A nada incident and other boyfriends

Illustration/Uday Mohite

On Thursday, after a long time, I had a nada incident. You know the one I mean, na?

I had been working madly for weeks, towards an event (a conference on pleasure) and finally it was the morning of the opening, I was rushing to put on my saree when it happened.

A nada incident. Yaniki, I realised that the nada of my petticoat had slid far back into its casing, aka nefa, beyond the reach of my fingers.

Well, what did I expect? Mercury is retrograde, after all.

Once upon a time, a house had relevant nada equipment. The official item was some kind of stick, pointed on one end for going into nefa with a hole at the other for knotting the nada it ferried round the pyjama world until it came out on the other side, ready to meet its own tail. The domestically challenged used a very thin ballpoint pen with a clip, or thin toothbrush with a hole at the end. Neither item is anymore in common use, so I was stuck.

In the heyday of the nada there were two types of people: those who always had a nada bundle, like a plump figure-of-eight seth. The other type had a complex nada rotation system, borrowing from one pyjama for another salwar. I don't wish to reveal my category. If the bundle fell into latter hands, they would make rookie mistakes like cutting the nada before putting it in, because of which it was either too short or too long. Some of these people were not above knotting a short piece of nada onto another piece and then chalaoing it. These people had incidents. Clearly this symbolises something (yaniki you can't get it together), disdain for which dripped from Nilu Phule when he would look at Anil Kapoor's constantly dangling threads in Woh Saath Din and say "naa-da".

Such people had nada incidents of two kinds: a too short nada would decide to retreat like a cat into a cupboard while you were in an alien loo.

A too long nada, double knotted would tense into a sulking child and not yield to coaxing, also in an alien loo, resulting in a thriller starring your bladder. I once helped a woman, near tears, to undo such a knot (with a ballpoint pen. I had experience) in the Churchgate station loo, and got the idea of making a film about women and public toilets, so a nada incident had had its uses, but not scalable ones.

Perhaps these dramas caused people to replace nadas with elastic. Maybe they were outlawed by the same Eww Desi Samiti that calls Hawai chappals flip flops. I don't know, yaar. Elastic is like one of those boyfriends with intimacy issues. Tight, tighter, tightest till you can't breathe, making you hold your breath more than you should to look good to him.

Then, once you feel you've reached a comfort level, suddenly gives way as if you had no rishta-nada #sorrynotsorry.

Nadas, on the other hand, change along with you - you can tighten or loosen them depending on how much you ate. They accommodate changes in weight - you may be fatter, but you're still you and they love you. If you do right by them, they do right by you. Hence, for an atoot bandhan, date someone who holds you like nada.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com