Oh Behave!

A little put off with the hustle and bustle of big city life, Madam R_ decided to take a break, and head to slightly less turbulent waters. What caused this need for calm is a matter of speculation, but it did exist, none the less, and well, was to be pampered by a visit to Lucknow.

Lucknow isn’t exactly the backwater town it is perceived to be. Some form of social inertia prevents people from realizing that it indeed has a hustle and bustle, which, while not equal to Delhi’s none the less prevents the average citizen from being a sleepy person. Lucknow’s advent into the main stream is made painstakingly obvious every now and again when a miniskirt makes itself seen in public. Rare though the phenomenon might be, it definitely belies the image of Lucknow being an ‘old’ city.

However, it is still known for its etiquette a reputation it will definitely have to leave behind before it can make space for itself in the upper echelons of India’s Metropolises. No one in Delhi or Bombay for that matter has the time to be polite, or help someone across the street. Quite frankly they barely have time to notice that the names of the streets have changed, or indeed in the case of Bombay, that the very city has changed names.

So Madam R_ found two friends who lived in Lucknow, and flipped a coin to choose who she was going to spend the holiday with.

Madam R_ was dutifully shown around the city. Taken to shiny new malls, with the same stores that all malls across the nation had, with the same range of clothes, though truncated towards the more expensive stuff, Lucknowis don’t yet spend that big on labels.

She was of course unimpressed by the bright lights of the city, being used to much brighter lights herself, and in fact looking for escape from their glare, she was mostly disappointed. She made the obligatory visits to monuments of the city and to the obligatory artifacts in obligatory museums and was still unimpressed. She also received the obligatory letches and cat calls in the more seedy parts of the old city; and managed to remain unimpressed. One wonders whether this was because cat calls in the big city are better, or just because it was the smart thing to do. Though Madam R_ definitely gives one the impression of being feminist enough to do something about being a woman.


It’s hard to impress big town ladies, and madam R_ had a reputation to uphold as well. So she walked from sight to sight, dressed in oversized kurtas and carrying large hand bags with mysterious contents that she never had occasion to use. She disregarded the heat of the sun, and walked around bare headed, with her long hair tied up in a bun, so it didn’t get dirty. Her eyes would dart up and down the street, checking for something, no one, not even her, had a clue about.

She admired the ‘oh so quaint’ things that people did in the old city, and the ‘ah so delightful’ things they made, and the ‘pretty’ things it was possible to buy. But knowingly, she also criticized the way many of the stores practices business, jovially and laid back. Durees spread across shop floors to seat customers, tea served in dirty glasses and pan stains on the fronts of shops. The aesthetics and efficiency of business practice were naturally the chief of her concerns, feeling that a more impersonal and professional approach might meet with more success.

She said as much, and when she added that that’s how shops in the big city run, she immediately received nods of sympathy from her company. She also complained about the hygiene in a couple of eateries they visited, and insisted on being shown the water purifier before she actually drank the water they served, though for the most part she carried her own.

Whether this was seen as normal by her hostess is difficult to say. Stuck between the awe due to a big city lady, and the etiquette of Lucknow, she didn’t really find herself in a position to pass judgment. Though I’m sure she did, if not on her guest, then at least on the kind of news they showed every evening. Everyone passes judgment on that, even if they don’t watch it. It’s quite easy, any negative statement, even one about the kind of traffic on the way home, if made just after the bulletin qualifies as valid criticism.

However, since we’re not concerned about the state of traffic on the streets of Lucknow we can safely avoid the evening bulletin. And therefore judgment as well.

Well one evening, towards the end of her stay, when Madam R__ was thoroughly saturated, or so she thought, with the spirit of Lucknow, and fallen in and out of love with it, the host announced an invitation to a tea with her friends. A chance to meet more of the ‘natives’ was not to be missed so the Madam decided to go.

The occasion was more than just a tea. The party, was being thrown by a member of the many royal families and local chieftains that had once resided in Lucknow, and thanks to the nation’s socialist leaning, were now with very little left, but the social know how, to conduct a tea in the prescribed manner, even if the prescription was written centuries ago, in a different language.

The hostess and Madam R___ both dressed up. Madam R___ put on the only saree she was carrying, a summery silk affair, it seemed almost chosen exclusively for the occasion from her vast collection. The solid blue with a red border spoke class in big bold letters. And she teamed it up with a small red clutch bag, a very light pink lipstick, ruby danglers and a string of rubies around her neck. She wore black strappy sandals, borrowed, and the look was completed by letting her hair hang loose and fall around her shoulders in bouncy curls recommended by the finest hairdresser in Delhi.

Her experience in the city, with fashion hadn’t been encouraging and she was assuming another evening of people dressed as aunties looking like they’d stopped following fashion trends 20 years ago.

The ‘palace’ cause that’s what it was called, where the tea was, was almost a ruin. The gate was rusted, and one just hung on its hinges resting on the ground, almost ready to tip over and take the gate post with it. They were entirely covered in the brown-red of rust, and nowhere did any vestige of paint show. The building itself was a similar story. Plaster was missing in places, showing the brick work of the walls. In other places only the paint had come away, and underneath, the mortar seemed to be crumbling into bright orange rust, because of the high percentage of red earth used in pre-cement mortar. The roof seemed a little lopsided, and the pillars holding up the verandah seemed a little bowed. The house would have been colored a sick shade of yellow, but in most places was covered with moss, algae or stains of black, creating a collage of nausea.

However, Madam R__ half expecting a ruin was rather impressed by the idea of a single family owning the entire building she was looking at. Rundown or not, the house was huge, three stories high, its front ran along the road for at least 300 meters. Private quarters this large were something to be impressed by, no matter where you were, and in a time when houses were advertised as luxurious for having 3 bedrooms, this particular residence completely denied classification.

