PROFILE: Slight Alterations

Ashley Duraiswamy 12:00 am, Oct 15, 2023

Thisbe Wu

Heena’s fingers are greased with the guts of sewing machines. The space between machine and table is a no man’s land, full of dust, red thread, and splashes of oil. Flicking the shuttle cover aside, Heena plunges her hands into the breach. It smells of crushed sesame. She clicks her tongue.

“Sister.” She pulls out the empty bobbin. Pops it into my hand. “No thread. No good. Two threads are compulsory.”

✂

“Compulsory,” I soon discover, is Heena’s favorite word. Four months ago, she felt compelled to march into Amritsar airport, board a plane to Heathrow, and install herself at Gill Tailor Shop, Unit 23, Palace Shopping Center, 14 South Road, Southall, London. Heena doesn’t understand what’s so “South” about Southall. As far she’s concerned, anything North of North India is in the wrong direction. Like most of Little India’s inhabitants, Heena grew up in Punjab. As a child, she’d shown little interest in the UK and spent her afternoons admiring salwar suits in shop windows. After high school, she took a rickshaw to the neighboring village and secured a B.A. in fashion design. This was theoretical stuff, Heena explains. Not practical. Instead of training her hands, she spent three years training her eyes.

One afternoon, she passes my sewing machine and, with a squeak of dismay, informs me that I am using radically different colors. I glance down at the two “compulsory” threads in the machine. Both yellow. Now that she’s mentioned it, I can see how they might differ. One thread is a milky saffron, the other a crushed marigold. When I ask Heena what she’d call these colors, she shakes her head.

“Different, sister,” she says. “Just different.”

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Heena kicks off chartreuse Crocs. These were the first articles of dress she purchased in London—round, rubbery things that won’t dent a sewing machine if they soar in the wrong direction. I look up. The walls are lined with spools the size of coffee cups. Heena hops onto a stool and stoops, her eyes a needle’s length from the threads. Today, she’s dressed in North Face track pants and a blue Scooby Doo t-shirt. With muscled arms, she coils her hair into a low bun and wraps a blue measuring tape around her neck. Aside from color-coordinating her tape measures with her t-shirts, Heena doesn’t care what she wears. She can admire clothes more effectively when they’re not on her body.

Plucking a spool of mint-green thread off the shelf, Heena returns to her ghangra choli. She holds the dress out, away from her torso. Traces the almond-shaped mirrors around the sleeves, the gold zardosi embroidery around the neck. From my post at Sewing Machine #3, I recall the ill-fated sewing lessons of my youth. I ask Heena if I’ll ever be able to sew something as beautiful as those mirrored sleeves. She considers my question.

“Sister,” she says, “you are very intelligent. I think. I am thinking you can learn in four weeks.”

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The Punjabi word for sister is bhenji. Hindi—deedee. If you wander around Palace Shopping Centre, you’ll hear both bellowed with reckless abandon. Heena, on the other hand, is determined to do things the proper way—the English way—and confines herself to “sister.” She censures in a British accent, praises in an American one. With gentle pity, she calls my zig-zag saffron stitches “complete rubbish,” then graces my accidental backstitch with an “Oh my god! How cool!”

Heena’s secret ambition is to get “the Accent.” This Accent is the difference between saffron and marigold threads. At the moment, Heena confesses, she can’t pick out the difference between American and British English. But she’s learning. With loving regularity, Heena tailors her voice.

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The Indian tailor cannot adapt. So claimed the Brits who flooded Indian ports in the eighteenth century. These were lackeys of the East India Company, ill-suited to their new environment. When they disembarked at Madras, humidity seeped into their frilled habits à la française like spilled soup. So the British employed Indian tailors. The tailor, or darzi, equipped his sunburned patron with climate-appropriate clothing. Cool sateen replaced cambric jabots; wool underwear gave way to cotton briefs; and black worsted wool—the doom of sextons and vulturous widows—melted into white silk twill. Thus far, the darzi served his purpose. But he knew nothing of style. To keep pace with colonial fashions, British nabobs imported British tailors. The English tailor was well-versed in the latest technologies: the handheld sewing machine in the mid-1800s, the electric sewing machine post 1889. After all, nabobs said, shaking bewigged heads—what Indian could tame a sewing machine?

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When Heena swept into Gill Tailor Shop four months ago, she’d never touched a sewing machine. In four minutes, she persuaded Mr. Gill to teach her. Now, the fifty-something year-old Punjabi owner jabbers about Heena to anyone who drifts in for a fitting. The best student this shop’s ever seen, he tells a Welsh customer as he pins her wedding lehenga. Heena was so good he just had to pay her.

