Have you ever had positive associations with a piece of clothing? Lucky shoes, lucky tie, lucky suit, lucky dress, you get the drift right? These clothes are blessed with a serendipitous superpower, everything goes right the day you don them.
So if lucky clothes exist, the converse must also hold and I have evidence to believe that I own a pair of cursed, unforgiving, jinxed leggings.
I bought these nondescript cream coloured leggings in January. I cashed in my credit card points for shop vouchers and bought these leggings for free. I felt grand for having cheated the financial system, I know that’s probably not true, but yes I didn’t pay a dime the day I bought them. . I was the new age finance guru; I had found a novel way to encash my spending sprees. I also made it a point to announce it to anyone listening. In the hindsight maybe that’s how the curse started.
But why were they cursed you might ask, what evidence I have, you might ask. Elementary, my dear readers, I have 3 indisputable facts to support my theory of jinxed leggings.
Fact 1: The first day, I wore these brand new leggings; I slipped on the footpath while getting into my car. I fell right next to a foul and full dumpster. Not only did I smell awful, but I also acquired a suspicious big brown stain. The realization of these however happened only after I had reached my place of work. The stares and funny faces I got through the day still make me cringe.
Fact 2: The very unfortunate stain had to be removed (thankfully, it wasn’t what you thought it was).
So the darn pair of leggings was soaked overnight with the most powerful stain removal detergent I could afford. Later, I duly washed and sun-dried them on the terrace. So what went wrong? Well, they went missing.
After 2 weeks of searching, questioning, observing (OK spying), they were returned by our downstairs neighbours. Alas, a classic case of mix up. Surprisingly, the brown stain had indeed disappeared, but the powerful elements had bleached the delicate cream colour into a jarring white Kandinsky style art. To add insult to injury, there were two new blobs of colour. The leggings seem to have had a community wash aka machine wash with other coloured clothes, at their temporary home.
Fact 3: I was still determined to use these pants, they were free after all. A trophy of my spending habits, a symbol of financial maturity. But, this time, after donning them merely once, it was I who made the fateful decision for community bath number two. Believing, very innocently that other clothes would behave and stick to their lines, not harming, my already fragile, cream and white and mix coloured pants.
It went horribly wrong. My trophy pants have become a symbol of all that can go wrong. I am left with is an ugly beige, dull peach piece of clothing, which quite frankly doesn’t really go with anything from my wardrobe.
Symbol of financial smartness turned into a dump. I will give them away eventually, but not just yet. I am still in mourning. I am still in shock for losing my free leggings to circumstances. I am still looking for a way to make them work.
On a side note, I am planning to claim this as my tie and dye attempt at home. Feels like everyone has found novel ways of keeping themselves occupied, this could be my crowning glory. Maybe all this was worth it. Maybe it was destiny for the leggings to be honoured as my first original piece of art.
Maybe they are not jinxed after all!
-by Deepashree Mohan