They drove past the main entrance to the palace, and at a smaller but definitely fresher looking door, the car stopped, and Madam R_ and hostess got out to meet the titular queen of somewhere, which even the queen wasn’t too sure about.

They were slightly late, and for once Madam R_ felt a little sheepish about being fashionably late, the house had lent credibility to the claim of royalty of their current host. The inside of the house only heightened her sense of awe. The palace was indeed palatial, and correctly outfitted with chandeliers in the foyer and had walls mounted with muskets and cutlasses as it should be. The rooms they passed through to enter the courtyard where the tea was, spoke of an easy opulence that had been taken for granted to a degree when it was now falling apart. A good analogy would be the woman who stays home and cleans, until one day you forget her name, and angered she just leaves.

She was greeted by a group of 4 women sitting around a table with only two more empty chairs. The tea had just arrived from the look of things cups and saucers were still in the tray, and sugar and milk still unspilt. Her Hostess, whose name I shall now have to reveal: Shainab, made the appropriate introductions, while she was busy taking in the company.

While she was prepared for old fashioned people, this was pushing it too far. They were dressed in corsets, and not one or two of them, but the whole lot. And not even the more modern and aesthetically pleasing version of the corset, but in fact the old school, Victorian avatar. How anyone would, or could wear those was beyond madam R_ and it took her a little while to accept even that she was in the company of people so dressed.

The tea was poured, and cakes and pastries duly served, biscuits cookies too… all of that. Conversation waxed and waned, but Madam R_ was slightly out of it, for the most part. Only after a good twenty minutes of effort could she bring herself to stop examining, quite blatantly in fact, the corsets these women were wearing. She couldn’t quite believe that they actually were tied in place with the same elaborate system of laces that Victorian corsets seemed to sport in movies. And the waste and bosom responded exactly as it should, one looked painfully constricted the other looked ready to overflow. And it was scary.

Overcome with in the inexplicability of the situation, she decided to ignore the fact, and behave as thought this was normal company.

“…. The food in Tuscany is perfect, I loved it there,” someone dressed in blue was saying. Her corset was blue too, with a frilly collar and the lace tied in large bow at the back. It was quite blatantly obvious unlike the other corsets, which were worn with the lace a little more discreet.

“Yes, it is exquisite, their pasta, or whatever it is tastes heavenly, I could live on just that for years.” Someone she vaguely remembered as being Simrin, or Simon chimed in.

“Perhaps, but it would take a lot of it to keep you full.” Said the one in blue, and everyone broke into polite laughter, even Simrin/Simon obligingly smiled.

“Yeah, and the roof tops just look so lovely, don’t they?” Another lady with a corset so tight she seemed to be breathing shallowly because of it, panted.

“Well, I never really looked at roof tops,” said the woman in blue again, “I prefer looking at people.”

“Yeah knowing you, you even checked out the waiters…” said the woman with too tight a corset. And once more there was obliging laughter.

“Yeah, well who says waiters can’t be hot? And who says waiters don’t have needs? And who are we to say we’re better than them?” asked the woman in blue, not quite as amused as politeness required.

“Uff. Not your socialist stuff again yaar, Rosa Luxemburg was bad enough, don’t you start... or wait I don’t know, who was it who said, as long as there is a lower class I’m of it?” Said Simrin/Simon

“Don’t know, and don’t care,” panted the guest with the corset too tight.

“Anyway when was the last time you were in Tuscany?” asked the queen, in a tone that immediately brought the fun to an end.

“Oh not so long ago, just a month ago maybe?” said the woman in Blue.

“You just missed me then; I was there that week too. I think they were having some kind of a special food fare. We went in for that,” said the queen.

“We did as well, I wish we’d known you were coming, we could have gone together,” said the woman in blue.

“That’s an awesome idea, we should all go together next year actually… don’t you think?” asked Simon/Simrin.

“Indeed we should, we’re all free around that time, and I could get my niece I’d love to introduce her to you people, she lives in boarding school, poor thing, and has absolutely no idea of a higher culture than football and hockey.”

This too received some sympathetic smiles and laughs. The conversation then veered towards discussion regarding friends and family, that Madam R_ knew nothing about, so tea cup in hand she tuned out, till it was time to say good bye.

The next day, she was on her own for some time, and decided to go to Tuscany for lunch, assuming quite understandably that it was an Italian or some such restaurant, and probably the finest in the city, judging from its patrons.

She asked Shainab for the address. Shainab laughed, and then explained, “Oh we meant Tuscany, as in the place Tuscany, we love going there all of us have been so many times, but never together, you thought it was a restaurant? That’s precious…”

Madam R_ was obviously surprised by this, owing to the fact that she’d never been out of the country beyond the immediate neighborhood. However, the idea of these corset wearing women walking around in Italy created such a comic image in her head, that she laughed and consoled herself with that.

The consolation didn’t last long. The month’s edition of all the Fashion magazines were covered with photographs of corsets, apparently this was the anniversary year of something, and they were one thing that everyone was wearing. What made matters worse is that the magazines had exactly those corsets featured that the she remembered the women wearing.

The chance information that Milan fashion week had happened just a month ago, and the deduction that these women had probably bought their clothes literally straight of the ramp was more than she could handle.

She asked Shainab about it, one evening. “Where did they get their corsets from?”

“Oh Milan I think, I don’t know, some fashion week in Italy…”

Over come, she blurted, “wow! That must have cost a fortune, how much did they pay?”

Shainab nervously checked her watch, and decided she was in a hurry. After all, small town people still don’t think it polite to talk about money, there’s a lot they have to learn before they match Delhi.