Being faux Indian is hard to do

I think the clothes Indian women wear are beautiful. The draping fabric, the vibrant colors, the intricate details. I love people watching in India because it's like a parade of beauty coming down the street. Even the women who work as maids or on the road crew wear beautiful saris while working. 

While I love to look at Indian women's clothing, I am fully aware that I am white and would just look like a poser if I were to wear them myself. Even when attending Indian events in the U.S., I usually opt against wearing any of my Indian clothing. And I have lots of it. My mother-in-law loaded me up on the last visit. Unfortunately, the clothes I ended up with are like the ugly step-siblings of what I see all the other women wearing. My two saris are actually pretty, but one is such a stiff material its completely unrealistic for any activity other than playing mannequin, and the other I haven't had a chance to wear yet. The more common day-to-day outfits are called salwar kameez. See photo:

Now bear in mind that none of mine are this pretty. In fact, one is the color of pea soup, a color that wouldn't even flatter an Indian complexion. I've never been a big fan of these outfits.

The pants are made with so much excess fabric it's like wearing a diaper. Harem pants, basically. Even those that have a tapered leg (think skinny jeans) still have ridiculous amounts of fabric up top. You can fit maybe two extra people in the waist of these pants, which you tighten with a drawstring. So all this fabric is bunched up around your butt. Which I guess is why your top needs to be long enough to cover it. The tops are not so bad on their own, although much longer than an American girl is used to.

And then there's the spare strip of fabric, the dupatta. This can be worn many different ways. In Hindi movies you usually see it going across the front of the neck and hanging down the back, like in the photo. My mother-in-law likes to wear hers pulled more loosely in the front so it sort of drapes on her chest. And I've seen some women wearing it more spread out so it covers the shoulders and hangs down the arms. Any way you do it, it's a bitch to keep on. You lean forward, it falls off. Move an arm, it falls off. If a good stiff breeze comes up it could strangle you. It handily doubles as a shawl if your arms get cold, but that's pretty much the only time I'm glad to have one around.

Many women my age in India wear western style clothing. So I can go out in jeans and a tshirt and fit right in...well, as much is allowed by my skin and hair color anyway. But since I've been working, and especially since I've been going to a village where there hasn't exactly been a lot of western exposure, I felt like it would be more respectful to wear traditional Indian dress to work. I've worked out how to tie up my pants to minimize the bulk as much as possible. I've resorted to tying my dupatta loosely behind my back which keeps it on most of the time. I'm learning the ropes. What has taken me the longest to figure out, however, is maneuvering all this fabric around the bathroom.

For the uninitiated, Indian toilets are probably the most daunting thing you will encounter here. I probably shouldn't say "Indian toilet" because it's not just here, but moving on.

Yep, that's a porcelain hole in the floor. There are many places that will have western style toilets instead (or also), but regardless of which one you are faced with, you will not find any toilet paper. So, if you can't quite bring yourself to try the handwash dripdry method, you have to keep a clump of tissue in your hand or have your purse hanging from some part of your body. Not all that bad right? Thanks to being horribly ill on the last visit, I mastered the Indian toilet out of necessity.

However, adding 40 pounds of extra fabric to my frame makes this an entirely different matter. The floor will inevitably be wet, either because there is also a shower in the bathroom (just a shower head on the wall, you have to squeegee the floor after) or it's just been cleaned or just because of the vary nature of the Indian toilet. So attempting to move around without stepping in anything too questionable looking, and without slipping and falling, and trying to keep all the excess fabric and whatever else you have with you off the floor and out of harm's way...it's rather complicated. It did not take the kids long to discover that I always emerge from the bathroom looking very frazzled. They have no idea why that is, since this is all they've ever known, but it entertains them enough to make them follow me every time anyway.

Perhaps by the time I leave here I will have it all figured out. Either way, I will be absurdly happy to return to my own bathroom and wearing western clothes everywhere I go. I may be in India and have an Indian family, but I am American through and through.