City Style - Pramod Kumar's Flowery Mask, Roshanpura

City Style – Pramod Kumar’s Flowery Mask, Roshanpura

City Style - Mask with Flowers, Roshanpura

The mask sartorialist.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Elegant, his dressing style. His blue-and-white striped, long-sleeved shirt is going well with his gamchha, which is arrayed in a check pattern of of blue, pink and green. Both ends of the gamchha are falling on either sides of his shoulders, like a set of extra limbs, for decoration.

But the most remarkable thing about rickshaw puller Pramod Kumar’s sartorial style is his pandemic-era mask. Especially when you compare it to the masks of folks going about him this afternoon, here in Gurgaon’s Roshanpura in the Greater Delhi Region. Their face covers are in plain shades, some are branded. But Mr Kumar’s mask is looking like a garden. It has a blue background littered with what seems to be the red semal flowers. And then there are long pink leaves, or can they be bird feathers?

Mr Kumar shrugs his shoulders. Standing leisurely, with clasped hands casually placed on the rider’s seat, he is waiting for customers.
He got his mask a few days ago from a hawker in adjacent Sadar Bazar, near the Sardar Jalebi. “It was 20 rupees… anybody can buy it.” Even so, not one person around is seen in a mask half as interesting as this one.

Anyhow, Mr Kumar dismisses the possibility of him having any interest in clothes. “I’m not a hero,” he remarks, referring to film actors.

Mr Kumar lives around the area, sharing a room with a dozen other rickshaw pullers. All are from Madhubani in Bihar. “I have three sets of clothes… this evening, on returning to the kamra (room), I will wash this pant-shirt I’m wearing, and tomorrow morning I’ll wear the pant-shirt I washed last night. Or the other spare set.”

Mr Kumar prefers to shop for clothes in his village, which he visits once every four months. “Sometimes my stay lasts for a month because I help my father and brother with farming… we have a small land.”

On being congratulated for his choice of mask, he expresses happiness but says that “summer is setting in, and the sweating makes it difficult to keep up with the mask.”

Now looking at the photo for which he just posed on The Delhi Walla’s phone, he declares that the pink design on the mask “is a patta (leaf), not pankh (feather).”

Mask in season

City Style - Mask with Flowers, Roshanpura