Years ago, when I lived as a paying guest, my landlady spent most of her day in a nightie. She cooked in it, supervised the domestic help in it, received the milkman in it and exchanged neighbourhood intelligence in it. Within the house, the nightie enjoyed complete freedom. But whenever she had to go beyond the main gate, she changed. I barely noticed the ritual then. Years later, it strikes me as a rather perfect summary of the Indian woman’s complicated relationship with comfort. The woman could cross the gate; the nightie could not.AdvertisementA recent article (‘Red lipstick: Make-up or manifesto’, IE, October 25) got me thinking about the other end of this peculiar spectrum of female presentation. If red-stained lips could scream “look at me”, the nightie bordered on “please don’t”. Somewhere between the two lies the narrow strip of acceptable femininity women have long been expected to inhabit — attractive, but not attention-seeking; modest, but not dowdy; comfortable, but never careless. Women may swing like pendulums between these instructions, but society expects them to land, miraculously, in the middle.That unease around the nightie is hardly ancient history. Earlier this year, a handwritten notice reportedly displayed at a UCO Bank branch in West Bengal went viral for asking customers not to enter wearing “half-pant and nightie”. Banks, one would imagine, have enough to worry about without policing floral cotton. Yet the nightie’s inclusion felt oddly unsurprising. Decades after entering Indian homes, it remains perfectly acceptable beside a pressure cooker but somehow loses social clearance at the front door.Long before feminism found a confident public voice in India, the nightie had staged a quiet domestic revolution of its own. It liberated women from sari pleats, petticoats, pins, hooks and the exhausting requirement to remain properly assembled while cooking, cleaning, bending, carrying and caring. You pulled it over your head and got on with life. It made no claims to elegance; its only ambition was to let a woman get on with her day. The complication began when somebody else could see it.AdvertisementA friend once told me that during her pregnancy, the staircase in her house came with an unofficial dress code. Her in-laws lived downstairs, so she could spend the day upstairs in the forgiving comfort of a nightie, but descending one flight required a wardrobe change. Pregnancy could alter the body, gait, appetite and centre of gravity; apparently, it could not alter the rules of propriety. The nightie was perfectly respectable on the first floor. Somewhere on the staircase, it lost its character certificate.Also Read | India’s time will come. For now, it is a middle power in a bi-multipolar worldThis is quite an achievement for what may be the least threatening garment ever designed. The traditional Indian nightie is long, loose, frequently floral and extraordinarily generous with cloth. Whatever your shape, there is enough fabric. If the nightie ever intended to scandalise society, it chose a remarkably inefficient business model. Still, Indian ingenuity found a solution — the humble dupatta. Throw one over a nightie and a cultural miracle occurs. Nothing underneath has changed, but the ensemble suddenly acquires respectable intentions. The nightie says, “I would like to be comfortable”; the dupatta hastily adds, “but I have not forgotten my values”. Apparently, sanskaar can be layered.Consider the Indian man. He can descend in ancient shorts, a fading T-shirt and rubber slippers, buy milk, squeeze tomatoes and conduct a 20-minute seminar on geopolitics with the security guard. Nobody interprets his clothes as a collapse in standards or wonders what message he is sending society. He is simply Uncle, and Uncle needed tomatoes. A woman’s comfort, meanwhile, has historically required considerably more paperwork. Be attractive, but not attention-seeking. Be modest, but not frumpy. Dress casually, but remain presentable. A woman can choose comfort, as long as it remains socially presentable.Then luxury loungewear arrived and accidentally exposed the entire absurdity. Satin pyjamas, coordinated sleep sets and expensive robes now stroll confidently through resort breakfasts and hotel lobbies. Wear the right version and nobody thinks you forgot to change. The cut, fabric and price establish that you have dressed very carefully to look as though you have not dressed at all. Comfort, it turns out, becomes considerably more respectable when it comes with a brand label.The Rs 400 floral nightie enjoys no such diplomatic immunity. Its Rs 4,000 cousin can be called “elevated loungewear”, while the humble maxi can still raise eyebrows on a trip downstairs. Both cover the body and both privilege comfort, yet one signifies leisure, taste and purchasing power; the other evokes pressure cookers, milk packets and unpaid domestic work. One woman is lounging. The other, apparently, has failed to get dressed. The difference is not really modesty; it is what class allows us to call fashionable.you may likePerhaps that is the nightie’s real offence. It belongs to the uncurated woman — hair tied without strategy, face unprepared, stomach unheld, body temporarily relieved of the obligation to be visually pleasing. The nightie does not flatter, announce or aspire. Most unforgivably, it does not appear to care who is looking. Perhaps that is why something so modest can still make people uncomfortable. The nightie reveals almost nothing of the body, but plenty about a woman who has decided, for once, not to dress for other people.Red lipstick and the floral nightie may live at opposite ends of the bedroom, one on the dressing table and the other in the cupboard, but society has somehow managed to write rules for both. Too noticeable at one end, insufficiently presentable at the other, she is expected to find precisely the right setting somewhere in between. The problem was never really lipstick or nightwear. It was the expectation that a woman must continuously calibrate herself for other people’s comfort.My landlady had understood that bargain without ever articulating it. Inside the gate, she dressed for herself; to meet the world, she changed. Indian women have crossed classrooms, offices, courtrooms and boardrooms. The nightie is still negotiating the main gate.Rana is a Gurgaon-based writer