A blog post I read a while back,  got me thinking about my own teenage years.
I was overweight and not good-looking. I was also rather hirsute! In those days, at least here in India, not that many youngsters got their eyebrows done or facial hair removed, more so because, as I remember, bodily hair was only either shaved off or tweezed off.
I studied in a girls' school--a convent and none of my classmates would come out and say that I was fat or ugly or anything. But then I had a younger brother who had no such scruples and hummed 'Baby Elephant's Walk' whenever he wanted to annoy me.
Those were the days of shift dresses and tight skirts (so tight that you were forced to take mincing steps) and my mother flatly refused to let me get anything stitched like that because she thought I was too fat for those kinds of fashions (I was kind of bosomy and my mother felt that Western style clothes just attracted unwanted, negative attention ). I remember that, after much pleading from me and from one of my best friends, she finally allowed me to get one shift dress made, which I personally thought made me look slimmer, but which my mother wasn't too happy about. From the time I was 12, for most formal occasions my mother got me to wear saris. For school of course we had uniforms.
But when I got into the 9th standard and the class got split into sections, depending on the classes/subjects we elected to do, I found I was much more comfortable with my classmates. We were all science students and therefore considered more career-oriented and so being upto-the-minute fashionable was not given that much importance.
Even so, there were social occasions we occasionally attended, more so because of the work my father did, where there might be girls about my age, from the upper crust of Calcutta society and how I hated going because I felt fat, ugly and so unsophisticated, next to these smart svelte young women. In that sense wearing a sari was good because although I might be considered old-fashioned, at least there wouldn't be any unfavourable comparisons, as there might have been if I was dressed fashionably! That was when I began telling myself--'Packaging may count, but that's not everything; what counts is what's within the package and you have brains and you can build substance. There will be people you will come across who will appreciate the substance as long as the package is cleanly and neatly wrapped'. [:-)]
There was a kind of safety in the fact that well-behaved girls from good families did not have boyfriends as in going steady. So that kind of competition was never there. In that sense I think that the not needing to have a sweetheart at that age, took away a great part of the pressure--for both boys and girls--of having to be good-looking or attractive in an accepted mould.

Pajama party

I saw a school version of the musical 'Grease' recently. Incidentally that was my very first introduction to the musical. I had heard about it naturally, but never got a chance to see or hear it before this.
Watching the pyjama party scene that the girls have in the play (complete with baby doll pyjamas, though very modestly made, in deference to parents and family watching!), brought back the memory of the one pyjama party I had--a proper one.
This party took place probably in '64 or '65, when I was around 13 or 14 (a very vulnerable age). I had spent the night at various aunts' and uncles' place before but never with a bunch of girls almost my own age, till then. There was this couple from the US, who were working with my father for a short time, while we were in Calcutta. They had a daughter who was around my age. So that is how I got invited to an American style pyjama party.
Well anyway, there were quite a few girls there, all of whom were children of other US expats (as I remember) and I was the only Indian kid there. The early part of the evening was interesting because they had an American style barbecue, with steaks, et al and a cake dessert I think, all of which was unfamiliar to me, but which I enjoyed thoroughly. Besides the parents of my young hostess were there and they did what they could to help me fit in. It was only later at night, when the pyjama part of the party began that I began to feel the complete outsider.
Here I was, a teenage girl, who didn't shave my legs, nor remove facial hair or wear make-up. Young girls of my age in the India of that time very definitely did not do things like that. Besides I was plump and I had long hair tied in 2 tight pigtails (or else my thick frizzy hair got impossibly tangled) unlike the other girls, all of whom either had their hair worn short or in a high ponytail. Suffice it to say that I was as alien to the girls there, as they seemed to me.
I can see the picture of that room so clearly now and I can see me sitting on a bed in a corner being the observer. I remember hearing them talk derogatorily about other girls who didn't shave their legs, watching as some of them stuffed rolled up toilet paper into the front of their clothes to look busty, while I loathed that I had breasts which attracted attention from sick older men (yes horrible) and watching in fascination as they tried on make-up. I really felt like the ultimate outsider and I so wished that my mother--as was normally her wont--had vetoed the idea.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that I came out in hives--big huge itchy ones--on my face and and limbs and and the worried parents of the girl called my parents and sent me home, wondering whether it was their cat, or some food I had eaten earlier, that I was allergic to.
Much later, after reading much more American fiction (till then I had read mainly British fiction), I realised that those girls had indulged in behaviour very normal for them. Besides, they were too young to appreciate a person from another culture, never having been exposed to that before. I really was such a drag for them I guess and I'm sure my young hostess must have been very relieved when I left.
The whole experience was such a culture shock to me that I had just shoved the memory deep into the back of my mind. So I was really surprised to find the memories flooding back, when I watched the play.

My teen clothes

A blog post by Ageless Bonding on the wearing of the half-sari brought back memories of my teenage years. I was decidedly plump and the fashion at that point was for tight salwar kameezes, where the salwar was loose, almost like today's but the kameez/kurta was cut like the vintage sheath dresses of the early 60s--like this.

I remember one of the girls I knew, come to church in a kurta cut even tighter than this dress (if possible) and her having to waddle up the stairs into church cos it was too tight to allow her to stride! Of course, not that many of my classmates were allowed to wear skirts that were that narrow. But,being a good deal thinner than me, they were able to wear other kinds of Western clothes.

We had a school uniform with a pleated skirt and a blouse, which were both white--in the Cal summer, while in winter we had a darker colour serge skirt and we got to wear cardigans. Now I was quite buxom in comparison to many of my classmates and I hated it--being stared at by sick men who must have thought I was older than my 13 years. I used to be so grateful for the winter uniform, when the cardi kind of hid my boobs. It was around that time that my mother decided that I really was way too busty to be wearing any kind of Western clothes and certainly not the narrowly cut kurtas. And so sari it was that I wore for all formal occasions. I was only allowed to wear Western clothes to the homes of family or to school--an all girls' one.
So, all the clothes that I would have loved to wear, I designed and made for my paper dolls ( I had been lucky to get a sort of Barbie & Ken type pair of paper dolls!) and for my skinny younger sister.
And later, when I left home to join university and I lost around 15 pounds in the first term, I almost completely gave up wearing saris, switching to the then fashion of loose kurtas and churidhars. Bliss!