Originally posted by: sashashyam
Girls,
Let us get back to the gajras, please!
Bee, I used to make them with the fat little buds of the mallikaipoo, which have short stems. The othre kind is thing and has long stems, and that is the one the flower selles used, and that is one in Purvi's gajra, with some other flower, perhaps rose petals as suggested, or perhaps the orange kanakambaram. We used the latter only for the gods, we did not wear them in our hair, as there was no scent.
I was taught to thread the mallikai buds with a needle, on to sewing thread. I alternated two in a line, the buds outside and the stems overlapping in the centre and sewn thru, and then two more at right angles to the first two, and so on, making the malai as long as my paatti (grandma) wanted it to be. The way I have described it, the malai comes out looking round in the cross section, and is pure white. Sometimes we added a big red or pink rose right at the middle, so that it would look nice in a garland for one of the deities in the puja room.
The gajras made for wearing in the hair were similar but much shorter, about 4-6 inches. My paatti used to fix them to my pigtails. I had two thick ones, neatly braided on either side of my head, so that was not difficult. Two each on either side, and they used to smell lovely. Aaah...such memories!
Jyothi, Arjun could have said gunda badmaash with my blessings. Not dehati. It is not something he would have picked up in the garage - there the vocabulary would have been much more colourful, to put it mildly. The point is that dehati is a sneer at Vishnu not because he is a criminal, but because he is from a village. That is not right, and it is perhaps more the kind of the thing the old Arjun would have said, in his city-bred arrogance.
Shyamala
CID
