Unstitched

I was a bit down earlier tonight, so I started messing around with a sample of that favourite garment of mine, the sari. I tried winding the length of cloth around my body in various ways, with various supplementary pieces of clothing/underclothing to boot, in different attempts. What I discovered, for the umpteenth time, but more decisively than ever before, was that that piece of cloth can be the sexiest fucker in the entire repertoire of female clothing known to human kind at any fucking time in history.

Take the sari I used - a simple, light, soft, watery chiffon with very small, very unpretentious floral prints. You'd probably get one like it for 150 bucks at your local community market, if you tried. Damn, man. That flimsy chiffon makes an awesome evening gown, draped correctly. And what's more, there's almost nothing to the draping.

(I stood in front of my full-length wardrobe mirror, and posed for paparazzi cameras in my gorgeous little evening number.)

Ta chara, I tried the regular sasky drapes that I can never hope to sport in my life, for obvious reasons: social decorum + lack of courage to defy it. Yes, the cavorting will always be confined to the mirror-front, if you know what I mean.

Then there was the ancient nartoki style (or what I imagine it to be). An improvised breast-band tied in a knot at the back - the waddyacallit - oh yeah, the knachuli, then the sari. There was the old-style rural blouse-less sari wrap. And so on. The bare back, I tell you, is set off by a suitably liquid sari that clings to your form, if you've got the form for it.

Anyway, all this messing around has given a boost to my flagging self-image - I'm being brutally honest here - and I feel better. Fuck that man who forced a nice bit of his chauvinism down our gullets at uni today.

Sometimes, you have to be vain and inane and superficial and un-intellectual in order to repair a self-esteem honed by intellect and damaged by an insult that goes considerably deeper than your clothing and the skin you wear under it.