Friday 17th October 2008

Today is Karva Chauth. For the last few days, the markets have smelled of henna paste as men and women sit in the gutter with little paper cones, painting women’s hands for the festival. The fine, burnt orange patterns of henna snake around fingers and knuckles into the intricate shapes of flowers and birds, turning a fierce brown on the palms of the hands where they are absorbed into the fleshy skin. “Yours doesn’t come off though,” laughed one of the women in the office, pointing to the slightly blueish tattoo of a swan on my hand, which was needled into my skin last year somewhere in the East Village.

This particular coworker wears red and silver bangles all the way up her forearms, stretching from wrist to elbow. It’s a tradition amongst some wives to wear them until the first anniversary of their wedding (in the shower too, I can confirm on further investigation). Karva Chauth is a marriage-related day. It derives from the story of Karva, whose husband (fairly carelessly it must be said) was swallowed by a crocodile whilst having a bath. Karva lassoed the offending reptile with some string, before taking him to Yama, the Lord of Death to ask him to send the crocodile to hell. Seeing the ‘power of a devoted wife,’ he did so, and freed the husband, who presumably found a new bathing spot from then onwards.

So today women fast from dawn til dusk to pray for the long lives of their husbands. Not even a glass of water passes their lips, which is quite a tough call in the Delhi heat. It might be considered a chauvinist practice, but for the fact that in return women get showered with jewellery and clothes, and fed by their husbands after dusk. And what woman in the West hasn’t starved themselves for a man who’ll buy them presents and dinner?

It’s a grumble my friend Neil, who is Indian-American, has with these festivals. “They always end in the girls getting presents,” he says. (Neil has sisters).

But while pious women stay at home avoiding the fridge, the tall, amazonian kind are still strutting down the catwalks at Delhi Fashion week. There to finish a couple of documentaries for the web, we meander in and out of silver trees and chairs draped in satin and other pointless installations, and duck in between besuited and unbesmirched buyers tipsily waving bulbous glasses of chardonnay in the air in circular motions.

Indian catwalk models are among the worst paid in the world. They are often not paid at all, and go through 12-day long fittings without seeing a single rupee. They often fail to get jobs on runways in New York, Milan or Paris, because neither their families nor their sensibilities will stomach the idea of appearing half-naked in public. In some of the catwalk shows today, the girls look nervous and attempt to pull down their skirts as they strut. Vinu is a fierce looking, six foot tall amazonian that had appeared at every show. She has cheekbones like razors and huge, scarleted lips that puckered with every vowel. “I’m here for I, me, myself,” she says, turning her better profile towards our camera. Presumably Vinu is not fasting for her husband today.

Ten minutes later she appears on the runway. Her long, brown, athletic legs make her look as if she could clear the whole thing in two strides. The wall of cameras flash away as she struts her way through the glittery path, wearing little more than a bra underneath her sari. But what a sari! Dripping with sequins and beads, wrapped around her taught, wiry frame, she looks like she was painted by Klimt. India hasn’t yet given into denim and viscose, despite it’s practicality in a country that is so poor and dirty. I finally understand why.

There are few white faces in the crowd, but among them is a heavily pregnant British journalist who is covering the event for Womens Wear Daily. She sits in the corner licking a chocolate ice cream cone. Normally, she writes for The Economist, she says. Later, we bump into a gaggle of blonde Swedish women, one of whom is a buyer for Ikea. They too stare around at the trendy deluge of Delhiites that mill around. It’s still seems a little incongruous standing at an international fashion week, full of people in diamonds and stilettos, in a country that has one of the highest number of citizens living below the poverty line.

It’s easy, in fact, as the Friday night champagne parties begin, to forget you are in India at all. It’s one of many such oubliesques around Delhi, mainly in the bars of five star restaurants (or otherwise in the city’s branch of TGI Fridays). It isn’t until we attempt to make our way back to the offices to edit the tape that, stuck in a gridlock, we remember it’s festival day. Moreover, it’s dinnertime and hundreds of couples all around us, sharing the seats of motorbikes, are off to their celebrations.

So today was women’s day. In kitchens over Delhi, mothers, aunts, wives and daughters sat in kitchens, making conversations and pujas and distracting themselves from the growlings of their stomachs. At Fashion Week, where fasting is an everyday matter for most, young girls bathed in attention. And tonight was a time for them all to let go: some to their dinners and some to their champagne. Both, I imagine, were toasting to longevity.