After more than two decades of having her salwar suits tailored by Lakshmi Tailors in her neighbourhood and calling the proprietor Lakshmi kakima (“simple matter of inference,” she had told her doubting sister who had not been sure about the etymology of the shop’s nomenclature), Trina discovered to her great embarrassment one evening that the “Lakshmi” in the shop name was a shortened form of kakima’s husband’s name, which happened to be Lakshmikanta.

She owed her enlightenment to an accident. She was sitting at the tailors’ with a Brobdingnagian jute bag full of yards of cloth, waiting to be cut, shaped and sewn into salwar kameez sets when an exhausted young man came enquiring after Lakshmi di. He had come straight from office, to leave his wife’s kurtas for alterations. The confusion regarding the gender of “Lakshmi” was soon cleared by the Lakshmi couple but Trina found herself in instant empathy with this hapless human who had ended up in the same queasy spot as hers. “Another instance of the inscrutable human mind,” she thought to herself, “which, for reasons known only to it, had to conclude that Lakshmi was a woman!”

But her thoughts were interrupted by Lakshmi kaku’s familiar, melancholic whines against the world which to Trina’s great amusement came perfectly in rhythm with the revolutions of the giant wheel of his sewing machine. The man was filled to the brim with pity for the world, which according to him, “has been going to the dogs steadily since the 1990s.” “You cannot trust anyone these days, Didimoni,” he would tell Trina with a deep sigh, “Kolkata has changed. This ‘flat culture’ ruined it all.”

Trina wasn’t sure what great harm people living in apartments had caused him in the past to deserve his disapproval but chose to remain silent. She knew that he smelled swindling, thievery, bribing and black money behind the success of his flat-owning neighbours as well as the rest of humanity. “Flat culture” was just his way of referring to post-liberalisation India, Trina guessed. Always clad in kurta-pajama, he had the air of a moral philosopher and the looks of a hurt poet. His sole refuge was his family — it had escaped the universal moral pestilence by sheer divine grace —– which consisted of his wife (a shrewd woman of business, a tigress-at-ease, always ready to pounce on an unsuspecting customer) and the pride of their life, their daughter Piya (thin enough to be missed entirely but for her garish makeup and her shrill voice, Trina always thought).

All three of them were tailors par excellence by their own admissions, and literally minded their own (tailoring) business. “We don’t outsource; we believe in doing it ourselves” was their stiff, readymade retort to anyone who dared to raise an eyebrow at their exorbitant making charges. No visit to Lakshmi Tailors was complete without sound moralising by Lakshmi kaku for the first 15 minutes and another 15 minutes of his flashback narrative on how he and his wife had single-handedly (“Shouldn’t it be double-handedly?,” Trina always wondered) established the business from scratch while miraculously managing to stay downright honest in the 21st century. So Trina resigned to her fate, nodded in amicable agreement to kaku’s complaints at suitable moments and did her best to look interested, all the while screaming inside and wondering when they would actually get to the business of taking her orders. That moment usually came when Piya grew tired of her father’s moralising.

Now Piya was a character in her own right. Her sartorial choices and cosmetic experiments — not to mention those of her mother — never failed to provoke Trina to steal glances and, at times when Trina could no longer control herself despite her best efforts, even gape at them.

Piya seemed remarkably open to wearing clothes cut out of almost anything ranging from what-looked-like-plastic to home-furnishing-material. Her jewellery, the object of Trina’s constant amazement, was a real study in variety; it reflected her catholic choice of raw materials that included beads and buttons and rocks to stones and seashells and pompoms made of wool.  “Above all, you could never miss her ‘nail art’,” Trina would often tell her friends jokingly, “from celestial bodies to abstract art; you will find them all on her claws!” In all fairness to Trina, and despite her whacky sense of humour, “nails” they could not be called.

Not to be left behind, Piya’s mother (her name was Parna, as Trina found out that day) wore all the jewellery she owned every single evening as she sewed away with a fixed, lipsticked smile. The unmistakable pieces were her five gold rings of the same shape and design with the pink stone shaped like a leaf in the middle adorning her fingers. “I’m pretty sure they were her wedding gifts from conniving, vengeful relatives, Maa” Trina had told her mother one day, making Maa crack up with laughter.

“Why in the world would she wear them every day?” Maa had asked, tears of mirth rolling down her ageing cheeks.

“Perhaps to savour her triumph over them… her business is thriving these days despite them, don’t you see!” she had replied gleefully.

Maa hadn’t pursued the matter; she knew her daughter was full of answers that she didn’t quite understand.

Parna kakima was pedalling on her sewing machine that evening, bathed in red like a new bride — bright red chiffon sari, red pola bangles on hands in addition to the usual gilded ones, red nail polish and red sindoor on the ever-widening, middle-aged parting of her hair. She was usually passive and benign when customers discussed patterns and designs with Piya. But she sprung to attention the moment the bill was mentioned, almost snatching the show from Piya!

An old customer, Trina was now prepared for the assault of numbers to begin; one astronomical number after the other appeared on the bill in quick, decisive stabs of kakima’s ball-point pen; charges for buttons added to designs, charges for cloth, also charges for inner lining fittings… and the list continued…. For some strange reason Trina never quite understood, these were not part of “making charges”.

For years Trina had looked at the two women and admired Dickens silently; for wasn’t it Dickens who first introduced to her young mind a sense of the eccentric, the idiosyncratic and the decadent? This mother-daughter duo would put a Miss Havisham to shame any day, she was certain.

But mathematics dominated her thoughts now, not literature, and she weakly intervened, “But kakima, it’s been only four months since you last raised your making charges during Poila Boisakh. How can it go up again?”

“Oh come on, Pujo is on the way! Don’t you give pujo bonus to your household help?” Kakima’s white teeth flashed. So did four more rows of “off-white” teeth in agreement.

“Yes, but these are not quite the same issues…,” Trina mumbled, inspecting the bill, and almost immediately a shocked exclamation escaped her lips, “And what about these? A hundred rupees for five plastic buttons!”

“Don’t dismiss them because they are plastic!” Kakima sounded almost wounded, as if Trina had just pointed out a flaw in her, “Upon my word, you can’t break them with a hammer.”

“But who would hammer buttons, kakima? … I really think they’re over-priced.”

“Do you have any idea of the market price of buttons, Trina?”

“No… But…”

“You take this one right now and go to any market of your choice. Gariahaat, New Market, Burrabazaar, anywhere… you will know then,” replied the tigress, offering Trina a button large heartedly.

Trina knew, just as well as kakima did, that there was no way she would undertake a journey from Behala to distant Burrabazaar, braving the crowd button-in-hand, pushing-shoving-jostling, to research the market price of “designer” buttons. She sensed that the battle was drawing to its inevitable end, with Lakshmi Tailors winning the case as always. She huffed and puffed and complained some more (in vain) and then gave up. Normalcy returned to the room instantly, like a breath of fresh air.

“So how’s Mashima’s backache, Trina?  Please tell her I send my regards,” said the tigress in a sing-song voice, savouring yet another sweet victory.

“And keep us in your prayers, Didimoni,” added Kaku, “we are trying hard to stay honest even in these hopeless times, you know….”

“I will,” said Trina curtly, almost recoiling in rage.

She vowed to find another tailor as she left for home, tired and late. A tailor with a little less honesty, she thought.