Word & Play

On fichus, puce fichus, and shirred puce fichus

A vocabulary book was my first literary influence (‘The Word-power Summer’). Any new word or phrase that I encounter in another’s writing makes an impression on me (‘A Raking Glance’), and stays, making small squeaks and scratches in my mind, till I have found a way to include it in my own work. This inclusion often requires a good amount of artifice and invention. Sometimes, the work is brutish—the word twisted out of meaning or applied outside narrative or cultural context. Sometimes the engineering is perfect. I like to believe I’m getting better at doing this. At any rate, I am convinced it is all part of the play that is essential for me to do what I do.

I’m writing this post to illustrate how continuous this interior process is, how I find myself dealing with multiple micro-aspirations at any point (because each new word or phrase becomes an aspiration), and how micro-joys and micro-frustrations—that have nothing to do with the joys or frustrations of the larger narrative I’m penning—are constantly a part of my writing life.

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The other day in my reading of ‘War and Peace’, I encountered for the first time ever the word fichu:

Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her lace fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on the lips.

From Wikipedia: A fichu (/ˈfiːʃuː/, from the French "thrown over") is a large, square kerchief worn by women to fill in the low neckline of a bodice.

From the image below, it is clear that a lace fichu was likely a delicate and expensive accessory in early 19th-century Russia (which is where Berg and his wife are situated).

Source: Wikipedia

But it is not that such accessories are not in use today. A fichu is not much different from a poncho. In hard desi utilitarian terms, it is a cousin of our very own dupatta.

My micro-aspiration with fichu? I want to use it in my fiction, which is always contemporary, always with Indian characters doing their stuff in India. There is, you’d appreciate, a bit of a problem here.

The problem is compounded by the fact that fichu’s pronunciation has reminded me of an adjective that I have long desired to use—puce. I forget where I first encountered puce, but now, following Tolstoy’s translators Maude & Maude’s ‘lace fichu’ I want to give to the world my ‘puce fichu’.

From Wikipedia: Puce is a brownish-purple colour. The term comes from the French couleur puce, literally meaning ‘flea colour’.

A fichu can be any colour, so why not the colour of a flea?

Puce. Source: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/puce/

A few months ago, I had similar micro-aspirations regarding another word from the world of attires and accessories. The word is godet.

Google defines it as a triangular piece of material inserted in a dress, shirt, or glove to make it flared or for ornamentation. The image below should clarify.

A shirt with godet on the seams. Source: Wikipedia.

I don’t remember where I first encountered it, but I remember the feeling when I understood what it meant: ‘I’ve seen this thing. I’ve seen it. I might be able to use this word.’

I did use the word godet, not in fiction, which is my preferred form, but in a poem. That too a poem of only three lines (not a haiku). In the poem, I used the word’s spelling and pronunciation as a little mystery, as an invitation for the reader to discover it. But it felt a bit too contrived to do just that, so I added another set of three lines to the poem and called it ‘Diptych’ (yes, I’m a bad poet, with all the wrong impulses).

Diptych

1.

The girl at the tailor’s

waiting for godet.

A streetlamp chunters.

2.

The tiger’s fractal wings

in a frayed gray book.

A palp’s press on silverfish.

The above poem was an exercise in housing ‘chunters’, ‘tiger’ butterflies, finger ‘palp’, and the insect ‘silverfish’, just as it was an exercise in housing ‘godet’. With two of these words, I remember my first conscious meetings well.

I’d first encountered ‘chuntered’ in Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which I read in December 2014. ‘Stop chuntering,’ V.S. Naipaul says to his first wife, Patricia Ann Hale, in the presence of Theroux (if I remember right, this happens inside a car, somewhere in Africa)¹. The poem Diptych was written in September 2023. It would not be wrong to say that I carried the pending task of making use of chunter/chuntering for close to nine years before finally being able to create an occasion for it.

I believe I encountered the word palp, in its meaning of a finger’s feely tip, in Lolita. I noticed it only in my third reading of the book, which happened not much before the writing of Diptych. So palp didn’t stay pending for too long.

Diptych is not a good poem. I don’t think it will ever be published anywhere. I posted it on Instagram soon after writing it, where it received no comprehension or appreciation, which is what I’d expected. It now sits among my archived posts on that website. I visit it occasionally, to deepen my familiarity with the words. At some point, the words will become so familiar that my next use of them will be unthinking. That, I think, is the goal of Diptych. It is private play, its objective only to make the unfamiliar familiar. If there’s anything poetic in it, I will take that as bonus.

Nabokov’s Lolita has, of course, been the source of a bagful of words that I carry around inside me in the hope of finding space for them in my work—hopefully with as much attention to their aural or alliterative possibilities as the master². I present a sentence from Lolita below, to draw from it a word that belongs to the same world as ‘godet’, and to also give a hint of how that bag of mine suffers a weight gain with every reading of Nabokov. Here’s Humbert Humbert saying being all vile about Dolores:

Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich postmeridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, be-pearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra.

There is a lot to pause at and take away from in this one sentence—the funny formality of ‘postmeridian shade’; the aural effects of ‘demure dip’, ‘dummy book’, ‘bag of bonbons’, ‘tingling glands’; and that most astonishing simile, ‘as glad as an ad’—but I focus next on the word I have italicised: shirred.

The word draws from shirring, which is a decorative sewing technique that involves stitching together many rows of gathered fabrics. Same world as godet. A shirr is different from a godet, of course, but you wouldn’t mind me keeping them close in a mental folder.

A close-up of a shirr on a blouse. Source: Wikipedia

Shirred is a word I have not used till now.

The idea roiling in my head, an idea that is close to becoming a private challenge, is to find space and occasion not only for ‘puce fichu’ but for ‘shirred puce fichu’. Surely there are shirred puce fichus in the world. Surely there can be shirred puce fichus in the world.

But it doesn’t sound too good, the phrase, does it?

The phrase could send my reader to the dictionary thrice. It would make them call me pretentious. This is all nothing to say, of course, of the stretch it would be to use this phrase in my fictional universe, as a part of an outfit for an Indian character in an Indian middle-class setting.

I asked Google Gemini AI for its opinion. Its main problem was the word puce:

"a shirred puce fichu" might not be the most evocative or stylish way to describe the garment. Consider a more common color to create a clearer picture for your audience.

A compromise, then? What about ‘shirred white fichu’? That solves the puce problem. And what about ‘shirred dupatta’? One has seen those.

I guess all I can say right now is: we will see about this. If there is one thing a writer has, it is time.

1. Naipaul was a nasty, abusive husband. This nastiness is made clear in Theroux’s memoir. Naipaul and Theroux had a long, good relationship, and then a bitter falling out. The book traces the whole thing. The two kissed and made up a few years after this book. It’s a very interesting book, even if you haven’t read any other books by Naipaul or Theroux and know next to nothing about them.

2. Nabokov is, in my experience, an awful writer to imitate, with disastrous results when one succeeds and disastrous results when one fails. Only he can get away with what he does. There is a je-ne-sais-quoi to him that just cannot be reverse-engineered.