All Wrapped up – Saris 101

My current ship hosted an India/Bollywood formal night the night after we departed Bombay – thus began my adventures in learning how to wear a sari….

When you look at a sari, it’s hard to comprehend that its’ really one giant length of fabric. Truly, a proper sari is several feet long, and it takes two people to really handle it properly.  I had no real knowledge of this, let alone how to wear one (though I’d always vaguely toyed with the idea of owning one in the “well that would be fun” kind of sense), until it came to my attention that I was actually required to own one.

It took me over two hours to get ready that night, and half of that was spent in leggings and choli top, perched in front of the mirror painting my eyes deep blue and purple and carefully frosting them over with white so that they shimmered (thankfully I brought my stage make up with me), and securing the necessary jewel between my eyes, and dabbing the tiniest splash of lotus blossom essential oil behind my ears. The remainder of said time was spent trying to figure out how to negotiate length upon length of nag-champa scented chiffon into something resembling a dress.

I think I succeeded, but it’s definitely not as easy as it looks

So it was that I eventually found myself swathed in several feet of midnight blue-chiffon, showing more skin than I ever thought I’d be showing in a passenger environment (the proper choli top that you wear under a sari exposes your entire mid-riff from hip to ribcage, and the sari itself only covers one side of said – so your left side is bare), with silver in my ears and a matching blue jewel set in the center of my forehead, greeting guests as they entered the elaborately decorated ballroom for the evening.

As Drew Barrymore said in Ever After “Yards of fabric and I still feel naked”

Beautiful perhaps – but exposed none-the-less.

There is a technique to wearing a sari, a technique that the people who have been wearing them all their lives make look overly natural. It’s like dancing, it only looks easy. Every step you take you feel as if the entire thing is going to come untucked from around your waist, and you’re extremely aware of the fact that the entire complicated contraption is held in place by two safety pins securing the pleats on your left shoulder.

You feel like you should move with the same effortless grace you’ve seen others create, and yet you somehow can’t manage it quite as well.

But when you do manage to get all the pins and folds into place, you feel…something beyond pretty. I can’t say that feeling exotic is something I’ve ever really experienced in my life, but that night…I felt like an Indian Cinderella…

Did I look it? I’m not sure, but I felt it, and that should count for something.

And the appreciative looks I got as I walked down the hall did go a long way towards lifting my spirits.