One afternoon, I was chit chatting with a friend over coffee at a café in Khan Market. Upasna Sarin was sitting on an adjacent table, in front of a large glass pane, her back towards me. At some point in time, she turned around to initiate a conversation with us--it lasted a good fifteen minutes. She was reacting to something she overheard us talk about. She seemed a different person when she turned around. That was because she was dressed in a quintessential printed kurta of hers, where the back and front were distinctively divergent, as if two halves of different kurtas were stitched together. A symphony of contrasts. The kurtas she wears are multifaceted like her personality.
Upasna is so easy going that it’s practically impossible not to be friends with her if one gets to interact with her for half an hour. Don’t be mistaken, this happy-go-lucky persona compliments her eye-for-details and meticulous approach to things and activities. She wants things to be in immaculate order, and that she finds instantly if things go amiss, and when things are amiss she doesn’t waste a moment to start fixing it.
In that brief conversation that ensued, she spoke about making a fortune selling shoes–are a work of art, and was a retailer, and now a supplier of shoes to leading ethnic brands, and that she has made certain unique choices in life, like she is a self taught astrologer. It was all very engaging, her personality. She embodies a benign yet infectious energy. This brief encounter propelled me to know her better. I pestered her for a meeting. Finally, she relented. A few weeks later, I was invited to a bungalow that was built by her father thirty years ago. She lives with her mother. We spent the afternoon chatting about things, particular and general. She is an early success story, she had opened multiple retail outlets in Delhi that sold hundreds of pairs of shoes every day before she turned 30. She’s so self sufficient and self contained that it's not funny.
Upasna has many loving friends, but she’s her best friend, and likes her company the most. She has no, and never had, a designated life partner in the normative sense. “I'm complete,” she says with gumption.
Upasna is so easy going that it’s practically impossible not to be friends with her if one gets to interact with her for half an hour. Don’t be mistaken, this happy-go-lucky persona compliments her eye-for-details and meticulous approach to things and activities. She wants things to be in immaculate order, and that she finds instantly if things go amiss, and when things are amiss she doesn’t waste a moment to start fixing it.
Her living room is a case in point of the multiplicity of her expansive self. To describe her dwelling in a couple of sentences, the latter half has two floors with two bedrooms each, and the front half is an extension of the second but with one high roof–that’s the living room, a larger cuboid, with a variety of objects, sofa, art, artefacts, carved wooden furniture, shelfs, carpets, a swing, punctuated by greenery–the glossy leaves reflecting the afternoon sun. There was a reckless ease in the way things were kept, but the process to achieve this aura is painstakingly punctilious.
We settled in the ultra cozy sofas, facing each other. The Carlisle English Arm was upholstered in earthen Bhagalpuri cotton, seamlessly blending with the surroundings. She wore a designer (for you won’t find another) kurta with greenish tinge, matched her embroidered slip on.
Upasna started to tell her story in far greater detail than the scope of this article. To summarize, a street smart woman, she started early, did a brief apprenticeship at his father’s retail outlet, and thereafter, due to circumstances beyond her making, she started selling shoes and did very well and in a few years had many outlets running. “By the end of 1991(in her early 20s), I had set up Finesse (her brand) in a small garage,” she recollects.
She has an enviable knack to make the kinds of shoes that do well in the market. She has been a trendsetter. Her shoes are expensive, for she uses the best materials, inputs. And she is not threatened by poor quality substitutes for has a niche market. She is professional but compassionate, and her street-smartness should not be confused with cunningness or opportunism. She preferred peace of mind to ugly competition, or confrontation, whenever she was forced to make a choice. She owned a Mercedes when she was barely 30. And built a beautiful farmhouse and spent years making it.
The death of her father in 2013 was the inflection point in her life. She shifted from South Delhi to live with her mother here in Gurugram. Her spiritually enlightened elder sister is her go to person. The dazzling success was not appealing to her anymore, Upasna sought self actualisation. She took a call. No more active retail. She has trusted clients like Ritu Kumar, Good Earth to name a few.
She studied astrology, and refers to the position of stars and planets to make sense of the mortal world. Upasna is an energy driven person, that’s why we are friends. She is one of those rare people who are their own best friend. This is an enviable situation.
Life's a game. Sometimes a good game to play is to exit it and to join in again at an opportune moment. I couldn't escape the feeling that another innings is on the cards, more intense than the first.
Opmerkingen