In India, most seamstresses learn from men. A Punjabi mother might teach her daughter to darn kameez trousers, but professional tailoring revolves around Western fast fashion. It’s no secret that companies like Zara, Mango, and Primark have moved their factories East. From 2007 to 2019, the New York Times churned out gut-wrenching headlines like “Who Made Your Clothes?” Most of these articles declaimed the horrors of Bangladeshi sweatshops. But there’s another kind of Indian seamstress. When male tailors realized they were making as little as 15 cents an hour, they brought work home; they enlisted female relatives, female neighbors; they raised an army of seamstresses, trained to perform simple tasks like looping lace around bell sleeves and stitching Corozo buttons onto blazers. The men earned a meager living. The women earned nothing. Mr. Gill, says Heena, is “a very nice man.” She expected him to teach her. She didn’t expect to be paid.

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William Crooke—esteemed British orientalist, chronicler of Anglo-Indian folklore—loved Hindi proverbs. He jotted them down on fly-away scraps of paper and shipped them back to England. One of his favorites went like this: Darji ka put jab tak jita ta tak sita. The tailor’s brat will do nothing but sew all life long.

Heena’s mother never taught her to sew. She urged her daughter to design. Fashion design was—and has always been—respectable. According to the Devanga weavers of Mysore, men came into the world naked, peeling, dragging cracked skin across the earth. Brahma created Manu to fashion men’s clothes. Manu was a designer. He pulled threads out of lotus stems—bright stalks sprouting from Vishnu’s navel—and dyed his cloth with the blood of demons.

The designer creates; the tailor destroys. A tailor, said the Moghuls, picks colors apart. A tailor is not Manu. A tailor’s brat will do nothing but sew all life long. So Heena learned to design. Not to sew.

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In the spring of 2013, my mom signed us up for joint sewing lessons. She bought matching sewing desks (honey maple for me, dark walnut for her); booted my dad’s yoga mat to his study; and arranged our sewing stations, side by side, in the master bedroom. When Mom moved to Silicon Valley, my grandma assumed she’d dump the mending on a maid and make a bid for Apple CEO. That was twenty-three years ago, and my mother was now a homemaker.

In these situations, Mom says, one has to adapt. After a reconnaissance mission to the March PTA meeting, she concluded that American mothers taught their daughters to sew. That weekend, she drove us to Quilting Bee, Sunnyvale, a place as cloying as its name, full of sunshine-yellow wallpaper and strawberry-shaped pincushions. I rebelled after three classes. Mom altered her plans. I’d spend my Bee-free Saturdays brushing up on biology. One day, when I was a cardiothoracic surgeon at Mass Gen, I’d pay someone to mend my jeans.

As for my mother, she continued to slip away, Saturday after Saturday, bringing home a frock that pinched my armpits and a stuffed cat too stiff to hug. When I asked why the cat wasn’t soft, she shrugged. She’d used lots of stuffing because all the mothers had. One has to adapt.

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Heena unwinds her bun. It’s that sleepy hour between 1:30 and 2:30—no customers, Mr. Gill off on his afternoon croissant hunt. For ten minutes, the only sound is the chuff of the fan. Heena’s hair spools out like a scarf. To fill the silence, she tells me about her family. Snaps her strawberry hairclip open, shut, open, shut, because she’s crying now and needs something to do with her hands. She’s tired, she says. Tired in the head. And lonely.

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Chintz, paisley, silk brocade, Madras plaid, and Ikat flame-weaving have all braved the crossing from India to England. Heena immigrated for her dad. Three rejected visa applications later, he still dreams of living in Southall. When I ask why, Heena eyes me blankly. It’s his dream. He doesn’t need a reason.

A mother and daughter burst into the shop. Hurriedly, Heena swipes a hand over her eyes, whips the blue tape from her neck, and descends on the daughter, measuring from waist to hips, hips to knees, knees to ankles, as the mother—brass-haired, bass-voiced—orders her to take in the bust and, for god’s sake, not to mess with the cut. A tailor never alters the design.

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I ask Heena if she tailors anything British. She gives her head a furious shake. No British clothes. Only Indian. Ten minutes later, she tugs a pair of black Puma joggers out of her drawer and sets to unpicking the waistband. Punjabis buy these joggers. Punjabis wear them. It’s a matter of altered definitions. If Heena only hemmed salwars, she’d be out of work.

