You might think that shopping for a sari ends when you purchase the actual sari, but you’d be wrong.
You don’t even get to take it home right away. First the salesman cuts off the blouse piece, a section of cloth woven together with the sari that you will have made into the choli – blouse – to wear with it. You take that home with you, pending discussions with your tailor. The shop keeps the rest of the sari for a few days to sew in a fall, a strip of lining along the bottom, to add weight at the bottom and help it drape gracefully, and stitch up the raw edges. This service is included in the price of the sari.
Some saris don’t include a blouse piece, so you need to find material in a matching (or contrasting) color. For that you go to a shop like the one pictured above – the photo shows only a portion of the goods on offer! – where you can find the precise shade of silk or cotton desired, with or without a decorative border.
Alternatively, you can get a gold or silver crepe or brocade.
This shop is also where you will buy the petticoat, a drawstring-waisted skirt that goes underneath, into which you will tuck the pleats and wraps of the sari. The petticoat is chosen both for color (more critical for a transparent sari, obviously) and for a material which complements the sari material and helps it drape better.
As always, every shop bustles with smiling salesmen ready to make helpful suggestions!
Though some articles on this site might lead you to believe otherwise, I am not usually an enthusiastic shopper. Shopping, for me, is not an end in itself; “retail therapy” has never worked for me. I don’t go out just to see what’s there – I like to have a specific mission.
Ross is good at providing me with shopping goals (one of her life’s missions seems to be to spend all my money!). Right now, we are on the hunt for a sari for her to wear for her Woodstock School graduation in May. (Mussoorie offers very limited choices, and she won’t have other opportunities to look elsewhere before school ends.)
So my classmate Deepu has been gamely escorting us all over Bombay, on the hunt for the perfect sari. This has turned out to be an endurance event, though the shops strive to make it pleasant.
A sari shop usually features a soft surface covered in taut, spotless white cloth. In the first place we visited, this was a counter that the salesman stood behind, and we had comfy chairs to sit on – refreshments were offered as well.
In the next shop (pictured above), the surface was a low platform, wide enough for the salesman to sit on, while we sat on cushioned benches.
In the third and most traditional, we sat on the cloth-covered floor (shoes off at the door) and reclined on bolsters, while the salesman sat cross-legged in front of us. This was very hard on the knees after a while – I’m too creaky to sit that way for long.
Once you’re settled and have established a range of what you’re looking for, the salesman begins to pull out long cardboard boxes…
…from which he unfolds meter after meter of textile miracles.
These are Benares brocades, an ancient art that may be dying out because it’s not in sync with modern tastes.
I love this material so much that I’m tempted to buy practically everything in sight, though I have no idea what I’d do with it, having no particular occasion, nor the necessary skill, to wear a sari myself. (I don’t even know enough to buy one without help, there are so many styles and origins and other factors…)
As the mind begins to boggle with colors, borders, and styles, saris to be kept for further consideration are tossed aside rather casually:
…while the rejects are folded back into their boxes. Like every other organization in India, sari shops swarm with employees – assistants stand ready to do the folding.
Prices range from Rs. 2000 into the stratosphere, depending on the quality of the material, whether the gold is real, and how much of it is woven into the material. A very fancy wedding sari can be heavy to wear from the sheer weight of precious metal in it. Though they can be expensive, a good sari lasts practically forever, always fits (you can have new blouses made to wear underneath), and can be handed on to your daughters.
When you find something you really like, someone will help drape it around you (over your clothes – no need for a changing room) so you can judge the effect in the mirror:
later – It took us until this evening – and an hour at a fourth store – to actually buy anything. But I won’t describe it, so as not to spoil the surprise. Suffice to say that Ross will look stunning!
photo top: At a large sari shop in Santa Cruz. The gentleman got nervous after a while and asked me to stop taking photos.
I’m sitting on a rattan footstool in order to be close to the modem – the wifi doesn’t seem to be working, but there’s an Ethernet cable, and the ADSL connection is good. Outside the window is a small, presumably ancient tomb, I have no idea whose, another of Delhi’s many semi-abandoned Mughal relics.
But the patch of land it sits on seems to be protected: there are trees enough to attract bright green, long-tailed parrots, and the little chipmunks whose backs are said to be striped because Lord Ram stroked them in thanks for helping build the bridge to Lanka.
We arrived in Delhi late Friday night on the Shatabdi Express from Dehra Dun, along with about 200 Woodstock students “Going Down” to return to their far-flung homes, and 14 staff members who were responsible for getting them onto myriad flights. A Woodstock staffer’s job emphatically does not end with the end of the semester! Some will have been on duty for 24 hours before they saw off the last of their charges yesterday afternoon – even longer if departures were delayed, as they so often are in Delhi’s foggy winter.
Fortunately for us, we only had to go across town to Green Park, where we are staying in a guest house/apartment belonging to a Woodstock alumna. It took us a while to find the place – our hired driver, being from Rajasthan, doesn’t know every corner of Delhi. But, then, I’m not sure anyone does.
