Family weddings lead to so many things – arguments, tears, gossip, gluttony. And, of course, sari talk. What is the bride wearing? What is the mamiaar wearing? Did you see how low that neckline was? Was that a designer sari? Remember the sari you bought for your wedding?
Eighty-two-year-old Vedavalli Ramaswamy remembers the nine-yards she wore for the occasion. It was the colour of ripe mangoes with a red border, she says with relish. Mythili Mami, also eighty plus, sternly points out that in the good old days it was only the perivaa who did the trousseau shopping. But yes, she wore a red and gold sari that her dad had chosen for her.
Laughing at the memory now, Usha Visweswaran says her sari was a disaster. “I didn't like my wedding sari at all. I cried every time I looked at it and was still crying when I was led into the mandapam! An acquaintance had brought it from Salem and it was an ugly maroon with buttas.” Varada Prasad got to pick her own sari, and her eyes sparkle as she tells it as if it were yesterday. “It was 1960. It was at Bhojayya and Sons on Sayyaji Rao Road in Mysore, my Mom's favourite store. I instantly fell in love with a dark green pattu with gold and multicoloured buttas that the mannequin in the display window wore. It cost an arm and a leg at Rs 200!” But the lovelorn look in her eyes won the day and the sari was taken off the mannequin and folded up and it was hers!
Silk smitten
The minute the mapillai is spotted on the horizon, the sari dreams begin. Sometimes even before, says A. Rukmini. “Well before we had fixed on a man, my father went to India and decided to buy some wedding saris for me, just in case. It's what NRIs used to do in the 1980s, when trips to the motherland were rare and expensive. I told him I wanted the same wedding colours my mother had, the chief sari being mustard with a green border. Well, Dad wandered through Mylapore and Mambalam looking for this magic combination. At Nalli's he approached the manager and with the help of muscular salesmen finally selected all the wedding saris, except for the mustard and green. He compromised and chose a mustard with a deep red border. Then at the cash counter he found a woman holding a mustard sari with a green border. My father is not the type to accost unknown women, but he pleaded with that woman to give him the sari, ultimately offering her a hundred rupees extra. Naturally she refused. Nothing makes a sari more attractive than knowing someone else wants it. And eight months later I got married in a mustard sari with a deep red border.”
Sree, a militant vegetarian, got married in ahimsa silk. She was delighted when on the internet she found someone in Hyderabad who made saris “without killing anything”, as she puts it. “But I learnt the painful truth from an article I read that the ahimsa saris are not so ahimsa after all. While the worms are not boiled, they die anyway.”
Sometimes it is all very racy. More than the excitement of buying a sari, Rajita saw an opportunity to spend time with her fiance. “Those days, we were not encouraged to do so, so we hatched a plot of trying to match my reception sari to his suit. We went around to all the shops in T-Nagar in the boiling sun just so that we could steal glances, and who knows, maybe even hold hands! We bought me a purple sari, and he bought a grey suit!”
“My sari is a nine-yard deep pink silk,” says Sindhuja Sandeep, who got married last year. “I got it from Tharakaram, in Coimbatore, because my mom and aunt said andha kadai rasiyaanadhu . So there we were my mom, aunt, cousins and a few more women who tagged along. I did not want to wear the usual maroon most Iyer brides wear. I did not want to spend too much on my muhurtham sari as I had to still buy other saris that I had to wear in the span of the two-day wedding. Then, I saw it. It was half way between magenta and maroon, with a simple gold border. The ladies went aaah and oooh about how well it suited me. It was memorable and I wish that along with my actual wedding someone had thought to capture the sari shopping with a video camera.”
