For a dinner my wife is hosting for her friends this weekend, she has delegated tasks to all of us — I am to be in charge of the bar (“and I don’t want to catch you tippling,” she’s warned me, which is unfair, considering some of those invited are my friends as well), our daughter is to supervise the platters (“any chipping and it’ll be deducted from your pocket money”), and our son is to be Man Friday whose main task is to be bursar of the bags. This means that he’s been asked to empty one of the bedrooms for the express purpose of stacking up – no, not umbrellas, even given the promise of rain; nor scarves and jackets, it’s still too warm for those of our fashionistas who periodically get the seasons wrong – but the ladies’ bags.
You have only to look around to see that women these days no longer carry modest-sized “matching” bags but huge totes that are good for packing anything you might need for a couple of days away from home. Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar came to India lugging her Hermes Birkin that would have made a serious dent in her ministry’s budget had the minister not laid out the Rs 17 lakh it cost as part of her personal spend that included Jimmy Choo shoes and Cavalli sunglasses.
It’s fine for Khar to flaunt her Birkins in public – she probably has a mansion in which to store them, and enough people to heave them around when she isn’t posing prettily with them – but what if you happen to live in an apartment where the size of your spouse’s bags is threatening to squeeze you out of the bedroom and into the living room? Bags that no longer fit into wardrobes but can’t be suspended from pegs that would cause their handles to scuff, so they’re wrapped in fine muslin and laid out on all available surfaces across armoires and tables, and are the cause of your eviction because you dared to suggest that beds were intended for humans, not some silly hold-alls?
Take a flight and chances are that the woman in the seat next to yours will have one larger than your laptop case that she’ll insist on keeping with her, and should you accidentally touch it (or worse, drop your inflight curry on it) she’ll threaten you with molestation. In restaurants and movie theatres, the bags block your view; in cars they occupy a whole seat; at hotels, they have to be checked in with the baggage, they’re so huge. But it’s a funny thing really — till recently, women’s bags were used for an assortment of stuff they could never find anyway. But the Birkins and their clones, so huge you could actually organise a wardrobe in them, are now used for nothing more than a clutch of credit cards, a mobile phone, and perhaps shades. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s because carrying a huge bag in the crook of their arm can be exhausting, and should they load it with the junk they keep in their everyday purses, it’s likely they’d end up with one arm looking like a wrestler’s while the other appears shrivelled by comparison.
“You’ve to make sure one bag doesn’t touch another,” my wife has advised our son on preparations for how the guests’ bags are to be stored — apparently, big bags shun intimacy, probably because the Ferragamos and Louis Vuittons can’t abide their Korean rip-offs. So if my wife’s guests are crowded on the balcony outside, instead of in the apartment inside, blame it on your bags, ladies.