The apartment is a third-floor walkup, nicely, if simply, furnished. The location is fairly quiet at night, though I suspect that we are due for some disturbance as the neighbors have had a huge awning put up for some sort of celebration. This morning I was awakened around 7:30 by steady drumming. Seems an odd time for a wedding rite (and also the wrong time of year for weddings), so I wonder what this is about.
As the city wakes up, more sounds impinge. A man on a bicycle pedals through the neighborhood crying: Kabadi kabadi kabadi (“second-hand goods” – he’s looking to buy them, including scrap clothing and paper). Another shouts Koel – I don’t know what that means. Cars make strange chirps and whistles to alert us that they are backing up. But mostly right now I hear parrots, mynahs, and pigeons against a muted rumble of traffic (relatively less – today is Sunday).
Delhi wildlife: can you spot two green parrots and a stripey squirrel?
I’m breakfasting on fresh papaya, bought from a well-stocked fruit stall around the corner, and Nescafé. Yes, this latter is a terrible comedown for a long-term resident of Italy, but India’s coffee culture is still developing. When I go out I’ll find a Barista or Café Coffee Day and have a decent espresso – Barista was recently bought by Italy’s coffee giant, Lavazza, a brand we drink at home.
I would be happy to sit around and work and listen to the morning symphony, but I’m cramped and chilly. Delhi is much colder than I expected at this time of year, but everything here is built for the fiercely hot weather of summer. Rooms which are doubtless delightfully cool and airy then are shivering cold now, with no possibility of heating. The shops, on the other hand, tend to be too warm without their habitual air conditioning. I’m going shopping!
This Swatch was my major fashion statement for several years, until (as you can see) I wore it out. The design isn’t easy to understand at a casual glance, so people would ask me about it: “Is that a mermaid?”
“No,” I would explain: “It’s Eve, gathering apples.” (As for the snake, take a close look at the strap…)
It goes with my theme song, by Cole Porter from his show, Nymph Errant.
Yesterday morning I woke early to make coffee for our guest, out-of-boardingSAGE student Laura, before her 8 am exam. The sun had not yet risen when we came downstairs. I peered out the windows. “What’s that white stuff on the trees?” I wondered. “Frost? Is it that cold?”
We gazed. “It’s snow!”
We opened the door. “It’s snowING!”
We shrieked with delight. Laura, who lives in Paraguay, doesn’t usually get to see snow falling. (I, too, was raised in the tropics, and never saw snow coming out of the sky til I was 11 years old, in Pittsburgh.)
The ground was too warm for it to stick much, and the snow stopped falling after about an hour. Then the temperature plunged; last night was cold, even in Sanjay’s (unusual for Mussoorie) centrally-heated home.
This morning, the snow is back with a vengeance. Still not quite cold enough to stick, but we may be getting there…
It’s almost unheard-of for students to be around when snow begins falling in Mussoorie. Going Down Day – the end of school, when everyone heads down the hill towards home – was traditionally around December 7th, several weeks before the first snowfall was usually expected.
But this year the calendar has been experimentally changed, so school began August 8th (about two weeks later than usual), winter vacation runs December 14th to January 22nd, and the school year ends May 28th. Graduation is after that, on May 30th – ours, in 1981, was on June 25th!
The rationale for this change has not been well explained; I’ve heard that it was intended to allow more time to prepare (or less time to forget) before external exams in the spring, and/or to align better with the American school calendar.
There are historical, practical reasons for the school to have a long winter vacation. The average altitude of the campus is 7000 feet: it gets cold up here! Word on the hillside is that Mussoorie is in for a colder-than-usual winter this year, and, with a looming shortage of propane in the region, the school may have trouble heating itself. Staff usually have bukharis – woodburning stoves – in their living rooms, but in classrooms and offices these have been replaced with gas heaters. Dorm rooms are not heated at all.
Students are allowed to have electric blankets which, along with flannel or fleece sheets, can make getting into bed a far less traumatic experience than it used to be. The only problem is that, eventually, you have to get out again…
Beyond mere physical discomfort, the calendar change has upset the plans of this year’s SAGE (exchange program) families. The Winter Tour, a multi-week gallop all around India, primarily – but not only – for the benefit of SAGE students, has been compressed to 31 days. For some it will be even shorter, as students join or leave the tour at odd times so that the kids also have an opportunity to go home and see their families.
This is undoubtedly a headache for the tour organizers, especially as the tour is moving so fast that it will be hard to catch up with it along the way. Ross wanted to spend some portion of her vacation relaxing in Goa, and the only reasonable solution I could find was to have her join the tour just a week before its end, in Mumbai. It’s a pity she’s missing so much. On the other hand, after a long semester she needs some rest, and this year’s Winter Tour will emphatically not provide that.
The shortened vacation also eats into a beloved staff perk: the opportunity to travel in Asia during the dry (but still warm) season. Woodstock staff don’t get paid much, so these perks count for a lot.
All things considered, I suspect this calendar change is not going to stick, at least not in as drastic a form as we see this year. It’s a pity they had to run this experiment during my daughter’s year here; it would have been nice for her Italian relatives to see her at Christmas.
