Belted days and belt-less days!

Weekday mornings are rushed mornings. The office-cab arrives as early as 7:06 am. You don’t have a choice. It’s the only solution to overcome the incurable traffic woes in our bustling metros. Needless to say, you are spinning like a top at home- to get ready, and bolt out of home at 6:59, allowing you exactly 7-minutes to run to the cab.

When time is at such a premium, it is irksome, to put it mildly, when you cannot locate your pant-belt. Where did it go? Where can it go? Like a man whose hair is on fire, you run helter-skelter, opening a cupboard here, a shelf there, rummaging through piles of clothes, in a frantic bid to find the belt.

Eventually, you do find the belt- coiled up and quietly hiding in a corner. It is 6:58. But a belt has absolutely no time-sense or urgency. You can never wear it in a hurry. It needs patience- enormous patience to thread it through each pant-loop. Why does a pant need so many loops in the first place? And that too, a loop right at the back- which, unless you did an “Exorcist act”, you can never see it, much less, thread the belt through. You get angry, and deliberately, skip a few loops, just enough to wrap the belt around, buckle up, and run.  

Agonizingly, you discover that you’ve strung the belt upside down, and now, it cannot be buckled. It must be retracted and redone from scratch.

On some days, try as you may, you cannot find the belt. The shelves and drawers are all pulled out, and still, there is no belt in sight. The clock shows 7 am. You take a chance, and dash out of home, without the belt. After all, you weren’t born with a black belt. You can very well stay a day at office, without the belt. A terrible decision- which you realize, only as the day unfolds.

The basic problem is that no one wears tailored pants anymore. It is all ready-made, which essentially means, the pant is at least two sizes larger than the waist.  Without a belt, you are on tenterhooks.

Each time it slides down, you must consciously pull it up. It requires repeated tinkering, and your entire attention is on the trouser for the rest of the day! If you tuck the shirt in, it gives a greater girth to your waist. Now you have more control, but it accentuates the awkwardness each time you pull up the pant. If you leave the shirt loose over the trouser, it is a different problem- whatever extra layer the shirt provided, is lost, and the trouser shows a greater propensity to slide down.

It begs a fundamental question- why should the belt be an extra appurtenance at all? Can’t we design pants with an inbuilt belt, like they did in yesteryears? 2 loops came from the pant that could be stretched over the shoulders, the kind worn by Laurel and Hardy. It would solve the problem completely- no more hunting for belts. More importantly, the design was intuitive and purposeful. The shoulders are meant for this- to prop up the pant, nice and snug. A waist-belt, on the other hand, works differently- it compresses and squeezes the belly, just to keep the trouser in place. In the long run, it is surely a health hazard.

Waist-belts have other practical problems. With each passing year, prosperity is evident on the waist. You need to find the next hole to buckle up. Soon, you run out of holes, and new ones must be drilled. Sometimes, you reach lands-end- the end of the rope and can go no further.  At the other end of the spectrum, is the narrow waisted specimen. You buckle the belt to the first hole. The rest of the belt stretches out like a king’s dagger, that could rub the unwary passerby the wrong way!  

On the way home from the belt-less day, some firm decisions had to be taken. I bought a dozen belts at the mall, one for each pant, and threaded them to the pants in advance. That way, any pant I pick up, it would come with its belt. Eventually, the mystery of the missing belt, the leather-hunt, was solved. Guess what? I had loaded the belt along with the unwashed pant in the washing machine! It had endured the entire washing process, still staying threaded to the pant, and now lay strung on the clothesline, squeaking clean and shiny!