Sari seems to the hardest word

Just what is it with women and saris? I’ve just got back from a wedding, in Chennai of all places, and my mind is still tripping over all the saris that had wrapped themselves around my brain.

The entire wedding seemed like a thinly disguised excuse for women to indulge in a sari orgy —buying saris, gifting saris, arguing about saris, shedding tears over a lost sari, endlessly comparing the fall of one sari with the rise of another. Let me just say it was all beyond the comprehension of a regular guy like me.

I don’t want to drag my wife into this, as I have nothing personal against her for wanting to build a collection of 3,333 saris with no intention of wearing any of them in the next millennium. Never mind that the said collection is to be housed in a space-starved flat in Mumbai, where the only way to accommodate new clothes is by gradually converting to skimpier garments — who can deny that a micromini takes up infinitely less space in a cupboard compared with a 22-yard Kancheevaram silk sari? But try explaining that to a woman.

I did. I said, “Look darling, I have noticed that you have never worn that buffalo black sari in ages. I have also noticed that you keep obsessing inordinately about getting new curtains. Now, if you’re never going to wear that buffalo black sari again, why don’t you make curtains out of it? This will solve two long-standing problems in one go: we’ll find a use for that sari you never wear, and the house gets new curtains.” Trust me, that was all I said. I don’t want to go into details about the tsunami of rage and tears provoked by my eminently logical but apparently insensitive advice. But for the benefit of rest of mankind (and I mean mankind here in a gender-specific sense), I would like to present the three basic rules which every man must learn by heart if he wants to cope successfully with the sari situations in his life.

Rule 1: Never compare the price of a sari to the price of anything else. We men are gifted with the insight that one can buy a home theatre system for half the price of a wedding sari and still have cash left over for a crate of beer. But avoid airing this thought aloud in the presence of a woman who is about to buy or wear a sari.

Rule 2: The likelihood of a woman wearing a sari is inversely proportional to the ratio of the number of saris she owns, and her other dresses. This means, in effect, that for a given number of tops, skirts, salwars, and other assorted garments a woman has, the greater the number of saris she owns, the less likely she is to wear them.

Rule 3: When a woman confronts you with the classic sari dilemma — should I wear a sari today — just clam up, and don’t attempt to resolve it with typical masculine common sense. The answer to her query is subject to a mind-boggling array of variables, which is beyond the processing ability of the average human male. I know because I am an extremely average human male who tried. 

For starters, the first variable is time: does she have enough of it to wear the sari? Typically, a woman needs at least half an hour to ‘fix’ the sari, but it could easily go up to 4 hours. Then comes manpower. Every woman needs a man to perform certain menial tasks: hold the folds as she ties the sari, check if the folds are level, then crawl around her on all fours like a lovelorn crocodile and ensure that the entire thing looks okay from every possible angle known to man. Are you up for this? 

Once these minor variables are taken care of, there come the major ones. She might, after vacillating for three hours, finally settle on the purple sari with the maroon border, and then discover, to her horror, that she doesn’t have the underskirt to go with it. If the underskirt is available, the blouse is untraceable. If both the underskirt and blouse turn up punctually, then she informs you, her eyes popping in disbelief, that she can no longer fit into the said blouse.

Assuming you’ve tackled all these variables, the entire project could still be derailed by her sudden and tragic realisation that the sari she’s taken four hours to select and wear no longer looks as nice as it did when she first bought it. By this time, the average human male is ready to scream: JUST WEAR ANY DAMN THING. But that would be a grave mistake, for it would make her burst into tears. And once that happens, after all the hard work, it’s you who’ll be saying the ‘s’ word.