I'm not partial to the glossy rag trade but permit myself an occasional discretionary peek to uncover the goings-on in the glamour world, which is how I know that every new starlet begins her journey to Bollywood with an allegiance to sole matters. "I love shoes," she'll coo - where mere mortals talk, Mumbai's aspiring actresses trill - "I can't stop buying them." Senior actresses are happy to pose with the real McCoy - flinging open cupboards to reveal their affair with a certain Jimmy Choo from downtown Bhendi Bazaar. At the top of the rung, the sponsors are happy to kit out the stars in their favourite red soles, so there's no need to actually buy them. And yet, there's an Imelda Marcos in every woman, and she doesn't have to be famous to covet a room full of pumps.
Home tours - we're still "new" in the house we inhabit - end with its piece de resistance, a walk-in shoe closet specially designed for my daughter. Much heartburn was caused when planning a residence for her footwear, even though it currently resembles their graveyard. Designers were consulted; the carpenter tut-tutted about the foibles of the rich as he set to measuring feet and shoes; shelving height was calculated less for storage than to allow them room to "breathe"; still, it hardly lives up to its billing. True, it's stacked - even crammed - with every kind of shoe a fetishist could dream up, but is this really a worthy Taj Mahal for the house?
The reason, it seems, lies with my wife, who likes nothing better than to purloin our daughter's shoes for her kitty blitzes. My daughter would never have discovered the betrayal were it not for the Facebook posts that let the cat out of the bag. "How could you?" she cried when she saw pictures of her mother in footwear that wasn't strictly hers to sport. "But you never air them," explained my wife. "That's because you're making them loose," accused my daughter, though in truth they wear the same size. "At least I'm putting them to use," justified my wife, simultaneously pointing out her daughter's lack of courtesy when "borrowing" her mother's shoes without bothering about the niceties of permission.
Having accused each other of perfidy, my wife began locking away her boxes of shoes, but because she keeps misplacing her keys - the neighbourhood keymaker offers us a special discount - this was hardly practical. So she looked for hiding places in the loft, my study table and, disingenuously, our daughter's shoe cupboard. My daughter consigned an entire trunkload of her footwear to her car, only to discover that the sun managed to wreak even more damage on her shoes than her mother's feet. The other day I opened the bar to find a pile of stilettoes where the single malts used to be. Getting ready for dinner, my wife's man Friday was summoned to open the box bed to scramble for a pair of shoes to match her bag. My daughter's heels appeared anywhere from the top of the fridge to the shelf where the cook keeps the party dishes. But the icing was when I opened the locker to look for my files, to find that they, along with the cheque books and cash I'd kept to pay a deposit, had been put aside for safekeeping in a shoebox in - where else? - my daughter's shoe closet, while the safe was now the new safe-house for my wife's most expensive shoes.
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