Few people wear traditional silk saris regularly, especially not the grand
Kancheepuram silk saris that come with borders brocaded in gold
threads and complex motifs.
The saris are beautiful but wearing them is hardly sensible. These saris with
their brocades and rich, natural dyes can not be washed without damaging and
devaluing them. Unlike cotton, the fabrics are not porous; the wearer steams
inside, especially in South India's humid and hot climate.
The rank odor of sweat that sticks with the saris makes it necessary to use
over-powering perfumes. Silk saris are an olfactory disaster.
So, people wear them as rarely as possible, at weddings
and such, and air them in the shade before relegating them to wardrobes.
Still, a few women wear those saris everyday. One of them came to Oklahoma
and confounded the natives.
To understand what happened, you need to know how a sari is worn. The fabric
is six yards long. Half its length is folded into pleats about six inches
wide and the rest of the fabric is draped around the body. The pleats
on a Kancheepuram silk sari, thanks to the gold brocade, will be about an
inch thick. That inch of fabric with a heavy concentration of gold set off
the metal detector at the airport.
The security guard felt the soft, plush fabric that was setting the alarm
off with a deeply puzzled look on her face. "Clothes are immune," you could
practically hear her thinking. "The border is setting it off?,"
the other guard wondered aloud incredulously.
And that my friend, is one more reason why silk saris will go the way of
the kimono.
