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"Apke ckuri kaha hai?" asked the community health workers.

"Nahi malum," I said ungrammatically, wondering about the correct Hindi for "My bangles fell off and broke."

The operating-theater nurses were characteristically forthright: "Nice try, but the hair is not OK." (This was true, but it was the monsoon season, so I felt I deserved some slack.) The male medical staff perked up and grinned, and the rickshaw wallahs leaned on their handlebars, leering.

On several occasions during the day, women I didn't even know stopped me, adjusted a pleat here and a tuck there, then moved on without having said a word.

I ended the day sweaty, bedraggled and completely bemused -- but also determined to repeat the process until I got the hang of it.

I hoped wearing a sari would make working in India easier, that it would offer some small insight into the culture, that it would help gawky, WASP me finesse the demure-flamboyant dichotomy every Indian woman understood. I didn't anticipate that my relationship with those fiendish five and a half yards of material would come to mirror my yearlong encounter with the subcontinent itself, or that something as simple as cloth would carry in its folds countless traditions, prohibitions and assumptions that would wrap around me and change more than my appearance.

I had ample opportunity to hone my sari-wearing skills because I was working in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, located directly beneath Nepal and somewhere back in the 19th century. I am a nurse practitioner, and I'd got it into my head to volunteer for a year at Kurji Holy Family Hospital, which is run by the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, Bihar's capital. I taught in the nursing school, struggled in Hindi classes, ate in the hospital cafeteria (greenish curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner), did my laundry in a bucket in my bathroom and lived in a hostel on the hospital compound. And I learned quickly that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a grown-up, professional woman, I needed to wear a sari.

As with many things in India, however, acquiring one was dramatically more complicated than I'd foreseen. First off, I had to get the material, which involved an expedition to the Aladdin's cave of Patna Market, a medieval warren of narrow streets crammed with open-fronted shops, their walls mosaics of jewel-toned cloth. I stood, looking white, damp and awkward in my skimpy khaki skirt, and pointed hopefully at various breathtaking lengths of material; two kind Indian friends who'd escorted me took it from there and, after fingering my choices and pronouncing them suitable, launched into fusillades of bargaining with the elderly men who sat sipping tea behind the counters.

On my first such expedition I walked out of the shop with five and a half yards of airy, blue, synthetic stuff, light as the breeze and about as manageable. I thought I was finished, but no, we'd hardly started.

Next page | Wound, draped and tucked into my first sari