Saree Shopping in Chennai

 Downtown Chennai is about heavy duty saree shopping.  Not much else, particularly just prior to Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival.  When I say ‘saree shop’, don’t imagine that I mean an ordinary shop, selling a few hundred sarees such as you might see in Singapore or Malaysia. Oh no, I mean SEVEN STORIES of sarees, cavernous interiors and packed with people all intent on saree shopping like there is no tomorrow. Add to that the fact that we have caught up here in Chennai with Rani and Kylie, Rani’s sister Shanthi and her daughter Thiva Shini and Jon is in trouble.  In fact, Rani and Kylie are here to purchase all the things required for Kylie’s Bharatha Natyam Aurangetram (her Indian dance graduation concert).   Therefore, many sarees have to be bought – for anyone even vaguely associated with the concert, and all family members.  Add to that the fact that Rani comes from a large family and that I was also buying sarees for Rani’s three nieces in Malaysia to thank them for their great kindness towards us during our six months there, and you have Saree mayhem.  I was greatly impressed with Jon’s patience as he sat on velvet covered stools in various Saree caverns providing entertainment to small children while we shopped.  People watching would have been interesting though. 

 At a saree store, the salespeople are all men.  They have the patience of saints.  Each saree consists of at least six meters of cloth and they throw them out on a b  ench so that the potential buyer can see the embroidery, the multi-coloured end piece and the part that will become the under-blouse.  It is nothing for each woman to look at twenty or more sarees per purchase.  Thus these guys are literally standing behind mountains of cloth, patiently folding and unfolding.

Kylie has a good eye for fashion and Thiva Shini also knew the girls I was buying for well, so we were sometimes quite quick to buy – ‘yep, that’s her colour, that will be good for her,  we’ll have that one please, Ok.  who is next?’.  We visited a few of these leviathan stores and bought up big.   Once you have decided on a saree, you get a docket from the sales person.  It seems like a complicated process but everything works like clockwork actually.  You collect your dockets and at the end you take them to a counter. Behind the counter each man has a job, one takes your docket, another takes your money, yet another issues a receipt.  Then you go to another counter with your paid docket and collect your sarees.  Often there is also some sort of free gift involved, such as a carry bag, calendar, mug set or even a suitcase! We left there with so much to carry and headed off into the traffic – the yellow three-wheeled auto-rickshaws all vying for your trade, the beggars, the guys selling peacock feather fans, the fruit sellers, and the one guy who was quite intent on selling me a small plastic guitar emblazoned with spiderman.   He was less successful than the saree stores.

After the saree shopping extravaganza Jon and I went to the post office to send home our excess baggage, mostly our cold weather clothes from Delhi.  Why would I write about that in a journal? Because it was a fascinating experience and a study in how things are done differently.  To post a parcel from India you have to complete several forms in triplicate, but not with carbon, thus you fill each one in three times etc..  Then, each parcel has to be sewn into a calico cover.  This sounds worse than it is, because there is a small shop in the post office where a couple of guys and a lady spend their day sewing up parcels.  Actually it’s a great idea if you can afford the labour costs.  The calico holds the parcel together really well and it will be absolutely 100% obvious if anyone has tampered with its contents.  The cost for sending twelve kilos home buy airmail was about a fifth of what we had been quoted by DHL, so let’s see if they arrive.  If they do I’ll be really seriously impressed.