Saturday, May 19, 2007
(reading) from Agha Shahid Ali (reading from Oscar Wilde) *
The Dacca Gauzes
. . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. --Oscar Wilde, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_
Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says,
"what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring.
Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands of the weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again.
One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.
(1987)
* Norton Anthology of Poetry, eds. Margaret Ferguson et al (New York, 2005) pp 1958-9
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