holy cow

If you want new clothes, shopping in Banaras will make you feel like an emperor.

From stores with marbled floors and high ceilings to road side clothing shacks, customers always receive first class treatment.

We are sitting on a once-white mat in a dimly lit shop. The room is bare and concrete, save for a large steel locker. Once opened, we see that a rainbow of fabric has been concealed inside.

Cotton, silk, baroque. In fiery oranges, reds, cooling blues and turquoises. Anything and everything the heart desires.

There isn't a lot of ready-to-wear clothing to choose from. Instead, we are instructed to select fabric, then a tailor will take our measurements for a custom-sewn suit.

We are offered chai, back cushions, and so much individual attention that we feel guilty for browsing, then leaving.

In another store, the shopkeeper shows us the superiority of his fabric by running the corner of a piece of cloth through a gold ring, yanked off his hairy knuckle, for the purpose of the elaborate demonstration.

The selection is overwhelming everywhere, the sales people are convincing, the prices are tourist-designated, and the guilt is overriding.

It's a confusing maze of material and sales pitches, and I'm not always sure where to shop, sometimes wishing I had help in deciding.

And so it came. I walked into a store one day to find it endorsed by the Hindu gods.

holy cow.