Romancing the bag

When I was a kid, women around me carried a fascinating accessory with them called ‘purse’. Today, it has been categorised into a wide range of names from tote to satchel but this differentiation didn’t exist in middle-class households. But another differentiation did exist, and still continues across social-strata — I call it the purse-polarity, men should supposedly stay poles apart from women’s bags. Not out of chivalry, of course, but out of gender stereotyping.

I always wondered why men stuck to boring black office bags when they could’ve easily picked up a purse. They came in cool designs, shapes, colours and could be suspended on the shoulder. They could also carry the world in it — be it cosmetics, or gods, the purse had a place for everything.

As expected, my love affair with women’s bags wasn’t much appreciated by my family. On one occasion, when I asked my Aai for a purse, she explained to me that purses are meant for girls. I couldn’t understand why it had to be so at that point of time, and I still don’t. But true love never dies.

As I grew up, I offered to carry my Aai’s purse, then my sister’s, then my female friends’ in school, college and at work. And now, my wife. Some of them willingly passed it on to me, while others cringed at the thought of a man carrying a women’s bag. They seemed as disturbed as men around me who never lost an opportunity to mock me when I carried a woman’s bag on my shoulder — be it my masculine friends, my manly cousins or my extremely macho Baba. Even a friend from college whom I respected for carrying his girlfriend’s sanitary pads in his bag asked me to be a closet feminist and not carry the purse openly. I tried to explain that it wasn’t feminism but my pure liking for the accessory. For others, I was either turning effeminate or was using it as a trick to get into women’s pants. While neither of it remained true, my love for women’s bags went beyond such worries and kept growing.

Once, an uncle of mine spotted me carrying the bag for my then girlfriend and now wife, who was visiting the wash room. He thought it was a matter of immediate concern and called my Baba instantly to report the degradation of my manhood. My Baba in turn called me and gave me an earful over dating a woman who makes me carry her bag. This continued even after our marriage. A month or two after our wedding, my Jiju saw me holding my wife’s bag and commented, “Isn’t it too early to be biwi ka naukar?” I guess my wife heard it, and refrained from letting me carry her bag all of a sudden till I had to convince her — a staunch feminist, to not give in to such conditioning. Now I can carry anything from her sling to her hobo without fear.

(Salil Mirashi is a 33-year-old writer-artist-junkie from Mumbai)

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