Dress to de-stress

(Sigh. Yeah, sometimes inspiration does not strike when and how it should. But there is always published stuff that I can fall back on...)

A few weeks ago, I decided to lever my nicely-rounded self out from the chair in front of the computer in the study and get some exercise. Almost before I knew what I was doing, I had signed up at the nearby gym for a month’s worth of physical activity of a very remotely familiar kind. The first day, I huffed and puffed through an hour of trotting along on the treadmill, wheeling along on a recumbent bicycle and stepping forth on a cross-trainer. By the next morning, I was being yelled at by muscles I could not remember I had, popping and cracking at the joints as I rummaged to find suitable clothes for my newest road to the goal of general self-improvement and creaking musically as I bent over to tie my sneaker-laces. Much to my horror, I discovered that in my enormous wardrobe, I had little that even vaguely resembled garb I could torture myself in. It was time to shop.

I started with the gym, which offered me their own label of pants, at a nice price of about Rs625. But they were blue and clingy and I wanted red and roomy. At Reebok, Nike, Adidas, and various others name outlets, the more esoteric and international the tag, the higher the price. Most salespeople looked snootily at me and presumed that I had strolled in to the wrong place. I peeked at the price tags, noting that a plain pair of track pants could cost about Rs1800. Feeling every one of my unwanted extra inches, I slid out as fast as I could and found solace in the wonderfully spike-heeled sandals in the window of the next shop. A department store was what I needed, with its lovely anonymity and friendliness, somewhere like Westside, Lifestyle, Big Bazaar or Max. So there I went. And came across an interesting paradox.

There was a huge disconnect in the whole mind-body equation. Most if not all the track pants (of course, there is a very good reason they are often called ‘sweat’ pants) made for the female sex are configured to fit bodies that have a long and happy relationship with exercise machines, weights and stretches, not those that needed it. Almost all that I looked at were tailored nicely, in decent colours – there was a fluorescent green I particularly fancied, and various shades of grey, blue, red and one nightmarish fuschia pink – and with neat logos, stripes and fastenings. They were primarily in synthetic fabrics, with generous helpings of lycra, all no-nos in my book where gym fashion is concerned. And they were affordable, ranging from about Rs700 to about Rs1500, less if there was a sale on. But – and it’s a fairly big but – more relevantly, they were all in sizes that could fit only the fit, figures that avoided adipose and eschewed any connection to calories, shapes that denied any link to the genetics of the Indian female proportions, especially as defined in the shastras, with curves and hollows in logical situations. Every one that I looked at was cut so slim and so straight and so clingy that I had perforce to slink stoutly away to the men’s section in a nice and friendly store called The Loot.

There I had better luck. I found pants that were soft cotton, generously cut and near-etheric in comfort levels. Sadly, they came in several shades of dreary: dark blue, black, beige, grey, mud and muddier. The salesman announced to me that they were “For mens, madam!” When I tried them on, they were wonderful – soft, roomy, breathable and well enough cut to add a soupcon of a la mode pajama-style to the oversized cut. They could be adjusted to sit snug at my still-slim waist, flowing smoothly down to my feet…and beyond. A minor cut and hem job that took the in-house tailor about ten minutes to do and I was all set to work up a sweat and work off some gastronomic sinning at the gym. All at far lower prices than the lycra leggings my gender was supposed to squeeze into, reduced from Rs1100 to a mere Rs 550 for one pair and from Rs1300 to about Rs600 for the other.

The pants are doing their job well. I am doing my exercise routines well, or so I am told. And some day not too long from now I am determined to walk into the store and denude the racks of all those lovely coloured track pants that are made “For womens, madam!”