My First Saree: A Weaver's Diary — Epoche B2
March 1st Dear Diary, Today was my first day as an apprentice in our family's workshop in Madanpura, the weavers' quarter here in Varanasi, and I am to weave a Banarasi silk saree — one piece of cloth, about five and a half metres long, from the first bobbin to the last thread. Chacha ji — my father's younger brother, who runs the two pit looms in the back room — says it will take me a month if I am lucky. A pit loom is exactly what it sounds like: the frame sits at floor level and the weaver's legs go down into a pit dug beneath it, so the foot treadles hang at the right height without the whole loom having to be raised. It fits a small room, and the earth in the pit holds a little damp, which silk needs; dry silk goes brittle and clings to itself. Grandmother used to say that every saree carries somebody's wish in it. I have not decided what mine will be yet. March 5th: Preparing the Yarn The silk arrived this week — raw mulberry yarn, bought as it always is from the traders in Karnataka and sent up by train. Karnataka grows more mulberry silk than any other state, which is why Varanasi, a thousand kilometres away, has bought its raw material from there for as long as anyone in the lane can remember: we make the cloth, not the thread. Ours is dyed deep marigold, with a second lot in emerald for the small motifs. My whole day was winding it onto bobbins on the charkha, the hand-cranked wheel that transfers yarn from the skein onto the small spools that go inside the shuttle. This sounds simple and is not: pull too hard and the filament snaps, too loosely and it slips off the spool in the middle of weaving. Chacha ji checked my first six bobbins and rewound four of them without saying anything. Grandmother used to sit at exactly this job by the window, and she told me once that a thread you have prepared badly will find you again three weeks later. Now I understand that this was a technical statement and not a piece of philosophy. A bobbin wound too tight stretches the silk, and stretched silk relaxes later at its own pace, so the weft it makes lies at a different tension from its neighbours; a bobbin wound too loose collapses and snags, and every snag is a join, and every join is visible on the right side of the cloth. Three weeks is simply how long it takes for that bobbin to reach the shuttle. March 10th: Dyeing the Border Today we dyed the border silk with natural indigo. The vat looks yellow-green, not blue at all, and the silk comes out the same dull colour — then it meets the air and turns, over about a minute, into a deep blue. I watched it happen four times and it did not stop being strange. The dyer explained why, and it is the best thing I have learnt this month. Indigo will not dissolve in water, so it cannot dye anything as it stands. What the vat does is take away oxygen from it — that is what all the stirring and the alkali and the fermenting are for — and the oxygen-poor form, which dyers call indigo white, does dissolve, and is yellow-green. That is what soaks into the silk. When you lift the skein out, the air puts the oxygen back, the dye turns into ordinary blue indigo again, and now it is insoluble inside the fibre and cannot be washed out. This is why indigo needs no mordant — no metal salt to fix it to the cloth, as most natural dyes do. It is not bonded to the silk at all. It is simply trapped there, having been made too large to leave. The skeins hung on the roof to dry, and by two o'clock it was over thirty-five degrees up there, so they were dry before we finished hanging the last of them. The blue border against the marigold body is going to be loud. Chacha ji says loud is what sells in April. March 18th: Warping the Loom The hardest week so far. Warping means setting up the lengthwise threads — the warp is the set of threads held under tension along the loom, and the weft is what the shuttle carries across them. For this saree there are about five thousand of them, each one drawn through a heddle eye and then through the reed. A heddle is a cord or wire with an eye in the middle; one warp thread passes through each, and lifting a group of heddles raises those threads and opens the gap the shuttle flies through. The reed is a comb with a fixed number of gaps to the inch, and it does two jobs: it keeps the threads evenly spaced, and, mounted in the beater, it packs each new weft thread down against the cloth. I asked where five thousand comes from, since nobody seems to count them. It follows from the reed. Our saree is about forty-six inches wide, and this reed is set at a little over a hundred threads to the inch, so $$46 \times 110 \approx 5{,}060,$$ and that is the whole of the mystery. A coarser cloth on a fifty-per-inch reed would need half as many; the number is a consequence of how fine the cloth is meant to be, not a tradition. Two of us worked at it for three days. My eyes ached by the afternoon and I twice threaded four ends where three should go, which meant unpicking backwards — the reed takes a set number of threads per gap, and a gap holding four instead of three crowds them, so that stripe of the cloth comes out denser and darker than the rest for its entire five metres. Chacha ji did not lose his temper, which surprised me. He said everyone does it, and that the ones who never make the mistake are the ones who never look closely enough to notice they have made it. March 25th: Weaving Begins Finally on the loom. My legs are in the pit, working the treadles; my hands throw the shuttle and pull the beater towards me. The pattern is butidar — buti means a small motif, so a butidar cloth is one scattered with them across the body — with a creeping bel , a vine, running along the border, and the leaf-points of the jhallar at its very edge. The three go in that order for a reason: the body is what is seen when the saree is worn, the border frames it, and the jhallar finishes the outermost inch so that the edge does not simply stop. The design comes of