Annikki used to carry her sari extremely well. She had a beautiful collection. She used the sari quite frequently while we lived in India.
After we came to Finland, she felt she got more mileage out of them as curtains. The curtains have decorated our house and have been greatly admired by our visitors. It is something quite unique and blends with how Annikki has decorated our rooms.
Also, her blouses became much too small.
One day we pulled out her old blouses from the trunks. They looked as if they were dolls blouses. We laughed our guts out thinking however did she mange to get into them!
Annikki was extremely slim all through her life in India.
In Finland, now, she wears convenient clothes and quite often, the salwar kameez, Finnish style. The jeans are the most common, but she uses the lovely kameezs with trousers on most occasions when going out.
What she loves are those beautiful scarves. She got a couple as presents a few months ago, and she wears them with everything.
She bought quite a few of them from the shop she did most of her shopping in while in India, some place called FabIndia. The prices were high, by Indian standards, but the quality was really good.
I, too, got most of my kurta pyjamas from there. For my more traditional Kerala gold braided jubba and mundu (dhoti), I went to Mahim, where I found a Malayali shop and bought them there. Unfortunately, as it was a Mumbai holiday, I could not get the exactly correct shoulder throw scarf, so I took another one as a stopper as I had to have one for the wedding in Kottayam a couple of days later.Maybe on my next visit I will get myself the correct one.
People have asked what is meant by the shoulder throw scarf.
In fact, in common day usage, this is just a towel. The farmer used to throw a towel over his shoulder when going out to work, so as to wipe the sweat from his brow. The more expensive throws have developed out of this very natural custom followed by most Malayalis.
The two photos show a traditional and a conventional ME in November 2009!
Some, however, expressed surprise when I was walking around with a thin towel as a shoulder throw on days when I was wearing trousers.
Is it only those in mundus who are allowed to wipe the sweat from their brow?
I do not know why people find it difficult to extrapolate the concepts!
