My shirt cost three hundred and forty-nine rupees.
I know because Dheeraj announced it to thirty people before I had finished my first glass of water.
He had lifted the collar to look for a label. When he found none, he asked where I bought it. I answered honestly, which was the last simple thing I did that evening.
“Three forty-nine,” he repeated into his phone. “Gentlemen, we have discovered the budget section.”
Somebody laughed so hard he spilled his drink.
I looked at Neha. She was standing near the entrance with two friends, holding the programme I had saved for her.
She laughed too.
I remember wanting, absurdly, to pull my sleeves farther down. As if the price had been written on my wrists.
* * *
I was twenty-seven and worked at a bookbinding unit.
By the end of a shift, paste would have dried along the side of my thumb and paper dust would be inside my shoes. I liked the work more than people expected. There was satisfaction in taking a loose, disorderly thing and making it hold together.
On Sundays, I played Teen Patti with an adult group that entered local events. I was good enough to win occasionally and inconsistent enough to remember the losses. A place in the following season's regular circuit was something I wanted, not something anybody had promised me.
The annual card-club dinner was my first invitation to one of its formal events.
I bought the shirt two days before it.
It was pale blue. The shoulders fitted, the sleeves did not. Parveen, who ran a tiny alteration shop beside the binding unit, shortened them for me. She charged less than I expected because I had once helped carry her new machine upstairs.
“Don't keep thanking me,” she said. “Stand straight.”
She folded a cuff back, pinned it and stepped away.
“There. Now you look like you bought it on purpose.”
I thought about that sentence all the way to the dinner.
* * *
Dheeraj made videos for the club.
He was not the best player in the room, but he was very good at deciding what the room should find amusing. He asked me to turn around, then asked whether the fabric had been cut from a bedsheet.
“Parveen Aunty fixed the sleeves,” I said.
I do not know why I supplied her name. Perhaps I wanted someone else to hear that the shirt had received care.
Dheeraj turned the camera towards the cuff.
“Custom tailoring, apparently. What's the shop?”
I told him. He repeated it with the solemn voice he used when pretending to endorse something terrible.
I asked him to stop.
He lowered the phone for a moment.
“Relax, Keshav. You're getting attention.”
I had imagined attention differently.
Neha came over later and told me not to let a joke ruin the evening. We were not a couple. We had been meeting for tea, sending each other photographs of stray cats and making plans that remained just vague enough for me to hope.
“You should have told me you needed a shirt,” she said.
I looked down at the one I was wearing.
“I had one.”
She touched my arm, as if I had misunderstood a kindness.
* * *
The video appeared the next morning.
The caption said Parveen's shop could turn discarded bedding into evening wear. It included the shop's name.
That was untrue. She had altered a shirt I bought elsewhere.
Dheeraj had made the cost of my clothes into a joke, then made a claim about somebody else's work to give the joke another life.
Neha forwarded it to a group I was in.
She added laughing faces.
I stared at them longer than I watched the clip.
At work, two colleagues had already seen it. One said the cuff actually looked fine. The other asked why I had told Dheeraj the price.
I had no answer that did not sound like a confession of stupidity.
During lunch, I went to Parveen's shop.
A customer was asking whether she really used old sheets. He was smiling, but he had also brought a new length of fabric and kept it folded under his arm instead of handing it over.
Parveen said, “I alter what people bring me.”
Then she saw me.
She did not ask what I had done.
That was almost unbearable.
* * *
I apologised after the customer left.
Parveen sat at her machine and cut the end of a thread.
“Did you make the video?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him to put my shop in it?”
“No.”
“Then ask him to correct it. Don't stand here paying for his manners.”
I messaged Dheeraj. He said the video was clearly comedy.
I pointed out that the claim about her materials was false.
He sent a thumbs-up and changed one word in the caption. The video stayed.
Telegram · WhatsApp Channel · WhatsApp Group
The club administrator told me they would discuss it at the next committee meeting.
Meanwhile, somebody left a mocking comment on a photograph of Parveen's work. Another person asked for the “bedsheet discount.”
She still opened the shop at nine. She still turned the radio down when customers entered. But the next time I went past, the blue shirt hanging in her window had been moved inside.
I noticed its absence before I understood why it hurt.
Once, while I was there, a woman came to collect an unstitched bundle of fabric she had left for alterations. Her sister had seen the video and wanted her to use another shop.
