OF WARP AND WEFT

Many of you may have noticed the shop ‘Warp and Weft’ in Marine Lines just before the train approaches Churchgate. Yes, today’s tale has been inspired by this name and, I am sure, by now my readers must have guessed that it will go the whole six yards …so gentlemen, if you so desire, you may refrain from reading this any further.

My tryst with the sari goes back to the time when I was a mere four year old.  My aunt still tells me that she had never before seen a little girl jump and clap with joy to see her mom go for a matinee show while she was busy draping a red silk sari in her own style in front of the dresser. Yes! That was the little girl’s pact with her mother - you can go for the movie but you must give me one of your saris from that big teak almirah. I remember spending many such afternoons playing with my ayah didi’s daughters - they were my best buddies since, being older than me, they would let me have my way in everything and even help in draping the sari so I could play mommy.

My next memory of wearing a sari goes back to a cousin’s wedding when I insisted on wearing one of my aunt’s wedding sari-a pink Benarasi with thread and zari work. The poor lady tried so hard to coax me into wearing a lighter Murshidabadi printed silk but the imp that I was, I refused to budge. The rest of the evening I spent sitting next to the bride looking like silver and gold spangled candy floss!

Being in a Salesian Sisters’ Convent for the major part of school-life, I did not get much opportunity to wear saris except for school plays or cultural programmes but weddings in the family gave lots of opportunities and my mother’s wedding sari was always my first choice-a deep magenta with a narrow gold border and very tiny gold zari flowers all over. Growing up in Calcutta means that some days are marked as sari days for us Bongs- Saraswati Puja, Ashtami during the five-day Durga Puja festival and Bhai Phonta!

In our youth, the dress code transition was very simple – from frocks and skirts to salwar or churidar kameez and then graduating directly to the sari with short interludes of bell-bottoms, maxis, midis and jeans- kurtas. So in college, too, any occasion be it the Freshers’ Welcome, the Farewell, or the College Fests saw us resplendent in our bandhnis and block-prints in mulmuls, kotas, silks and chiffons. Of course, my all-time favourite has always been the crisp cotton tangails. I still have in my possession my first Bangalore silk bought from the EXPO at the Calcutta Maidan.

There are always those very anxious moments when you first step out in a sari that it will all become undone or you might trip and the pleats will start falling apart but honestly the sari does not come off all that easily unless something is intrinsically wrong with the draping or the material. In fact the six yards give you enough indication that something, somewhere is going wrong and you always manage to save yourself a Draupadi moment. When draped well, a sari can exude an elegance and confidence in a woman that very few attires can. As someone in an ode to the six yards wrote,

“Saree my love, you’re the most beautiful attire

a timeless fashion, which refuses to retire..”

While working in the Public Sector there was little choice other than making the sari my official attire especially in Calcutta and Delhi. In fact, Delhi did full justice to the entire collection- you could devote six months of summer to all your cottons and another six months of winter to the silks.

 It was with the transfer to Mumbai that the tables turned. Many of my friends and colleagues in Delhi instilled such a fear of the local train rides in me that on the very first day itself I took their advice to turn up in a salwar-kameez, which, till then, had always been the informal attire for me.  One colleague had been particularly vivid in her picturization of the scene, “If you get into a Mumbai local in your sari, you will get off it holding the sari in your hand!” Anyway, when I saw the ladies in Mumbai negotiating a perfect jump into a moving train without a single pleat moving from its place, I started venturing more and more often in saris. But in Mumbai there are other constraints to wearing a sari-to iron the simplest of saris the presswala will charge you a bomb and that too without being able to distinguish the right side from the reverse side of a Bengal cotton, space constraint makes it impossible to starch and dry cotton saris at home, the laundry charges you exorbitant rates and if that was not enough, you will not find a tailor who can stitch a decent blouse. So in Mumbai saris are left for occasions only, unless you are ready to give up your silks and cottons and settle for the synthetics.

