Silk Sari Cloth Tulips by Lilliana Braico

It happens to me more and more these days -- I walk into a store or a restaurant and find I'm the only woman there in a sari.

This would not be surprising if I were in America; on visits there, it happens all the time. But in India? And with me being the blue-eyed offspring of Danish/English/French Huguenot stock, speaking with a twang fine-tuned in Kalamazoo, Michigan?

Improbable as it may seem, though, it happens all the time now.

It never used to. Back in the 1960s when I married an Indian and moved to his country, I found that in the conservative city where we lived, women wore saris, period. Only saris. People would have made allowances for me, probably, if I had wanted to retain my identity as an outsider. But whenever I put on the abbreviated dresses and well-worn jeans that constituted my poor-student wardrobe at that time, my husband's old gardener looked at the floor or out the window, but never at me. On the street, however, men never looked the other way. Women looked at me, but then turned away, as if unsure that they could find anything to say to me.

My in-laws gave me a trunk full of the most beautiful clothes. It may have been a gentle hint of expectations, but I didn't care. It was the '60s! I was young and ready to revel in the new and different.

If I had felt uncomfortable or inhibited in any way, I would have gone back to miniskirts like a shot. But the feel of all that silk and the ease of this new style of dress enraptured me. With a simple tug here and there, the sari could look sexy or modest, practical or glamorous. And -- remarkable discovery -- I found I was still very much myself, maybe more so, while I connected to people around me as though the sari was the tie that binds.

My mother-in-law gradually gave me more of the saris she'd collected and treasured over the years, even some from her trousseau. Each seemed like a sign of increased trust; we needed that sometimes. I used them all.

Can women in the Western world experience this? When I was a child I used to rummage through the attic, through the graveyard of " good" dresses -- too passé to wear, too expensive to throw away. I'd dress in the dated finery and outsized elegance, then trail through the house. During my mildly hippy days in college I wore a striped jacket my mother had worn quite a lot in the 1930s. Do students still do that?

For my first wedding (I had one each in America and India) I wore my mother's wedding gown. This was no mean feat since my mother had weighed only ninety-two pounds at the time of her wedding, and I couldn't remember when I'd last weighed that little.

The dress, hand stitched and made of delicate parachute silk in 1941, needed the addition of a subtle lace insert and a miraculous foundation garment so that I could fit into it. Walking down the aisle in my mother's dress meant a great deal to me, as if I was encased in her blessing.

In India, I wore my mother-in-law's and sister-in-law's clothes all the time. When we visited my husband's family in Delhi, I packed extra blouses in cream, maroon and black. Then whatever occasion we attended, I had the right thing to wear, just by raiding someone's cupboard.

It wasn't that fashion didn't change; purple was all the rage one year after a hit Bollywood film featured a heroine in purple and gold. Sleeve lengths and necklines went up and down, in and out, and a TV personality started wearing blouses with spaghetti straps, which caused a good deal of comment about invisible clothes. But blouses are easy and relatively cheap to change -- the sari is the real investment, and the classics remain undated.

Comfort, individuality and continuance -- in style down the years and generations -- why would such an ideal way of dressing ever lose popularity?

Convenience probably is one answer, as more women have to worry about doing all their own laundry in a hurry. Additionally, saris cause problems for women who drive scooters. Few of them want to end up like Isadora Duncan with parts of their floating saris caught in the wheels.

Novelty, of course, is another reason for the loss in popularity of the sari among women. In the last five years globalization has rolled into India in the most amazing way. Television ads want Indian women to believe that black hair is not their " true color" , that college students wear sun dresses, cropped tops, mini skirts and pants, that newsreaders have to wear Western business suits, and that clever, young moms should wear smart slacks. For the under thirty, upwardly mobile crowd, the sari is what their grandmothers wore and they want little part of that.

In today, out tomorrow. All the products of the multiplicity of boutiques now blossoming in every city have a life of only one season. Whether they produce " Western" or pajama-kurta Indian suits, radical swings in style ensure that no one wants to be caught dead in last year's clothes.

That's the new style: fast turnover. Sell fast, throw away fast, buy fast -- and pay slowly, with interest.

I'll stay in my six yards of treasured and comfortable cloth that cover a multitude of middle-aged evils, thank you.

Maybe someday globalization will get around to running the other way, and, as a one-hundred-year-old in silk, I'll walk in a San Francisco coffee bar wearing the same thing that every other woman wears -- a sari.

Bio:
Lucinda Nelson Dhavan first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant, immediately after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. Two years later, she married a struggling lawyer in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. After several years devoted to domestic bliss, child rearing and learning Hindi, she joined the staff of a regional newspaper, where she worked for thirteen years. She feels she may have learned enough by now to write fiction. She is polishing a collection of short stories and working on a novel.
You can email Lucinda at ldhavan@yahoo.co.in.