Parveen returned the bundle and the deposit without arguing.
Afterwards, I offered to pay what she had lost.
She gave me a look I remembered from the day she pinned my sleeves.
“Will you pay every time somebody behaves badly?”
“I brought him here. I said your name.”
“You told him who did good work.”
She opened the next customer's bag and unfolded a pair of trousers.
I wanted her to be angry with me because then there might be something simple I could do to make it stop. She refused to provide that convenience.
Before I left, she asked me to move the chair away from the doorway. There was still work arriving.
I stopped taking that lane for a few days.
Then I realised I was abandoning the one person who had not made me ashamed.
* * *
Neha called on the fourth evening.
She said I was taking the forwarding too seriously.
“You know I don't think you're cheap.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“What do you want me to say?”
I was sitting on a stack of packing boards behind the binding machine. The room smelled of glue and warm paper.
“I want you to tell me why it was funny.”
She began with Dheeraj's delivery, then stopped. After a while she said she had forwarded it without thinking.
I believed her.
That did not make it better in the way she expected.
She offered to help choose a shirt for the next event. I said I did not want to go shopping with her.
There was a silence in which our possible future became smaller.
“You're punishing me for one mistake.”
“No,” I said. “I'm deciding who I feel comfortable standing next to.”
I was not clever enough to invent that sentence on the spot. I had practised it while walking home.
My voice still shook when I said it.
* * *
For nearly a month, the shirt stayed behind other clothes.
I entered the season wearing a plain dark polo. Nobody commented.
The circuit had eight qualifying meetings. The best six results would count towards the final ranking, with eight players earning regular places the following season.
It was a structure I could understand. No one had to discover me at a party. I had to keep turning up and produce enough good results.
The first meeting was awful.
I arrived tired from work and spent more time watching the people behind me than the cards in front of me. When somebody laughed at another table, I assumed they had seen the video.
I finished near the bottom.
On Monday, a binding job went wrong because I cut a cover board to the previous order's measurements. My supervisor made me replace it and asked what was occupying my head.
I told him a little.
He listened, then pointed at the job sheet.
“Right now, this book.”
I did not find it profound. I found it useful.
The book had a size. The cut had a line. I could do the next thing without asking what thirty people thought of me.
* * *
The season passed in ordinary inconveniences.
A meeting clashed with a large order at work, so I swapped shifts. Another fell on the day my landlord needed access to repair a leak. I left the key with a neighbour and spent the afternoon imagining water dripping onto my mattress.
I played well twice, badly once, and sensibly enough on several days when I had wanted to be spectacular.
The ranking moved slowly.
At first I photographed every update. Later I stopped, because I had begun living from one number to the next.
Parveen asked about the matches when I collected a repaired trouser pocket.
I told her I was ninth.
“How many places?”
“Eight.”
“Then you have a reason to go again.”
She asked where the blue shirt was.
“In the cupboard.”
“Bring it. The cuff stitching was temporary. I told you to come back.”
I had forgotten.
She had not.
When I brought it, she unpicked a line of thread beneath the cuff and showed me how the fabric could sit more comfortably. There was nothing to rescue about the shirt except an unfinished alteration.
I stood beside the mirror and let her work.
* * *
Before the last qualifying meeting, I was eighth.
Two players were close enough to pass me. I needed a strong finish to keep the place.
Dheeraj arrived to record some footage for the club. When he saw me, he held up his phone and asked whether I was ready for a redemption story.
I said I was ready for the competition.
He laughed.
“Still angry?”
I did not answer.
In the middle of the session, I lost a hand I had expected to win and felt the urge to make the next one erase it. I knew that feeling by then. It had followed me from the dinner into too many rooms.
I put my hands in my lap and waited for the next deal.
That pause did not win the event. Neither did one brilliant decision.
I finished third that day.
When the season totals were checked, I was seventh.
A regular place.
I walked outside because the room had suddenly become too warm. I called Parveen before I called anyone else.
“Seventh,” I said.
She asked whether seventh was good.
I laughed.
“Yes.”
“Then say that first. I have a customer waiting.”
* * *
The next annual dinner invitation arrived six weeks later.
This time my name was printed among the newly qualified players. The club wanted photographs and short interviews for a campaign about the coming season.
I considered declining.
Then I opened my cupboard.
The blue shirt hung at the front now, its cuffs properly finished.
I tried it on.
