furniture and home design store, another a hotel group known for contemporary design while a Bengaluru friend has recently started a high-end Indian clothing store in London. Two Delhi friends regularly give away some of their show-stopping sarees to make room in their wardrobes. Short of flushing the ugly new Rs 2000 notes down the toilet, I could not be more foolish.

But, sarees have always been a triumph of mesmerising matter over rational minds. On Friday, I dined at the home of a friend in Hong Kong who delighted me by wearing a black and red tussar silk saree I had bought at Byloom in Kolkata last month. She has cupboards full of grander Banarsis and Kanjeevarams, but saree buying is becoming such an idiosyncratic activity among men (her late father-in-law was an exception as was my Tamil grandfather) that it generates far more praise than it should. That night I found I had locked myself out of my apartment and ended up in the home of a couple – one American, the other Hong Kong Chinese -- down the road. The guest bed was adorned with a dohar I had given them last year. They have six already, but are now demanding six more of these gossamer muslin summer sheets for their home in upstate New York.

In microcosm, this is the way the world used to prize Indian textiles. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s purchasing power parity calculations of weavers’ wages in the mid-18th century shows that weavers in Bengal earned about as much as those in England while those in south India earned more. Instead of harking back to an often fictitious ‘glorious’ past, let’s mandate men wear Indian clothes to the office a few times a week to boost demand. It would create more jobs than devising new ways of counting jobs.