July in Chennai, India, is wet and dry. First the monsoons pound the ground until you can’t tell feces apart from sandalwood paste on the roads of old Triplicane by Marina Beach. Then, about the middle of the month, the rays of the sun spew forth like magma from a latent volcano. Puddles vanish. Potholes crack into view. Over by Chennai Central Railway Station, the murky waters of the Cooum flinch. The river smells less and less like moss and more and more like the filth it breeds.

 Freshly married non-Brahmin couples wilt in this month. From July 15^th begins the Tamil month of Adi.  Sex is taboo. Young wives slip away into their mother’s homes for a month. A new bride knows that when she reenters her conjugal bed in mid-August, she’ll begin the night with a strand of potent jasmine flowers in her hair and six yards of a silk sari draped tight enough to fool her mother-in-law and loose enough to lull her husband.

 In such a restless month, Nalli nullifies the scorching July sun. Inside this 200-year-old sari institution, the frosty blasts of a hidden air-conditioner carry the smell of fresh-dyed silk and starched handloom.

Scissors rip through disrobed rolls of 2 by 2 cotton.

Clerks scan 1000 Rupee notes for counterfeits.

Cash registers jingle open.

Rubber stamps sink their teeth into bills.

Paid.

Delivered.

No returns.

Only exchanges.

Sticky brown tapes seal brown bags hiding customer purchases from unsuspecting husbands.

 Sari clerks line the wall, unpleating sari after sari from their tight folds until a customer picks one. From time to time, their hands, inadvertently, brush a woman’s luscious breasts as they drape the sari palloo around her torso and over her shoulder: “Let me show you how this design becomes you, madam, please step forward.”

 Precocious women like me don’t step forward and hand over our breasts, in a cup, to lascivious salesmen.

 Mine are power tactics learned from years of guarding nipples from being crushed by the hand of fate. If you’ve had your breasts pinched in Tanzania while running to catch a bus, you learn to create makeshift nipple-guards the way cricketers in India wear genital guards, the way American football heroes pad their basement area with insulation pads carved from granite.

 At Nalli’s I always say “No, thanks, give me the sari, young man, and I’ll take it to the mirror to see how it drapes me.”