Packing for a vacation requires special consideration. You have to think about space, comfort, versatility, local weather, and whether or not you’re okay with forgetting any of your clothes under the hotel room bed. Also important–you must consider how you want to look in the inevitable photographs. You have to distill your wardrobe into a handful of key pieces that will get you through the weeks, but not embarrass you later on Facebook.
When I went to India with my best friend Dervla, I thought I had it all worked out. I would wear jeans or shorts with a series of simple Polo shirts whose colours paid tribute to the country’s vibrant aesthetic–saffron yellow, orange, emerald green, and purple. What I didn’t want to do was attempt to dress like the locals. I shudder at the sartorial crimes of white people abroad.
Our tour group consisted mainly of Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis. Most of them had a casual attitude to dressing. All our clothes had to be scrunched into backpacks. They often got dirty. We were only able to have them cleaned sporadically. (“It’s not that it doesn’t smell clean,” Dervla said after receiving her clothes back from being washed. “But they also smell like river water. I think they were washed in the river.”)
The member of our group with the most personal style was a posh English girl named Ally. She wore lose, box-like tops that exposed her midriff, but she’d cover up her arms with a gigantic scarf. She had these incredible hot pink harem pants. One tragic day, she got some unidentified animal substance on them. She still pulled it off, though.
New Delhi, where we started our tour, was cold and grey. To stay warm, local men wore these incredible grey and taupe scarves the size of blankets. They wrapped them around their necks or heads, or draped them over their bodies like togas. I wanted one as soon as I saw them.
After the bleakness of New Delhi, arriving by train in Jaisalmer, a yellow-brick fort city on a hill, was a dream. Our hotel had a rooftop restaurant from which you could see children play with kites on the city’s rooftops. The desert stretched out around us in every direction. For our first evening, our tour leader recommended a shop where we could borrow traditional Rajasthani clothes for dinner. A lot of the young women in our group jumped at the opportunity to wear saris. I wanted to wear a sari too, but it’s not all about me.
Instead, the shopkeeper picked out a navy tunic and purple pajama-like pants for me, topped off with a red turban. The wrapping of a turban is a complicated process–if you don’t do it tight enough, it slips off. The shopkeeper had to do it twice. Wearing the clothing of a culture not your own isn’t just about how you look, but learning the process of how to accomplish the look. Wearing clothes that you never have before is another way to experience new things, like eating something unrecognizable and spicy. After she finished, she suggested I buy it. I thanked her, but explained that I would never be able to wrap it myself.
Back at the hotel, I stared at myself in the mirror. I had always thought that turbans made men look stoic and dignified. I, on the other hand, looked like Jason Schwartzman in a Wes Anderson movie.
After a few days in Jaisalmer, as we prepared for our camel ride in the Thar Desert, I began to reconsider my jeans. On the back of a camel, they would be hot and uncomfortable. Plus, what if I got an unidentified camel-substance on them? I thought back to my purple pants I had returned to the shop. Something like that would be comfortable and airy in the desert sun. And if I looked a little silly, who cares? I already looked silly riding a camel. I bought baggy, red harem pants that were quickly nicknamed my ‘camel pants.’
Despite their bad reputation, I actually like camels. I admire their proud stubbornness, their unwillingness to take crap from humans. (I like raccoons for the same reason.) The camel herder helped me climb up on the seated creature with no problem, but I worried about the lift off. Our tour leader warned us that camels stand up on their back legs first, tilting you forward as their backs become almost vertical. “Hold tight, lean back. Hold tight, lean back,” he said as he moved throughout the group. “Otherwise, you’ll fall off.”
I just knew that I would be the one who toppled over the camel’s head onto the ground. I would be known as the one who fell off his camel the rest of the trip. My camel was the last one to stand up, which only added to my anxiety. When she finally did, I held on very tight, and leaned all the way back. There was an excruciating moment where I could have fallen, but a camel-like stubbornness kicked in, and I stayed on. I wore no shoes, and for the duration of the trek it was nice to feel the camel’s hair and warmth next to my bare skin.
At home, I am a shopper, as my credit card company will tell you. But in India, I became inhibited any time we entered a shop. Partly it was feeling intimidated by the shopkeepers, who sometimes stand in their doorways trying to get you to come in by guessing your nationality.
“American? American! USA! No? England? UK? Oh, sorry! Are you…from Spain?”
Partly, I don’t like shopping as a tourist because I’m worried about buying something that I think is special, and then seeing it at every shop, in every city, for the rest of the trip. But mostly, I hate haggling. In India, you’re supposed to haggle over everything above the price of a bag of chips or a cup of chai.
Dervla, who lived in Africa, was not only an experienced haggler, but genuinely enjoyed it. She would decide what it she was willing to spend on something (say, a blanket for her Mom), and her and the shopkeeper would enter their little dance.
“How much?”
“Three thousand rupees.”
“Ha,” she’d laugh. “That’s too much.”
“Okay, 2700.”
“All I have is 2000.”
“For you, 2500.”
“I guess we’ll have to go,” she’d say, bluffing. “It’s too bad.”
“Okay, okay, okay! Twenty three hundred.”
“Twenty two.”
Sigh. “Alright.”
She was quite good at it, although occasionally she wouldn’t get the price she wanted and she’d walk away. I hated haggling. It felt wrong to ask for lower prices, to immediately assume that the first price was a rip-off. Haggling also takes a lot of time, and I just couldn’t force myself to care about saving a few dollars.
“It’s part of the culture here,” Dervla explained one evening at an outdoor restaurant. “If you don’t haggle, they won’t respect you.”
“Why do I need the shopkeepers to respect me?” I asked. “I miss Canada, where the price on the sticker is the price.”
“Haggling actually gives you a bit more freedom while shopping,” she continued. “In Toronto, if a store says a pair of jeans costs 100 dollars, that’s how much you’ll be charged. End of story. But here, you can go to all the vendors, see how much they each charge, use that knowledge, and get a good bargain. It’s much more interactive, and can be a lot more fair.”
“Sometimes, you just want the pair of jeans,” I said. This was the closest we came to fighting on the whole trip. After we went home, Dervla told me that a rat was running back and forth behind me at the restaurant during the entire conversation. She hadn’t told me at the time because she knew I was afraid of them.
I didn’t end up buying a lot of souvenirs, but there was one thing I really wanted–a big, sand-coloured scarf like the ones I saw on the men in Delhi. I didn’t see them at the tourist shops we inevitably ended up in. I grew concerned that we would leave Northern India, where the style was prevalent, and I would miss my chance. But, in a quiet little shop in Jodhpur we just happened to wander into, I discovered a wall full of them. Grey, beige, and taupe had never looked so beautiful. I went to India for the colours, and I ended up falling for neutrals!
The best part was when I asked the guy how much they cost, and the answer was so cheap that it would be ludicrous to haggle. The scarf was my favourite purchase of the entire trip and continues to be my most cherished accessory. My one regret–why didn’t I buy five?
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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