The six yard dash

I wore a sari to work yesterday after a long time and attracted a lot of attention, most of it the good kind. It was my celebration of my mother’s birthday, a kind of modern family tradition, as it were. And it was a sari that my mother had bought me many years ago, but that I had never worn. I enjoyed every moment of the attention and revelled in the feminine feeling the drape gave me, even as I chafed under the confinement of yards of fabric – however beautiful - and wiggled as the formality of my own behaviour was dictated by what I was wearing. I am more a jeans and top kind of person, or even a salwar kameez person, one who is free to stride and sometimes run, to sit with my legs crossed yogi-style and kick off my slippers and perch on the window sill watching the rain outside and the chaos within.

I remember the first time I wore a sari – officially, at least. I had been wearing an attenuated version of it for a while before that for my classical Indian dance lessons, but that was more like a uniform and did not really count in the fashion stakes. It was the six yards of material folded almost in half lengthwise and then draped and tucked like a normal sari with the pallu wrapped tightly around my waist. That was almost like clothing oneself in a costume, with the pleats stitched into place and neatly fitted to curve around the figure and show off every movement without the accompanying non-Indian-ness of a leotard or a pair of pants and a tight T-shirt.

So wearing a really-truly honest-to-goodness sari was a novelty. I wanted to try it, even though I was dreadfully nervous about the whole thing. And the occasion came up, when I had to go with my parents to a wedding of a family friend’s offspring. Why not this one, my mother suggested, pointing to a sari I had coveted for years. It was my grandmother’s heavy silk wedding sari, a gorgeously rich creation in deep green and red – the body was green, checked in lines of almost-pure gold, the border a solid mesh of god and vivid red, the pallu a gleaming sheet of gold tinted red by the supporting threads. It was heavy, weighing me down and giving me a taste of what luxury must have been all those years ago. Draping it around my frame was easy, especially with a little help from both parents, though walking with it on was not. But it was a matter of pride – the combination of a rare heritage with a beauty that was timeless. And it made me feel like I looked beautiful, too, the gold in the sari echoed by the gold in my ears and around my wrists.

A few days ago I opened my mother’s closet, as I sometimes do, to gently touch her favourite saris and feel her smiling wryly at me, as she sometimes did. And I saw her mother’s wedding sari tucked into a corner of the sweet-smelling shelf. It was yellowing, the silk fragile and fraying, the gold weighing down the fabric with its ageless strength. No one can wear it now, shredded as it is, but it is a treasure even today. After all, for me, it is my history, personal and familial, holding memories of a time that I never knew and still could remember.