Saris at Dinner with the Guru

Night with the Guru
Tuesday, December 20, 2012

Ok… I know this story is long after the pictures, but better late than never, right?

Good thing we had taken our last day off to go shopping for saris for Priya’s wedding one day, because just 2 days before the dinner we were told that it would be appreciated if we wore saris that night. We thought sure, we just bought them, but wait … it’s just yards and yards of fabric right now. When you purchase a sari it comes with a portion at the end of the fabric that is of a different design or no design at all, meant to be cut off and made into the blouse. Ok, so now we have 2 days to get a blouse made. Well, this is India and everyone around here seems to wear a sari, so there must be a tailor nearby. We asked around and found out that there were 2 tailors nearby, BUT the turnaround time is typically 1 MONTH! Whoa… a month?! But we don’t have a month. THIS is where it pays to be having dinner with the guru, because the anesthesiologist went to the tailor with us to explain why we need these done, and suddenly, like magic, she is able to have them done for us in 2 days.

We returned to the tailor on the afternoon of the day of the dinner. They were all done and ready to go. We paid her for her work and then took them back to our rooms to see how we’d look in them. Well… they were pretty once we were able to get into them because, oh my, were they TIGHT! At first we thought “these cannot be right! We are not tiny little Indian girls and she MUST have gotten our measurements wrong”, but no, apparently this was correct, so we squeezed in. We just prayed that the little hook and eyes would hold! After a good laugh at the fit of our blouses, we proceeded to get cleaned up and ready because at 6:00 someone will be coming to wrap us in our saris.

Well, 6:00 came, and 6:00 went, no one was there. No problem because we have now learned that everything runs late around here. Well once 6:35 rolled around we figured we could not wait any longer and we must go find someone to dress us. So we went out onto the campus and stopped the group of 3 young ladies and recruited them to come dress us. Well in no time those 3 multiplied into about 7 or 8 girls that filled our room and had Beth, Julie and myself standing with our arms at our side and fabric flying around like Arabian Nights! As they are wrapping and folding they ask us for our pins. Pins?? We don’t have any pins. Apparently these saris don’t just magically stay in place with all the fancy folding, you need pins to be sure you don’t give the guru a show! So one of the girls literally runs to the little convenient store on campus and purchases some pins so we can be properly dressed. In about 15 minutes flat those girls had us wrapped up and ready to go! The only flaw... they did not like my hair! They told me a needed a comb L I had the top half of my hair pulled back but I left it wavy, they wanted me to smooth it out. Haha… well there was no time for that, so I was going as is! With 2 minutes to spare the girls all wanted picture with us. So a snap here and there and we are off to the vehicle waiting outside our building.

Upon arrival at the temple (4 min down the road) and we are so thankful to see that the Singapore students are also there for this dinner. The Singapore students had arrived just a few days prior to this night and they are at the hospital as engineering students working on frugal innovations. The goal is to see everyday live in the village and hospital and think of new ways or new and inexpensive ways to improve daily living or activities. So needless to say we are glad to see that there are 10 other people to pull some of the attention away from us! In addition there were 5 physicians from the hospital that we knew well.

Before entering the temple there is an area to leave your shoes and wash your feet. Perfect!! I was planning to be able to remove my sandals because they did not match my sari in the least, but it was what I had with me! So we leave our footwear and enter leaving our wet footprints behind. Within the temple are smaller areas of worship. As guests we were brought on a mini tour before greeting the guru. The first thing he says to us is “Who taught you how to wear the sari?”. We just laughed and said we had Dr. Jog’s (the dentist) nurses to thank for dressing us. The four of us along with the physicians and Singapore students are directed to have a seat on one of 2 long benches placed in front of the guru. The benches were places parallel to the guru and facing one another. It was more awkward silent, similar to the first time we me the guru, and after a few minutes were invited to sit for dinner.

Now the style of this dinner is different than another I have attended. There were about 25 people at dinner and we were seated at long tables set up in the shape of a tall, narrow letter ‘U’. At the bottom of the ‘U’ was the ‘head table’ of 3 people, the guru and the 2 Singapore professors. The rest of us were distributed on the sides of the ‘U’, and we of course end up at an end closest to the guru. We figure this sets us up for more awkwardness in our future, but everyone was so focused on the food that dinner went very smoothly for us with no embarrassment or awkward moments.

Dinner itself was amazing! Still vegetarian, but really fantastic! The chef was brought in from Pune, which is about 4 hours away. There was vegetable rice, plain rice, cauliflower curry, pea and tofu curry, soup, cabbage salad, tomatoes, carrots, beets, chips, bread, crackers, chutney, strawberries, grapes, donut dessert dish, etc, etc… There were several servers that just continued to walk around the inside of our little U to serve us. The only problem with this is that they wanted to give me more of things before I had a chance to even try it for the first time! They just kept coming with more and more! But then we learned after watching others that you do not need to politely say ‘no thank you’ each time, you just need to make a motion to guard your plate. Then we realized that we were not eating fast enough either! We looked up to find the guru on dessert as we still had our plates full of dinner! So we moved our marathon pace to a sprint so we could catch up! In the end I believe dinner only lasted 15 minutes.

The funniest moment of dinner was when Beth and I looked up to see the absolute look of determination on Dr. Rishikesh’s face! He had made a bet with Jeremy before dinner over who could eat the most at dinner since neither of them had gotten lunch that day. Rishikesh totally did the “I got my eye on you Focker” motion in a very low profile manner! We almost died and wanted to bust out laughing, but we kept it together and continued shoveling food.

After dinner we were directed to a washing station to wash our hands, since we don’t us utensils, and then directed to be seated in front of the guru again. At this point my body is concentrating so hard on digesting that I just want to go lay down! But then the dinner servers come out with their arms full of bags. The guru calls us up to him, ladies first, then gents. The guru presented all the ladies with a sari and the men with a dress shirt! So this dinner we were all so worried about turned out quite well. Once everyone had received their parting gift, we were bit good night by the guru and back to the hospital. We were in our rooms again before 9:00!

We received many compliments that night on how well we carried ourselves in our saris and how comfortable we looked. Even though we did not quite have the Indian accessories like the bangles, bindi or necklaces, they were impressed with how we embraced the culture and we open to wearing the saris to dinner. For us it was almost like being a little girl and playing dress up with your girlfriends, and more than anything we were just trying not to embarrass ourselves!