However, I cannot help remembering an incident in a packed Mumbai local during the peak office hour rush that brings out the camaraderie that exists among the daily commuters. One young Punjabi girl from Chandigarh, who had been travelling with us for the past couple of years ,had boarded the 9.02 fast local wearing a sari which she declared had taken her an hour to drape. She was excited, it being her last day in office, because she was going back home to get married. Everybody was very appreciative. She was a beautiful girl and in the bright sari looked truly gorgeous. Suddenly, one of the seniors in group told her to get up as she had got it all wrong. That is when we noticed that the pleats which should have been facing her left were in the opposite direction and the pallu instead of draping over her left shoulder had crossed over to the right. Immediately, window shutters were downed, the grilled partition between the two compartments covered with two dupattas, a group of women formed a circle round her and the matriarch took charge to drape the sari on the girl properly. All this was completed even as the train slowly crept in to the next station. I am sure the girl sitting in Le Corbusier’s city will never ever forget her lesson in sari draping!

Now, I am in an altogether different predicament. With no office to go to, I have a wardrobe full of saris, and I guess I too will have to embark on a ‘One-a week’ pact to prevent them from completely disintegrating, taking inspiration from the ‘100-saree pact’ started by Ally Matthan and Anju Maudgal Kadam. Undoubtedly, a brilliant idea for the revival of the sari.

 Another solemn resolution I have made this New Year is not to buy any more saris. Yes, I intend to abide by it, come what may.

To be very honest, just before making this New Year resolution, while sauntering down Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Connaught Place, one winter morning, I could not resist picking up two saris which were on display in one of the State Emporiums. It’s an indescribable itch- you cannot help buying a good sari, even though you know perfectly well you do not need any more. I still miss some of my favourite sari haunts in Kolkata and I also have this sudden urge to catch a plane to Chennai and Coimbatore one of these days to just pay a visit to the original Nalli, Kumaran’s and also take a look at the Coimbatore collections. In the bucket list of course is a Dhakai Jaamdani from Dhaka… someday.

Once we had gone for a two-day workshop to Varanasi from office. Two memories of the trip remain etched on my mind- the first is the Ganga Aarti, which we had seen from a boat, an unforgettable experience. The second, a visit into the narrow by-lanes of Varanasi , arranged by our local colleagues, for the sole purpose of buying the famed Benarasi saris. All my friends and colleagues bought one or two but I, reeling under the effect of one such New Year resolution(the month being still January), had refrained from buying any. When I see the exorbitantly priced saris in Mumbai, I still kick myself for not having picked up one that day.

On a more serious note, I lament sincerely the loss of a good taste for saris. The saris you get to see nowadays are truly not saris to me. They are a type of patchwork. Many a time I have entered a popular shop and have almost convinced myself into buying one of them but just then some inner voice has stopped me- is this truly a sari? The pleats are in netlike material, the borders in velvet, the pallu in shimmer and the rest of the sari in georgette! And what are those stars, sequins, flowers, beads, tassels doing - all stitched or stuck on the sari like a beautiful piece of craftwork? Where is the wonder and magic of the six yards of warp and weft? Where is the grace and fluidity of the seamlessness that is the hallmark of a sari? Will those masterpieces in weaves, created by brilliant artistes with their looms, hands and imagination, be lost forever? It makes one sad to even think that, may be, a day will come when these weavers and their looms may no longer be there to tell their woven tales.

That brings me back to my New Year resolution. Not even a month has passed and just the other day got an invite to a mid- February wedding. The first thing that pops up in the mind-what shall I wear? I have still not been able to make up my mind. For some reason or the other, whichever sari I think of does not seem to be the right choice- there is some ‘technical’ snag in each of them. Why is it that no matter how many saris you have, whenever you have to go somewhere, you are always at a loss. Does that mean the resolution once again goes for a toss?

No wonder the Bard wrote, Frailty, thy name is woman…

DS