The word for it was “stylish”. Stylish girls had Lady Diana haircuts, wore low-wedge heels from Bata, and chocolate-corduroy bell-bottoms. Some wore midis and some wore maxis and some wore minis. Rubbed skivvies in single colours were in. Flared, high-waisted jeans and Keds. Or tight churidhars with lots of churis around the calf, matching kurtas in pink satin that reached just above the knees, and chunnis wound around the throat but not covering the breasts. Dark leather moccasins with coloured beadwork on the front. Chunky sweaters. Chiffon saris patterned with gardens.They were a distinct tribe—they either had cascades of hair, sometimes plaited, such as the gorgeous dungaree-wearing pop star Nazia Hassan’s or that layered, feathery bob copied from the Princess of Wales. She had just gotten married and everyone seemed quite certain they knew her. She was stylish for sure. “Ish, so stylish,” the older girls said to each other. It meant you looked fine or it meant you were attempting to look fine and could thus be mocked.A and C were less than ten years old and not yet stylish. Perhaps they’d never be. They could not aspire to stylishness, being skinny, awkward, myopic, and unwealthy. They didn’t have what it took.Leaning on the garden wall, they looked out for the stylish every evening. Meanwhile, A knitted panties for her dolls and let her hair grow till her waist while her younger sister C’s was too long to be short but too short to be long.She could have entrusted herself to their left-hand neighbour, who’d trained with Shahnaz Husain and even looked a little like her—smooth, plump and confident. The lady had recently set up a beauty parlour in her front room where a poster of her big-haired, big-eyed heroine hung and on the shelves were jars of pink, black, and green beauty products. The girls had been in there to shyly confer with her. She could give Lady Di haircuts for fifty rupees. But they didn’t have fifty rupees to spare for Shahnaz.So, one Sunday when A was nine, she took up their grandfather’s scissors, the heavy iron ones he used for his tailoring, and said to C, “Let me give you a haircut.” At this point in her life, she was forever running towards or away from something, every game involved fleeing or hiding under dusty beds, flinging the basketball far and away, climbing a ladder to the roof for the badminton shuttle. She would trip and fall, twist ankle or wrist, then be swathed for weeks in Relaxyl and stretch bandages. But she’d also pick herself up and carry on. She could not turn perfect cartwheels like their right-hand neighbour but she taught her to skip. This neighbour and C were the same age and friends.That winter morning, she snipped a little of her sister’s hair and it came away so easily between her fingers. She was restless, eager to bring some novelty into their lives. Even though they had Lyril soap to bathe with and Cuticura talcum powder, a couple of nice dresses each, made by their grandfather, and new, very shiny sandals, none of this was stylish. In fact, the sandals were downright telu, which in the lexicon was the very opposite of stylish. They were too golden and so they were telu, which was a word they had made up to brand unstylishness, describe those who were outcastes in the house of style, who cared nothing for the oil dripping from their plaits and the missing garters in their school socks. They were telu, others stylish, and these two girls hung on desperately somewhere in between. They put on their sandals reluctantly and perused old copies of Seventeen magazine at the right-hand-side neighbour’s.They were sitting on the front steps—C with a towel around her shoulders, compliant, trusting: A with those big scissors she could barely handle. She cut off C’s rattails and cleared her neck. She took up tufts and let them fall away. The hair on the back of her head started to thin out. A combed and snipped, urging her sister to sit still. Then she aimed at her fringe.Grandfather had not yet missed his scissors. For birthdays and festivals, he stitched clothes for the girls out of small squares of ordinary cloth and thin air. He would consider an expensive frock worn by the right-hand neighbour and turn out a perfect imitation in a couple of days, down to the ruffled sleeves, smocked front, and lacy frills. He stitched all the clothes he wore—the warm, buttoned, woollen vests, and the sharp-edged trousers. He stitched quilt covers and shopping bags and kurta-pyjamas. It was him and his old, black, hand-cranked Pfaff, well-oiled and singing; the gold-edged pockmarked silver thimble that went onto his forefinger