One button had loosened. I stitched it myself, badly enough that Parveen would later redo it while complaining about my knots.
Neha messaged after seeing the ranking.
She congratulated me and asked whether we could meet at the dinner.
I thanked her. I said I would be there for the event.
I did not leave a second meaning hidden in the sentence.
My supervisor gave me the evening off and asked whether I needed an advance to buy something suitable.
I said no.
He nodded, accepted the answer and went back to the order book.
I wished I had understood earlier how much respect could fit inside an ordinary nod.
* * *
At the hotel, the entrance mirror was the same.
I remembered checking my collar in it the previous year and deciding I looked all right. For a long time, that memory had seemed embarrassing. How could I have been so pleased with myself?
Now I looked at the shirt again.
The cloth had softened. The sleeves ended where they should. There was a faint mark inside the collar that no one else could see.
I went in.
Dheeraj recognised the shirt before he greeted me.
“Same one?”
“Yes.”
He looked as though I had failed to understand an opportunity.
The organiser, Mrs Sethi, joined us and asked for a photograph beside the season banner.
“There's something to settle first,” I said.
I showed her my unanswered request about the old video.
She read it carefully.
Dheeraj began explaining that the humour had been affectionate.
I asked him whether Parveen had found it affectionate when strangers questioned her work.
He looked towards the other guests.
I stayed where I was.
The previous year, that had been the part I could not manage.
* * *
I did not ask for a new suit, a special table or an introduction to anybody important.
I asked for the old video to be removed from the club's accounts and for the false claim about Parveen's materials to be corrected where it had been made. I also asked Dheeraj to apologise to her.
Mrs Sethi said the club could remove its copies and publish a correction. She could not recall every forwarded version.
“I know,” I said.
Dheeraj asked whether we could take the photograph first and handle the details afterwards.
“No.”
He sighed.
“You've got your place. Why keep going back?”
“Because she didn't lose hers in a game.”
Mrs Sethi looked at him.
For the first time that evening, somebody else had to wait for an answer.
The video was taken down from the accounts the club controlled. The correction stated that Parveen had altered a shirt I bought elsewhere and that the claim about discarded bedding was unfounded.
I read the wording before agreeing to the photograph.
Dheeraj called her from the corridor.
I did not stand beside him to listen.
The apology was hers to receive, not mine to collect as another prize.
* * *
Later, Parveen told me what he had said.
At first he apologised that she had been offended.
She told him that was not the problem.
Then he apologised for saying something untrue about her work and for using her shop's name in the joke.
“That took him a while,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“I have been all right in several ways. In other ways, you know.”
I did.
The correction did not replace every lost hour or awkward conversation. But when the next person mentioned the video, she had something clear to show them.
At the dinner, Neha came to speak to me.
She said she should not have forwarded it.
There was no suggestion of shopping this time.
I thanked her for saying it.
Then we stood for a moment without inventing a reason to return to what we had almost been.
She went back to her friends.
I joined two players who were discussing the next season's travel arrangements.
One asked where I had bought my shirt.
I told him.
He said the colour suited me and continued eating.
The conversation moved on.
I still looked towards Neha's table twice that evening. I would like to say I didn't, but wanting someone to choose you does not disappear because you have made a sensible decision about them.
Once she caught my eye. We nodded.
Then a player beside me asked about the binding unit. He had an old book with loose pages and wanted to know whether it could be repaired without replacing the cover.
I explained what we would need to examine.
For several minutes, I was useful in a way that had nothing to do with my ranking or my clothes. By the time we finished, Neha had left.
I noticed.
I stayed.
* * *
The club used the new photograph.
In it, I am standing beside the banner with my sleeves visible and a smile that looks slightly surprised.
They offered to include a dramatic account of overcoming humiliation in the interview.
I preferred to talk about the season.
I still worked at the binding unit. I still had mornings when I counted the days until wages arrived. A regular place was an opportunity to compete, not a replacement for the rest of my life.
On the way to work the following week, I took the lane past Parveen's shop.
The blue display shirt was back in the window.
She was arguing with a customer about whether a zip could be repaired in ten minutes. When she saw me, she pointed at my cuff.
“Turn that over.”
I did.
She inspected the stitching, then nodded.
“Now it's finished.”
I went to work.
At lunch, paste landed on the inside of my sleeve. I washed it out before it dried and hung the shirt carefully when I got home.
I no longer treated it like evidence.
It was a shirt.
It fitted.