We were sitting on Leela’s enormous bed pondering on what to wear for a party a few nights from there on. I had left it too late to go about acquiring the right outfit. The bed was scattered with silk saris and fabric pieces. I fingered them one after the other, unable to decide. Strangely enough, into my mind swam a well-known fictitious heroine’s dilemma. Scarlett O’ Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind:

‘There wasn’t a nice dress in Tara or a dress which hadn’t been turned twice and mended…The moss-green velvet curtains felt prickly and soft beneath her cheek and she rubbed her face against them gratefully, like a cat. And then suddenly she looked at them....’
Beneath the pile of fabric, something shimmered. It wasn’t moss-green velvet curtains but it was the most awful bit of bling brocade. My friend Leela’s eyes widened when I said I would take it.

“You don’t want that,” she said in horror touching the pink and gold brocade material. “My secretary made a mistake. In fact, I bit her head off for picking it up. I tried giving it to my maids. But they don’t want it either. So how can you want this…this…why would you want it?” she asked. “I like it. I really do…I think I can actually see myself in it….” My voice trailed off. I wouldn’t explain, I told myself. I would just show her what I had in mind.

On the day of the cocktail party, I was all set. It was one of the most happening parties of the month and I knew everyone there would be togged out in their best haute couture and dripping diamonds. I had a choice. Either go with the herd or beat my own path. And the awful bit of bling brocade was to be that path....

So with the help of a tailor the pink brocade became a straight cut top with spaghetti straps. A dusty pink cotton skirt flowed beneath it. A raw silk deep pink stole to drape ever so gently. An old faded pink silk reticule bag to dangle from the wrist and antique Mysore heavy gold jewellery…it had the desired effect. Leela’s mouth did fall open…and I couldn’t help grinning…. I knew exactly the effect I was aiming for. Her Royal Highness of Bilishivale perhaps!

Writers are not supposed to be too smitten by clothes unless you are a Barbara Cartland wannabe or one of the new generation, air brushed, teeth capped, chick lit writing packaged wonders whose picture on the book jacket is just as crucial as what is within the book. It is as if having drizzled the colours of their soul into their writing, literary writers are expected to crouch moth-like, drab and muddy, blending with the wood of the woodwork around them…. It is a notion that the world has about writers; and one many writers have themselves rushed to embrace. As if by doing so their work would be imbued with an enviable gravitas. I, for one, have always loved clothes. Not the idea of dressing up as much as mixing fabric and texture with weave and yarn to create a composite effect of harmony. The heft of silk. The lightness of organza. The sheen of satin. The feel of fine cotton. And how the blending is a kind of sensual magic.

But beyond the pure sensuality of fabric, it was only as I entered the hallways of literature that I encountered the multiple roles clothes may be called upon to perform. In the classic The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck I first encountered clothes as a metaphor of transformation in a man…. In fact, it was with a sinking heart that I read of the change in Wang Lung, the simple farmer who as he slowly became prosperous felt the need for what he never had had. Be it fine accoutrements or a pretty concubine. And how, like his old clothes, his dull stodgy wife began to displease him.

‘He bought also new stuffs for clothes, and although O-lan had always cut his robes, making them wide and long for good measure and sewing them stoutly this way and that for strength, now he was scornful of her cutting and sewing and he took the stuffs to a tailor in the town and he had his clothes made as the men in the town had theirs, light grey silk for a robe, cut neatly to his body and with little to spare, and over this a black satin sleeveless coat. And he bought the first shoes he had had in his life not made by a woman, and they were black velvet shoes such as the Old Lord had worn flapping at his heels. But these fine clothes he was ashamed to wear suddenly before O-lan and his children. He kept them folded in sheets of brown oiled paper and he left them at the tea shop with a clerk he had come to know, and for a price they let him go into an inner room secretly and put them on before he went up the stairs.’

Mrs Hibbert, in that splendid novel Is there Anything You Want by Margaret Forster, is a domineering do-gooder and a control freak. Best embodied by her relationship with her clothes.

She’d also been trained to match colours carefully. Co-ordination was important, the picking out of a red thread in a patterned red-and-grey-black skirt by the choice of an exactly matching red blouse, for example. Mrs Hibbert was very good at this. She never had to take a skirt with her to find a match for it – she could carry the colour in her head.

Such is her need to have total control over her life and what is around her that she needs to exercise her force of character even after her death. And so:

‘There was a bit in her will about clothes. Clothes made a statement, after all. One of her great terrors was that when she died her clothes would be taken to a charity shop and she absolutely could not bear, dead though she would be, the thought…. She had tossed and turned many nights, trying to solve this dilemma, and then had come across a solution quite by accident. In the local paper, the amateur dramatic society had advertised for clothes of good quality, any clothes, to be given to it for use in future productions. Mrs Hibbert knew it was odd, but she had immediately been attracted by the idea of an actress wearing her clothes.’

The finest of novels and biographies would be incomplete without the description of clothes in it. Be it Leo Tolstoy or Henry James, Gustave Flaubert or Tom Wolfe, Jane Austen or Isabel Allende, what the people who populate their writings wear becomes a reflection of not just class and economic position but also of who they are and what they think…. In fact an article of clothing, as in the handkerchief in Shakespeare’s Othello, could be the focal point of a narrative.

And yet, to dwell on clothes is dismissed in the real world as the preoccupation of people who have little to do with their time – the kitty party page 3 memsahibs! Tsk, tsk…. I do not know what I would rank as the triumphs of my life. But I do know that I will cherish the thought of that awful bling brocade that brought alive one evening for me…and how!