Tandarin

It was 1981, a Friday evening, and I was a content young man looking forward to a week of contentment away from YKC (Yokohama Kenshu Center) in Yokohama, Japan. Monday class was ten days away and the easier institute assignments looked humanly possible to be completed in few hours.

Reclining lazily on the soft cushions of this peaceable picture, I set my mind to weightier matters, and for this post it is the pleasurable task of detailing my much-applauded 'White Trouser Theory'.

Or to be more specific. White trousers wearing women.

I first started on this theory on the airport express from Hong Kong airport to Central. An hour long journey in an air conditioned train (I use the term loosely. To my untrained heart, it ran faster than the plane I had landed in).

That was when I spotted this British woman. Tall, full, and wearing gleaming white trousers. Her long flowing gait, sunglasses perched fashionably on her lovely auburn hair, she looked gorgeous.

But something bothered me...... I couldn't put my finger on it.

My next vision of a white trousered woman was in Bombay. Funnily enough, a similar looking woman, stepping of a sleek silver Merc with, almost inevitably, shopping bags in her hand.

And then, on that trip in Bombay, I kept running into this succession of white trousers and women in them. Something kept nagging at me right through and over paani-puri and veg frankies on Linking road with my friend 'Venu', it hit me.

There was a common thread (no pun intended) running through all these women.

And it had to do with white trousers. And unattainability.

What kind of woman wears white trousers? Remember women and their finickiness about appearances?

So what kind of woman puts herself up voluntarily to that acid test?

If it hasn't struck you yet, and i don't blame you. It took me long enough - it really is the kind of woman who is supremely confident about what her day is going to dish out to her.

The kind of woman who has a handle on almost every factor in her life.

More specifically, it is the kind of woman who knows that her home isn't that kind that springs nasty surprises in the form of an un-vacuumed portion of the sofa.

The kind of woman who knows her bags aren't made of the cheap leather that could streak your trouser leg as your bag swishes against it as she walks. The kind of woman, who organizes her belongings in such a way that not a single thing need go into her trouser pocket.

Picture, if you will, a white trousered woman's day.

She steps out of a dustless home, into a gleaming elevator that swooshes down to the floor like a molecule beam. She spends all of seven seconds in the sun as she walks to a vacuumed, de-odorized car, whose chauffeur has the air-conditioning humming at twenty-two degrees while the tarmac melts on the road he is about to drive her on. Her palms are dry and cool and she smells exactly the way she intended to.

I realized then that this was exactly the kind of woman who a bloke didn't want in his life. The kind of woman, who a man instinctively shies away from making passes at. And I relaxed, as I looked at another white-trousered tower of feminine intimidation, for a brief moment gleaming whitely in the morning sun, as she glided back into the cool, dark interiors of her car.

Solving life's little puzzles gives an an almost obscenely disproportionate sense of satisfaction.