a phone / telephone book / directory Polski: książka telefoniczna (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the rains still playing truant till yesterday, I decided to take advantage of the dry spell and catch up with some shopping. Like most women, I’m a sucker for shopping and the word SALE is like a carrot to this donkey who finds it hard to resist. Supposedly to beat the blues on wet days, the July sales in Mumbai have now become a regular feature of Mumbai’s shopping scene come rain or shine. The last time I had a blast during the sales was two years ago when there was a wedding in the family to shop for. This time too there is a wedding in the family to shop for hence the need to go to the Sales.

Vandana and Saroj at Chandralok on Napean Sea Road are great for fabrics especially if you’re looking for something dressy particularly suitable for Indian functions where you can choose from handloom and lace, cotton and silks  to synthetics and traditional weaves with zari and bootis and all those embellishments that go to making your outfit different from the rest. Another shop which has similar stuff but catering to a different audience is Soni Moni at Tardeo right near the Mall.

I went practically berserk at these shops, feasting my eyes on the gorgeous colours and textures that were rolled out before me. It was fun watching the other shoppers too putting one fabric against the other trying to mix and match colours to make up the dress they had designed in their mind’s eye. Strangely enough at Vandana and at Soni Moni I came upon two ladies who were shopping for themselves and were generous enough to give me advice on my purchase. It turned out that both these ladies were designers and also volunteered to stitch my garments if I so desired.

I was grateful indeed for their contact details because I greedily bought up all those yards without any tailor in mind and would have gone straight to them were it not for the distance away from home. Then, as it happened Kay wanted the number of a seamstress I’d been to and that set me thinking that I’d go back to her. After all a seamstress is different from a tailor and less uppity than a designer. There’s something gracious and old fashioned about a seamstress who would design a dress and tailor it with old fashioned attention to detail.  Sadly I’d thrown away her card and then dug out her number from the telephone directory a big three volume tome that is long out dated. Luckily I did manage to track down the seamstress and will get the clothes stitched from her…….

But this whole exercise set me thinking about tracking down people. In the good old days if one wanted to trace someone particularly in a new town, all one had to do was look carefully through the telephone directory and you were sure of getting there. But with directories now no longer published and telephones being mobile, how does one find out the whereabouts of a person?

There is no telephone inquiry, nor is there a telephone directory nor for that matter are there seamstresses any more.