Eliza had been going out with her rower boyfriend Alex for a couple of months when she was invited to go to Henley Regatta last July. The dress code at the Stewards’ Enclosure is very strict, for those of you unfamiliar with the form. Ladies are not permitted to wear trousers or anything that shows their knees. (Until recently I’d never really associated knees with a sexual connotation, but what do I know?) As Eliza is a teenager and quite small, she had nothing at short notice that fitted in with these contraints and was formal enough to wear to one of the highlights of the English Social Season. As I sat in the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport waiting for my flight to India, she told me that she’d decided to wear one of my saris. Ever resourceful, she looked up a video on Youtube about how to wrap a sari, Marathi-style. It was a cold and windy Henley day for her and she wore leggings and a vest under my hastily-pinned sari blouse. It was important to her, though, to point out the ridiculous exclusiveness of such an narrow dress code.
Fast forward a year and Alex was into his school’s first eight. We watched him compete on Wednesday on a live stream but sadly his team were beaten by another school. The pair had planned to make an appearance later in the week, and this time Eliza was determined to wear her own sari, not because she was constrained by her wardrobe but because she wanted to make a statement about who she is: half English and half Indian. You’ll remember that she asked me to buy her a red and black sari (her own school colours and, as it happens, her favourites) from India earlier in the year and that a very kind nurse from my mum’s care home had made her a sari blouse to replace the one I’d bought which she deemed unsuitable.
After few hiccups caused by sign failures and broken rails, the pair of them made their way to Oxfiordshire by train in full regalia: Eliza in sari and Indian jewellery and Alex in his Henley blazer. When giving in their tickets at Henley station, a woman looked Eliza up and down in disgust. It was at this point that our two lovebirds made a bet about the amount of nasty looks they’d get that day. The parameters were: lingering looks of confusion, disgust or judgement. Alex bet 30 looks and Eliza countered with 40. The one who guessed nearest would buy the other a coffee.
In the end there were 96 lingering looks of disgust, confusion or adverse judgment. When they related this figure to everyone, it seemed unbelievable, but there it is. Eliza reports that these looks were mainly from women and young women at that but no demographic except for children was exempt. Eliza tells me that some of the looks she got were so bad that they would have counted as more than one, but she counted ten strictly according to her parameters.
What she found most disappointing was that her sari seems OK with people per se but it was the fact that a sari-clad young woman was holding hands and obviously very much together with a young, tall white man in traditional Henley attire. It was this point that hurt me most, I think because it reminded me of when my husband was called horrid names for having a brown girlfriend 35 years ago. The point is that people can accept other people who have obviously made an effort but not when this integration becomes tangible and affects the fabric of their existence.
On their return, to be fair, they received many smiles and admiring looks and one woman on the tube told her “You look great by the way.” But I suppose that Londoners are more accustomed to diversity than the “cream of society.”
My Twitter friends were all incredibly supportive and lovely. It’s a different world sometimes, it really is.