When those happy feet frown

Thank god there’s nothing like shoes for the hands. Wait a minute. Before you start thinking that I have probably lost it, let me explain what prompts that statement. As much as I would love to have two happy feet walk me through the day, my experiences with footwear have always been killjoys.

Trips to shoe stores mostly end up in heartbreaks, what with nothing of my size ever available. And luck by chance if I manage to get a pair, it’s no less than a stupendous feat for my puny feet. But then it’s the poor purse that bears the brunt. After all, in such rarest of rare moments, price is the last thing that I can afford to ponder over. Like they say, beggars cannot be choosers. Of course, I make sure pairs that are beyond my budget are beyond my line of vision too.  

The colour, the shape, the feel, the look -- when all of it is just what I have been longing for, it’s that silly size that always cuts me down to size. Those cute, colourful ballerinas, oh how I envy someone else fitting into them. Ask for my size and the standard answer is, “Sorry ma’am, that’s the starting size. We don’t have anything smaller.” Just an inch here, just an inch there and I always miss them by a whisker.

There have been times when the salesmen were generous enough (or was it that they took piety on me) to suggest that they could custom-make one for me. But the rigmarole of the entire process shoos off much of the excitement. Call it a confession, but there have been times when I have taken a causal stroll to the kids footwear section, eyeing the stuff on display, but with a deadpan face that betrays all signs of the curios cat within. It’s a different matter that I never found anything there too, this time the size being too small to fit my feet.

 In fact, I have a lot of these ‘shoestopper’ moments too. No sooner I realize someone’s shoe size could be close to mine (just from the look of it of course), I brazenly walk up to the person to know the source of the pair. Thankfully, such people are always the ones who seem to share my story and hence are more than willing to help me with all the details, from the name of the store, to its address et al.

Probably you got to put yourself in my shoes to know what I really mean. LOL! But most of you wouldn’t ever fit into mine.