Shopping for clothes is not my strong point. It’s not that I don’t like clothes, I just can’t be bothered with crowds, sales assistants, changing rooms and queues.

My solution is to circle what I need in a store catalogue, then buy the lot in bulk purchases twice a year. If I could have them delivered to my door it would be the perfect system. It’s even worse when I’m dragged along to go shopping with my wife. Actually, she shops while I try to guess the correct answers to her questions about what looks good.

So shopping for saris is my clothing nightmare writ large – everything that bores me stiff about buying a shirt or advising on a new pair of shoes is magnified a thousand-fold when purchasing a sari.

Your standard sari shop has nothing on display apart from two or three outfits draped over rather scary looking caucasian mannequins with shocking red hair and smiles that belong on a clown at a fairground. Every item in the store is wrapped in plastic and stacked on shelves, so there’s no “I’m just looking” browsing – if you want to see a sari you have to go through the process.

After kicking off your shoes it’s time to stretch out on the large mattresses covering the floor. You’ll be spending some time here so it makes sense to get comfortable and the big bed is a bonus over shopping in the West. If more high street stores offered oversized gym mats for their customers, I might be inclined to shop.

Once comfortable, the salesman (it’s always a man) will ask the lady a few general questions before the cascade of saris begins. Each one is pulled from its plastic bag and draped over the salesman’s shoulder. If the woman shakes her head it goes on the floor to form an ever-growing multicoloured mess of chiffon and silk. A gasp of appreciation results in the sari being transferred to the woman, with the salesman doing his best to get any audience behind him and agree that this is the sari to buy. This is where husbands/boyfriends/significant others need to be paying attention, unless they want to be rebuked by the salesman and cop a withering stare from their wife/girlfriend/significant other.

Once the salesman has a whiff of something the putative purchaser might like, a flood of similar saris makes its way onto the scene. Since each sari is different there are countless permutations of colour, pattern and material. The red one may be perfect, but the beading has been done by machine. The orange one, however, has beautiful hand-stitched peacocks along the border. The only problem is it’s polyester, not silk. The blue one . . . you get the picture. This is the point where I usually slip into a sort of waking coma, to be rudely snapped out of it by a sharp shout from the salesman.

After an hour or so of this, with the discard pile threatening to engulf the store, the real business begins. It’s here that the salesman, who is also a master showman, brings out his quality merchandise. Everything up until this point has been a tease. “You thought you liked the ones I’ve shown you? Wait to till you cop a look at these.” At which point the “oohs” and “aahs” rise in pitch and urgency and I slip back into my coma and try to find that happy place I go to during chick flicks and enforced viewings of Sex and the City.

If you thought that the next stage in the process was the purchase of a sari you’d be (a) wrong and (b) a man. The next stage is “thanks, but I’ll think about it” – before starting the process from scratch at the sari store next door.