Skirting Around The Monsoon

Tongue firmly in cheek, Yashpal Mehta humorously skirts around the garment that not only provided practicality but was also something that added to the charm of the Mumbai monsoon. 

Many rains ago someone eloquently said, “ I shall make salaams at the sight of a skirt before considering the quality of the cloth”. The context in this famous quote is that a lady has to be respected irrespective of wealth, status and features. I am all for it, but where on earth is the skirt?

In the good old days, the first showers of Mumbai rains brought about a change in the wardrobe and presto, out came the skirt. The school teachers’ sedate sari gave way to a single-coloured skirt, and the staff at the office turned either to an A-Line or a pencil skirt to avoid getting wet especially if the commute was by the much-used trains. Wait for the evening and you would be greeted with a pleated or a bubbled skirt with tops to match. The beaches were dotted with sarongs and their ilk. No more dresses, and salwar kameezes, even the most down-to-earth girl would flaunt a flared or a circle for the entire four months of monsoons. 

The choice of a midi, maxi or mini skirt differentiated the avant-garde from the daring. But did the skirt have a kingdom outside of Mumbai? I recall an incident during my internship days while doing my Chartered Accountancy which was both hilarious and worthy of narration.

We were asked to go to the Delhi office to complete an assignment with two other fashionable girls from the Mumbai office. The senior from the Delhi office was a married guy whose Gauna (a ritual in which the girl goes to her husband’s home) was still to be performed. The girls in our team wanted to shop at the famous Ajmal Khan Road Market and turned out in mini skirts much to the embarrassment of our Delhi colleague who refused to walk along with us and stayed ten meters away throughout the shopping sojourn. It became a classic humorous episode recounted in the Mumbai office for a long time. Well, not for all is the finery of the skirt.

These days, the ubiquitous types of denim and jeans are such a bane of fashion that I wonder what makes them so popular. I lament the lack of variety with complete disregard for the gender or size of the person wearing it. 

But why are we even skirting the issue of appearance? 

A young girl was once asked what she would like in her partner, appearance, money or status and her honest reply was appearance any time! I am the same.

Clothes maketh both men and women and if you ask me, nothing adds to a woman’s appearance better than the skirt. Sadly this time, it’s been a month into the monsoon and I have still not spotted the once-favoured and much-liked skirt among Mumbai women in monsoon times.

Photographs courtesy Unsplash

Calling our Members to Write for Us!

Silver Talkies Members get a unique chance to get published with us. We welcome travelogues, family recipes, memoirs, oral history accounts, short stories, poems, humour and personal essays, tips on living well and if you are a qualified subject matter expert then your thoughts on your chosen topics as well. Email us at connect@silvertalkies.com to know more!