My current ship hosted an India\/Bollywood formal night the night after we departed Bombay \u2013 thus began my adventures in learning how to wear a sari\u2026.<\/p>\n
When you look at a sari, it\u2019s hard to comprehend that its\u2019 really one giant length of fabric. Truly, a proper sari is several feet long, and it takes two people to really handle it properly.\u00a0 I had no real knowledge of this, let alone how to wear one (though I\u2019d always vaguely toyed with the idea of owning one in the \u201cwell that would be fun\u201d kind of sense), until it came to my attention that I was actually required<\/em> to own one.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I think I succeeded, but it\u2019s definitely not as easy as it looks<\/p>\n So it was that I eventually found myself swathed in several feet of midnight blue-chiffon, showing more skin than I ever thought I\u2019d 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n As Drew Barrymore said in Ever After<\/em> \u201cYards of fabric and I still feel naked\u201d<\/p>\n Beautiful perhaps \u2013 but exposed none-the-less.<\/p>\n There is a technique<\/em> to wearing a sari, a technique that the people who have been wearing them all their lives make look overly natural. It\u2019s like dancing, it only looks<\/em> easy. Every step you take you feel as if the entire thing is going to come untucked from around your waist, and you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n You feel like you should move with the same effortless grace you\u2019ve seen others create, and yet you somehow can\u2019t manage it quite as well.<\/p>\n But when you do manage to get all the pins and folds into place, you feel\u2026something beyond pretty. I can\u2019t say that feeling exotic is something I\u2019ve ever really experienced in my life, but that night\u2026I felt like an Indian Cinderella\u2026<\/p>\n Did I look it? I\u2019m not sure, but I felt<\/em> it, and that should count for something.<\/p>\n And the appreciative looks I got as I walked down the hall did go a long way towards lifting my spirits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My current ship hosted an India\/Bollywood formal night the night after we departed Bombay \u2013 thus began my adventures in learning how to wear a sari\u2026. When you look at a sari, it\u2019s hard to comprehend that its\u2019 really one … Continue reading