1. I Hate Suits

  
This opening scene will be accompanied by a montage of still images of me in suits. I have at least 15 images that will work, and I imagine we can cut between these images and a recording of my live presentation, which will be a spontaneous, 'off the cuff' version of the text below.

I HATE suits. I don’t mean executives and administrators. I actually hate suits, I think I got my first suit at the age of seven. I remember my father taking me to a tailor somewhere in East London who poked, prodded and measured me up for a hideous costume that made me look like a subcontinental version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. My father, on the other hand, had a thing about suits, and fabrics defined our relationship and drove a wedge between us that remained in place until the day he died. My father was an Anglo-Indian, and Anglo-Indians of his generation loved suits. So, in order to understand my almost pathological hatred of suits you need to know something about Anglo-Indians.





Anglo-Indians are the smallest, and possibly oddest, minority group in India. They are the literal progeny of European colonization, and often stereotyped as being ‘more British than the British’ because they practice Christianity, speak English as their first language and generally adopt British social customs. Today, Anglo-Indians are mostly a diasporic community living in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia. When the British left India in 1947 many Anglo-Indians left with them believing they had no future in the new republic. My father left India in 1963, first for the UK, and then some years later for Australia.
It’s not easy being an Anglo-Indian in Australia, particularly if you look like an Indian and behave like an Australian. People are generally curious about the disparity between your appearance and your culture, and often ask questions like: Where are you really from? Where did you learn to speak such good English? Why can’t you speak ‘Indian’?
My father was a man of principles, and he derived his sense of values from a somewhat odd and diverse collection of aphorisms and maxims. One of his favourites was ‘clothes maketh the man.’ Accordingly, my relationship with him was defined, in many ways, by our radically divergent views on sartorial elegance. Our differences of opinion on this matter resulted in countless arguments, characterized by histrionic displays of anger and disgust, particularly during my adolescence and early adult years. I never understood my father’s obsession with clothes, and his insistence that I should always look ‘smart’, until after his death. At fourteen, visits to the menswear sections of department stores filled me with dread. The hairdresser’s technologies of choice–the scissors and the electric clippers–also held special terrors for my adolescent self. I wanted to be a longhaired hippie, and get around in ‘Californian’ jeans (a monstrous grey mutation of blue jeans) and desert boots with tractor treads–two essential components of social acceptability at John Forrest Senior High School circa 1977. With the assistance of his ‘barber’ and ‘tailor, my father thwarted this ambition until I flew the family coop.

A few days after my father died in 1985, he appeared to me in a dream. I’ve completely forgotten the narrative details of the dream, but the image of my father remains vivid in my memory. Two things about this image have particular significance for me. The first is the expression on his face. His eyes are bloodshot, and tears are running down his cheeks. He looks as though he desperately wants to communicate something, but can’t summon the words to express himself. He is mute, probably rendered speechless by grief. His look is one of sorrow and deep remorse. On reflection, he is obviously trying to say goodbye. More pointedly, though, I think his demeanor expresses his regret about our relationship. Of course, since I am describing an image in my dream the regret is mine, the tears and grief, too (tears and grief that I couldn’t express in real life).

The second striking feature of this apparition is my father’s clothes. He’s dressed in his favourite dark blue blazer with a crest on its right breast pocket. He is also wearing a crisply ironed white shirt complemented by a wide red and white checked tie. His trousers are pressed and his black shoes are brightly polished. He looks exactly like he did on the day he moved with us to Australia from the UK. He must have found it difficult to say goodbye to his extended family then, but he was also manifestly excited by the prospect of moving to a new country and starting a new life, and his dress conveyed this optimism. His choice of dress for this occasion was thoughtful and considered. I’m sure he wanted to leave his family with an image that conveyed his personality and sense of values. His conservative blazer went a long way towards consolidating such an image. Of course, a lot of people are interested in clothes and fashion, but my father’s choice of clothes and the image that his dress sense conveyed had little to do with any desire to appear particularly fashionable. It stemmed from a desire to be accepted as a European.

As I grew older my own sense of fashion became more extreme and deliberately oppositional. Like most cultural trends, punk arrived late in my home town of that time, Perth. Indeed, it was 1984 before I fully embraced the phenomenon. Seduced by its anti-establishment politics and its DIY aesthetic, I gave myself a stylistic makeover in a desperate bid to appear radical and politically sophisticated. I cut my long hair and put a safety pin through my left ear lobe. The punk or post-punk uniform relied heavily on recycled clothes from op-shops, and suits from the 1960s were highly coveted items. My father had an impressive collection of suits from this era in his wardrobe. So, after years of heaping scorn on his formal attire, I found myself regularly borrowing my father’s suit jackets.

A few months before he died, I lost one of his jackets — the one he wore to his mother’s funeral. Of all the items of clothing in his wardrobe, I’d lost the one item that held emotional significance for him. My negligence enraged him, and this act of neglect further soured our relationship, already strained by my increasing enthusiasm for punk and my lack of interest in getting a job. As my previous posts demonstrate, my father hoped I’d become a clerk, a position that signified a high social status among his generation of Anglo-Indians. He even made me sit the public service entrance exam, against my wishes, when I was fifteen. A few years later he got me a job as a sheet metal worker’s assistant because he feared that remaining idle for three months between the end of school and the beginning of university would be bad for my ‘character’. I acquiesced in his wishes mainly because of the prospect of actually earning money for the first time in my life. However, by my early twenties I didn’t really want to do much, and clerical work was not on my agenda.
In my father’s eyes, I was what he called a ‘waster’, someone with no ambition and no prospects. Everything about me upset him. I’d even managed to incorporate a treasured item of his clothing into my ensemble of revolt. He was obviously disappointed with the course of my life, and he died before I could convince him that I wasn’t completely worthless.
I’m still haunted by the image of my father in his dark blue blazer, waving goodbye from the great beyond, embarking on yet another journey. For the record, though, I still hate suits.