when he took up hemming and putting in the buttons, the faded British-era biscuit tin in which he kept his spools of threads and bobbins.Grandfather was an artist but he was not stylish. He saw to it that the grandchildren were clothed and to supplement what he made them he’d go to the footbridge in the town’s market square where the sellers of second-hand clothes had their stalls and buy them track pants and winter jackets. They had labels from abroad and looked crumpled.Meanwhile, the thrill of taking matters into her own hands. Her first attempt at tidying the fringe was hesitant and led to uneven results. She gave it another go and the lopsided look improved. Strands poked down from one side which she took away. She combed C’s hair sideways. “Show me,” she said and it looked all right. A had given her a haircut in the sense that she had cut her hair. But there was nothing stylish about it. Where were the perfectly set waves that crowned the princess head? Where was the glamour of that golden crop? She pulled down the hair over her sister’s forehead and started snipping again.Careful, said their mother, from somewhere inside the house. A imagined she trusted her because she let her make tea and handle knives, clean out the rice, and broom out the rooms. In any case, A couldn’t confide in her about their lack of stylishness because her mother was stylish herself, impossibly so. She wore silk saris in thick colours with matching lipstick, and had her hair done at Jenny’s, which was the oldest stylish place in town. She owned fascinating shoes—brown suede and blue leather and a pair of burgundy, crocodile-skin, handcrafted high heels made to order by a Chinese shoemaker. She used only Yardley and Max Factor, and wore pure wool cardigans. So when she said careful, both A and C knew it was to be taken only half-seriously. Most of the time, she merely scolded absent-mindedly.The hunt for stylish continued despite her. A and C cut out pictures of luxurious clothes and lip-glossed women from the magazines and pasted them at odd angles into old notebooks.C’s fringe was now shorter but uneven. A cut some more. Now it was straighter. She cut a tiny bit more. Now it was uneven again. And so on till more and more of her forehead was revealed and then the top of her scalp began to show. And still that line of hair wouldn’t fall straight. Suddenly C demanded to see a mirror. “What have you done?” she screamed. She looked like the victim of an illness that had selectively eaten up her hair. Their mother came out and C finally began to cry.Some moments of mixed emotions followed: their mother’s great exasperation at A’s stupidity even though she had originally acceded to her do-it-yourself plan. A’s own conviction that she had missed stylishness by a whisper, that a few snips more or less would have done it. C’s sense of adventure dissolving into a feeling of betrayal. “Cover up her head and take her to the barber,” said their mother. So, the two of them went, ignominiously, down the street—A disgraced and C with a woollen cap concealing her disfigurement. There was the grocery shop where they bought their atta and soap, the typing school, the pakoriwallah who doubled as an electrician, the mithai shop with basins of syrup-soaked sponges in the window, the panwallah, the gentle man in a dark suit who sold toffees and hard-boiled sweets out of huge glass jars along with pencils and exercise books, and then the barber. He was the one who usually dealt with their hair and he had no truck with style and Lady Diana.Was it then, in that shameful morning at the barber’s, when this unattainable word started to fall away from them? He did what he could with the mess and in a few weeks C’s hair grew out and the accident was forgotten. But the dream of stylish loosened its hold on them. There would be moments in the years to come when they’d be touched by it again—the time their mother took A to town and bought her shoes with the elegant word “Henry” printed on the soles, for instance, or when her sister went across to the left-hand neighbour and finally got herself that Lady Di haircut. But on the whole, they seemed to have given up the fight.They remained children for a little longer, still yearning for the sophistications of an adult world, till that too passed and they became, for better or worse, the people they were meant to be, no more those they hoped to become. Selected by Mini KrishnanReproduced courtesy of Aleph Book CompanyIllustrations by Siddharth SenguptaAlso Read | Portrait of a LadyAlso Read | SoundCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS