I return to my hometown of Shillong annually and begin by recalibrating my measure of beauty. It starts with the food on my plate. The vegetables are smaller than in the metropolises — slim, V-shaped carrots with their green shoots intact, baby beetroots, mini-turnips — and distinctly sweeter. The soil seems to have a secret affinity with the scale of this town and its people. It’s all of a piece: low lintels in shop fronts, foot-wide benches in tiny tea and rice stalls, tight little lanes winding out from the main roads, and on those roads small-built girls walking in stilt-high heels.

On a recent visit, I can’t resist chatting with a trio in Don Bosco Square, 14-year-olds dressed to kill in frilly, tailored dresses and towering wedge heels of, respectively, red velvet, leopard print fabric and blue leather. I ask them about the shoes. “We got them in Happy Valley,” says the least shy one, trying to recall the name of the shop. Happy Valley is in my memory little more than an army cantonment on the fringes of town. But I am behind the times; it’s clearly on the same cutting edge of fashion as the rest of the city.

In Laitumkhrah, hub of the stylish young, I count half a dozen new boutiques, some closet-sized outlets for inexpensive readymades, some glass-fronted stores sporting local designer labels. You don’t even need to look in to find out what’s au courant. It’s enough to take a walk down the main road, or slip into one of the trendy cafes and just ogle. Fashion has always been high priority in Shillong — and I’m reminded again of how it’s less slavish imitation and more self-expression. People dress according to their lights; they have an unerring sense (not unlike the creativeness noticeable on the streets of Paris or Milan) of what will suit them.

Where do they get their ideas from? The western influence is obvious but another answer is — further east. Clothes have always made their way to the markets of Shillong from Myanmar, but now I spot DVDs of popular Korean TV serials in the pavement bazaars, Thai fashion magazines in the salon, and Japanese dress catalogues at the tailor’s. The ‘cute’ fashion aesthetic of these cultures is big here and for good reason — it perfectly suits the dimensions of these bodies, the cut of these faces, this hair texture and skin tone.

Which brings us to the subject there is no escaping when in Shillong — ethnicity. Friends point me to the fashion blog, Wearabout, whose Mumbai-based author recently spent some months here marvelling at Shillong’s street style and lovingly photographing it. “No saris. No kurta-pajamas,” he says in one entry, and in another wonders if an elderly gent in a dhoti is a tourist. It’s easy to think of ‘Indian’ apparel as an anomaly here, and their wearers as tourists, but the fact is that saris and dhotis are native to Shillong too. It depends on where you look. During the mid-October Durga Puja, one’s attention is wholly taken by the muted colours of all the crisp, Bengali jamdanis on display, their paleness complementing the livid red of sindoor smeared on cheeks and foreheads on Dashami day.

But the Puja itself was muted this past year. Since a couple of months before the festival, local groups were agitating for the enforcement of a law requiring visitors to acquire a permit before entering Meghalaya. The agitation (and occasional incidents of arson and murder) reinforced ethnic divides, with the result that Shillong’s Puja pandals had sparser crowds than usual and signs saying ‘You Are Under CCTV Surveillance’.

The most instructive thing about the ongoing debate over the permit is the terms in which it is conducted. Newspapers bristle with opinions but always with reference to the blank abstractions of ‘native’ and ‘outsider’; one rarely reads stories about actual people or lived experience. Shillong has started to feel like two places: the besieged city of the mind in which the binaries are neat, and that other, more familiar city where, given waves of migrations and decades of commingling and inter-marriage between communities, identities are inevitably blurred.

It could be argued that in a place with as developed a fashion sense as Shillong’s, you are what you wear. This is not just about trendiness but being able to affect that mysterious thing called style. Like the vegetables which grow small and elegant in this terrain, effortless cool sprouts out of this soil too. The city’s famed talent at rock music, for instance, seems to rest not so much on original expression as a marvellous ability to pull off a Western style. I attend a concert one evening, and even though the songs are the well-worn rock and pop standards — Eagles and Deep Purple, Beatles and Abba — the effect is thrilling. Those boys just look amazingly good with guitars and those girls just happen to sound like the real thing.

If style is a form of self-confidence, then what Shillong teaches you is how to be yourself. The danger of style, though, is that it distinguishes you by how you look and move, not what you feel and think. Individuality runs deeper — and maybe it’s respect for individuality, for what marks out people from each, not what lumps them together under impersonal group handles — that we ought to be after. Dress and manners are alluring but if we are to live together we might have to look further than fashion.

(Anjum Hasan’s latest book is Difficult Pleasures. She is books editor, Caravan.)

(In this monthly series, authors chronicle the cities they call home)

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