A Balenciaga State of Affairs

MANY days have passed since the day I looked out of the car window during one of my shotgun drives across the various bountiful terrains of Kashmir, involuntarily noticing silhouettes of young boys and girls swooshing across my peripheral vision, which, if left to its volition, was hoping to stay fixated on the sights of the golden rays of the sunset perforating the mighty pine tree thickets of the valley we find ourselves nestled in.

- Tabish Rafiq Mir

In one such passing-by of sorts, as my eyes registered only in passing the shapes of the clothed bodies of this generation, the generation immediately after mine, the Gen-Z as they are called, I had a realisation that had been marinating itself subconsciously in my head for days until that day; this day of revelation.

My head, bobbing and sometimes vibrating against the glass on the window, which was slightly dusty from that one temporarily off-road detour we had taken a few minutes earlier, blurted out through its (sometimes my) mouth something that would stay with us for weeks and perhaps years to come.

‘Surat-e-haal kaafi Balenciaga hain’—The state of affairs is quite Balenciaga—I had said, with the sigh of someone drifting dizzyingly into the irrelevance of the slightly older generation.

As I said this, my friend maintained, not very well albeit, a composure of profundity, while also clearly at the crinkled-face brink of laughing out loud. He was not maintaining appearances; he was, in fact, truly struggling. He was, after all, my friend of three years, privy to every secret of mine and not without the gall and friendly capital to mock my less-than-quotable quotes. There was, in this sentence, such stupid genius that even he did not know what best to do.