Playing dress-up

In lieu of anything better to do last Friday, I decided to play dress-up. I'd been pretty lethargic the whole day, and climbing out of my two-day sickbed, I felt impelled to trowel some cosmetics over my ashen complexion (my lips were actually faintly gray). Marlon's homecoming was a convenient excuse to prettify myself.

A pair of tight jeans necessitated a loose top to hide excess waistline flab, so I picked up one of my dad's trusty old kurtahs. A side note about kurtahs: kurtahs are soft, flowing and often sheer tunics for men, embellished with delicate embroidery. My dad left behind a large trove of kurtahs, which we use for beach coverups, pambahay and pantulog because they're just so comfy. We gave a lot of them away, too, which is a real shame. The recent Indian/boho mania has a lot of idiotic fashion writers calling them kaftans, which irks me no end (it's caftan with a c -- caftans are not Indian in origin, and refer to an entirely different garment altogether).

Anyway. The kurtah I picked was white, sheer with thin white stripes and delicate white embroidery running along the lines of the collar and shoulder seams. Since it was oversized, I knotted the hems at my hips. I put on some gold and clear glass costume jewelry Marlon got me via Shivaani, his Indian best friend at P&G – a necklace with an ornate dangling pendant and two heavy bangles. I labored at my mirror to achieve a dewy, gleaming look with smoky eyes (the better for them to look deep-set and bumbay) and left my hair down and wavy.

The finishing touch was a tiny jewel out of the pack of bindi I picked up in Singapore, lodged just a little above and between my eyebrows. Channeling the aura of a Mumbai star, I glided off to the Pen lobby to reveal my beautiful Indian self to my boyfriend.

Whereupon I was met by a gaggle of Indians in the Pen driveway. Real, genuine Indians, a whole horde of them, calling it a night after some event at the ballroom. These were the rich Indians of Makati, totally decked out and fully loaded with Bollywood's best bling. The women wearing saris as women should, the men too dapper to seen out at night in kurtahs. And all of them, no doubt, wondering who this weird-looking girl was doing wearing a kurtah of all things with flared jeans and in that weird knot above her hip and just one miniscule bindi, a little off center at that.

Suddenly I felt just as I thought a Shenzhen-made LV bag would if someone plunked it down in the LV flagship store in Paris. And I couldn't seem to look up whenever I passed one of the “'real ones”. Suddenly I felt like a kid caught playing dress up, which was an incredibly fun thing at the start of the night but now just felt awfully stupid. Suddenly I thought of that scene in Bridget Jones when she shows up dressed as a Playboy bunny at what she thinks is a costume party but really isn't. I felt as stupid as a fictional character like Bridget could possibly feel, except that I'm a real person.

I've always made jokes about being a “fake Indian”. The last time an Indian introduced me to another Indian, who thought I was an Indian, he invoked that joke of mine. And I've always joked that I'm so fake I hardly know what to order in an Indian restaurant. All of a sudden, the joke was on me, and it wasn't as funny as I thought it always was.

--

don't worry folks, i'm ok. i didn't dwell on it for long at all. i guess if you really are in the mood to write, you just mine certain experiences. :-) forehead bindi image from www.bindi-bindis.co.uk.