New to the Unhooked series? Click on #NoBraDay and scroll all the way down because that’s where it all begins. Yes, it’s in descending order and detrimental to your trackpad. The elves are fixing it.
The elves at Santa’s Little Workshop are currently in the mystic Orient, attending some toymakers’ convention knee-deep in rides and robots. So that leaves me with some extra scrubbing and polishing to do back home. Hence the 48-hour gap.
Since I decided to surrender all the underwires, I’ve had to sift through my drawer back home to look for my older, less stinging alternatives. And there they were, tucked right under my ancient size-36 jeans, relics from my pre-underwire/strapless/meshwork days (that complemented the jeans) – the Conical Bras. For the uninitiated, the Conical Bra is the gateway bra for over an estimated 80 per cent of middle class adolescent women in this country. Sure, you’ve heard (or seen) that most of our mothers start us off on the sports bra. Well, those are the fancier ones among us – the ones who take ballet lessons or at least, have someone they’re showing the bra off to, at 13.
I remember the first time my mother decided it was time for me to go bra-shopping. It was at the swimming pool at CME, Pune where Mrs Gill had gone up to my mother and slipped in a little comment about how quickly I’d grown up – put forth elegantly with just a slight hint of sly that only a thouroughbred fauji wife can muster at will (The Army Wife is a strange cross between Julie London and Zora Sehgal). To the growing 12-year old me, this was just a reprise of the old, hackneyed ‘kids-they-grow-up-so-fast’. Apparently not.
The gravity of the statement hung heavily on the way back while I sat in the car and my mother drove on, stern-faced and ominously silent. To this day, I cannot bear a gap in conversation – it’s like this empty space I constantly feel the need of filling up with anything. “So I’ve been prepping for the half-yearlies, but I think I’m already done with most of the portion (that’s St-Mary’s-Speak for syllabus) because of the August unit tests- remember the August unit tests where I aced 8 out of 11 subjects?” Just anything at all. I considered bringing up the July unit test but it wasn’t as sparkling as August. Mother, who prefers silence over a lot of other things, decided to break the retelling of Little Grimy’s Unit Test Adventures with a subtle and sensitively articulated, “I think you should now start wearing a bra.” A life-changing decision, yes – but why did it sound like a sweeping declaration of my betrayal? Again, my radar, sometimes picks up imaginary signals and susceptible to much melodramatic interpretations and rotations. At 13, you take yourself rather seriously.
So off to the store it was. I knew it wasn’t yet time for Chantilly lace and detachable satin straps. But the thinly padded tee-shirt bras held a lot of promise. And they came in vibrant purples, pinks and blues. But mother was going to have none of it. Without so much as a sweeping glance across my shoulders, the store lady determined my band and cup size which mother confirmed with a nod. And mother simply pointed at the rack (the kinds used as storage units in shops. . . sheesh) at the far-end – that’s right gentlemen, a woman with her mind made up at a garment store. And the next thing I knew, I was ushered into the changing stall, with three rectangular boxes – each bearing a model who must have made the cover of Sarita and Saheli every other month in the 90s (the millennial covers have upped the ante).
So what does the conical bra look like? Well, exactly the way it sounds – pointed, contoured and well, conical. The conical bra has all the volcanic sex appeal of a parked Maruti Celerio – the CNG variant, not even the diesel kind. But with safety equipment to rival a Volvo – with cotton shoulder straps as wide as your thumbs and four hooks, it’s a fortress that would make second base as good as Everest Base Camp – you need tools and fortitude to get past that. And from there one, it’s only uphill. The choice of colours, of course, is eclectic – white, black and taupe. And fabric – cotton, cotton and yes, cotton too. Stuff of wet dreams, ain’t it?
And this was my initiation into womanhood where my breasts entered a room before the rest of me. Each held firmly in place but polarised from its twin – like they weren’t on talking terms with each other because each pointed in a different direction. Hello Uniboob, meet your match in awkward teenage brassiere malfunctions.
I wanted to protest. How was one to counter mother’s very rationally put arguments in favour of the offending article, citing comfort, support and shape? “But I don’t want THAT shape, mother. . . and not THAT colour either.”
Of course, mother killed the discussion with the mother of all comebacks – “Who’s going to see it?”
There’s no correct response to this, so you strap on for the next five years until you discover rainbows, sunshine and Bandra.
Special thanks to Leo – who rocks the pink bra a lot better than his bedfellow in this #randomclick. And Avijit Pathak who you must all agree, has great street cred.
Another camera-phone user who posts random clicks on WordPress and Instagram – we need more of those, yes. What will she shoot next? Cups of coffee with floating foam shapes, captioned #cappuccinolove? Silhouettes of her own shadow, editted in black and white, hashtagged #nofilters? Videos of falling rain outside her window #monsoon #rainyday #indoors? Who knows. Follow this spinster to find out more (It’s the grey Follow button on the right hand corner). Scroll down to share it on Facebook and Twitter. Don’t do it. No, please don’t. Enough already.
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