As she feeds a taffeta gown into her sewing machine, I ask about the fabric. Is it difficult to shape? Heena tosses her head. “No, sister. Easy.”

I wonder if all this is a bit too easy. No lotus threads pulled from navels. Grab the seam ripper. Unpick the hem. Smooth the seam edge. Tuck one inch. Iron. Tuck another inch. Repeat. Don’t alter the design.

Twice a week, Heena leaves Mr. Gill nodding over his 11am cup of chai and catches the train to Brunel University, where she’s getting an MSt in Business and Management. Mr. Gill is very nice, she repeats. Then she glances up, makes sure he’s on his croissant break, and leans forward until her measuring tape brushes my wrist. She wants to be a tailor. Her own shop, her own customers. And she’d do some tailoring. But mostly—here, she breaks off and eyes the left wall. Heena’s favorite part of the shop. Choli blouses flutter from the racks, golds and pinks and Persian blues, bright as demon’s blood. She made these. Of course, nobody buys them. Most customers stroll down Indian Broadway, to Monga’s and Prathana’s and Preeti Fashion. Yet every morning, Heena kicks off her Crocs, hops onto her stool, and rearranges her cholis. Because—mostly—she wants to be a designer.

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On my last day, I smuggle black jeans into the shop. They’re my favorite pair—threadbare and ragged, ripped in all the wrong places. This, I’ve decided, is my final project. Mending my jeans. My mother will be proud, and I’ll appease the poor ghost of Quilting Bee.

When I yank the crumpled jeans out of my backpack, Heena squawks and sweeps them out of my hands. She folds them, running her fingers over the tears, crooning like a vet with a bruised black cat. Feeling mildly guilty, I slink back to my sewing desk. We work in lines here—Mr. Gill at the front of the shop, Heena behind him, and me at the back, where no customers will glimpse my crooked stitches. Heena decides I need more practice before tackling jeans, so she tosses me two slivers of saffron silk. I’ve never held fabric so soft, much less mutilated it with my sewing machine. Heena flips the scraps belly-up. She instructs me to sew them together.

“Down this length, sister,” she says, tracing a line with her finger. “Nice straight length.”

This sounds simple. It isn’t. Three lessons in, I still struggle to coax thread out of the sewing machine’s innards. Back at Quilting Bee, a lady in a cupcake apron flounced into our first lesson with a diagrammed sewing machine, labeled with mysterious phrases like “bobbin winder stop” and “feed dogs.” The only useful things about this diagram were the numbers. They went from one to six and showed you where to loop the thread. Heena’s explanation is a bit different: “One, there, here, there, five, five, done!”

As incompetent as I’ve always been at math, even I’m put off by the superabundance of fives. But this is my third lesson, so I set to work, counting beneath my breath: “One, there, here, there, five, five, done!”

After speeding the presser foot over two sides of fabric, I notice a problem. I haven’t made any stitches. So I tap the needle. Count my compulsory threads. Shove my hand into the no man’s land of bobbins and smudge my fingers with sesame grease. Heena lets me struggle. She believes I’m learning something.

Ten minutes and several “five, five’s” later, I’ve sewed a line. It’s not a straight line, but it holds the pieces together, so I figure I’ve succeeded. I present my work to Heena.

“Sister,” she says kindly, “this is rubbish. Unpick, please.”

She hands me a seam ripper. I set to work. After another twenty minutes, I’ve managed to sew a line that is not straight—but isn’t rubbish either. Heena whisks past on her way to fluff the cholis. She stops.

“You’re making a sleeve?” she asks.

I stare back, uncomprehending. The thing in my hands is two finger’s thick—an unfit sleeve for anyone besides Jiminy Cricket—but Heena wraps it around my arm and shows me how the silk would frill a salwar cuff. She smooths an affectionate hand over my project. These are no longer two scraps of fabric. They’re the inklings of a design.

The next forty minutes are more stressful than my pre-med exams. Heena, who is now invested, hovers by my shoulder as I primp the edges, grab a hook that resembles an Egyptian brain-extraction rod, and flip the fabric inside-out. At long last, I have something resembling a ribbon. It’s unimpressive—the kind of thing a Punjabi milkmaid might wear in her braids—but with reverent hands, we slide it away from the presser foot and onto the ironing table. Steam beads in our hair. The silk feels warm in our hands. Ripped jeans forgotten, we clutch opposite ends of the ribbon, smile, and realize we’ve made something. Like Manu.