Days of work, painstaking, eye-crossing work, to wind one warp beam properly. But sometimes there was a kind of music to it, when the drum was turning well, clattering on its hinges, and the yarn was whirling through the eyes of the board, like a stream shooting through rapids.
And then, one day, Shombhu at last led Alu to a loom. Alu, in his eagerness, would have jumped straight down to the bench, but Shombhu’s hand was on his shoulder. He smiled his cracked, discoloured smile: You have to know what it is first.
The machine, like man, is captive to language.
So that was another month gone, a labour of a different kind.
Shombhu Debnath squats by the loom with Alu beside him. He points with his cane at a heavy beam. He opens his mouth, he would speak, but lo! the loom has knotted his tongue. So many names, so many words, words beaten together in the churning which created the world: Tangail words, stewed with Noakhali words, salted with Naboganj words, boiled up with English (picked up who knows where in his years of wandering). Words, words, this village teems with words, yet too few to speak of the world and the machine. Such wealth and such oppression: to survive a man must try twice as hard, pour out words, whatever comes his way, and hope …
Kol-norod, Shombhu shouts, pointing with his cane. Kol-norod in Noakhali, nata-norod in Tangail, cloth beam in English.
Then his cane switches to the other end of the loom: bhim-norod in Noakhali, pancha-norod in Tangail, warp beam in English. Understood? All right now — his cane points back at the cloth beam — in Tangail?
Alu hesitates, and a fraction of a second later a weal is reddening on his back. Shombhu Debnath smiles: You have to study hard, you know. We sucked it all in through our mother’s tits.
So many words, so many things. On a loom a beam’s name changes after every inch. Why? Every nail has a name, every twist of rope, every little eyelet, every twig of bamboo on the heddle. A loom is a dictionaryglossarythesaurus. Why? Words serve no purpose; nothing mechanical. No, it is because the weaver, in making cloth, makes words, too, and trespassing on the territory of the poets gives names to things the eye can’t see. That is why the loom has given language more words, more metaphor, more idiom than all the world’s armies of pen-wielders.
And so it went on.
It was hard, but at the end of a month Alu, his back matted with scars, could name every nail and every join on the fly-shuttle loom. And so at last Shombhu Debnath could stop him no longer from climbing into the loom’s pit.
Actually weaving is simple. All it is is a technique for laying a cross-thread, called the weft or woof, between parallel long threads, called the warp, at right angles. To do this, it is enough to part the warp threads so that the weft can be passed through, and then close them again so that they lock the weft in place. That is all it is and it rules all cloth (except bashed, beaten things like felt, which, despite dictionaries, is not cloth), in all times and in all the realms of the world. The machines change as dizzily as all appearances; there are dummy-shuttle looms and rapier looms and water-jet looms and circular looms. But the changes are merely mechanical, they have to do with speed and bulk and quality. The essence of cloth — locking yarns together by crossing them — has not changed since prehistory.
It’s so simple, Alu said with a conqueror’s elation. It took no more than a day to learn, just a matter of coordination: tug on the shuttle-cord once and the shuttle flies across with the weft, press the right pedal and the warp closes on the weft, push the reed once towards you and the cloth grows by another minute fraction of an inch, then tug the shuttle-cord again … like a dance, one way, then another, hands and feet together.
Yes, said Shombhu Debnath. Plain white cloth, like you’re weaving, is simple. You’ll find out how simple it is if you ever get past that.
Alu paid him no attention. He had his reward at last: a five-yard length of cloth. Maya cut it from the cloth beam for him. You’ll never learn, she said, folding it. Go back to your books. But she smiled.
Alu walked sedately out of the courtyard, the cloth folded under his arm. When he reached the bamboos he began to run. He bounded into Balaram’s study and shouted: Look, the first bit of cloth I’ve woven. But Balaram was away, dousing the village in antiseptic.
It didn’t matter, for Alu was already in a dream. It took him barely a week to master the weaving of ordinary white cloth. At the end of the week the loom, rattling faster than it ever had before, had thrown out a waterfall of cloth.
But Shombhu Debnath curled his lip. He looked at the bale Alu had woven, and snorted: How old are you?
Fifteen, Alu said, sixteen soon.
Shame, said Shombhu. We used to do better than that when we were ten.
But, again, Maya smiled.
At the end of the week, Shombhu Debnath moved Alu on to coloured cloth. The simplest first, a weft of one shade and a warp of another — no different, really, from weaving plain cloth. Then real patterns: checks which needed two changes of shuttle for every inch; then bordered stripes and even bordered checks.
Alu learnt quicker than Shombhu Debnath could teach. His loom poured out rainbows of cloth with magical ease.
Fast, too fast, faster than Maya could wind bobbins. Maya had to appeal to Rakhal for help. But Rakhal, proudly, had no time. He was busy at last. He had saved enough money to join the Bruce Lee kung fu class (daily 7 a.m.; fees weekly) near the ancient banyan of Poramatola in Naboganj. He was working furiously himself, after his classes, to earn money for his bus fares and for fees for months and months ahead. So Maya, disappointed, had to hire bobbins out to families with lots of little children, so that Alu would have enough yarn for the maws of his loom.
And Alu wove still faster. His hands flew like pistons; the shuttle became a wooden blur, its knocking, as it hit the sides of the batten, merged and rose into a whine. Maya marvelled at last; she had never seen such speed, and that night Alu somersaulted all the way back through the bamboo forest.
Alu was peacock-proud. He longed to preen, to spread the feathers of his skill. But Lalpukur was churning like cement in a grinder, and Balaram was busy chasing its shooting boundaries with buckets of carbolic acid, his hair wafting behind him, in the germ-free air; Toru-debi was fouled in the tangles of her buttonless blouse; and, as for Shombhu Debnath, he had taken to disappearing again, all through the day, and in the chaos of that churning no one knew where he went.
Alu had to be content with quantity. In two weeks he wove seventy-five violently coloured lungis. It was something tangible. After he cut the seventy-fifth from the cloth beam he and Maya laid them out in the courtyard and waited late into the evening for Shombhu Debnath.
But Shombhu Debnath was unimpressed when he arrived at last, panting and damp with evening dew. He dismissed the carpet of cloth with a wave: Simple patterns; a boy could do it.
Then, teach me better ones, Alu retorted.
Too fast, said Shombhu Debnath, you’re going too fast.
But, still, between disappearances he taught Alu to tie the heddle of his loom for grainy tabby weaves: two adjacent strings of the warp, instead of the usual alternate, in a regular series across the beam, crossed with two picks of the weft instead of one. He taught him dizzying spectroscopic patterns, spiralling combinations of eight, ten, twelve colours. He banished the coarse yarn Alu had started with and warped his loom with fine, delicate cotton instead — 80, 100, 120 warp threads to the inch. Be careful, he said, this yarn tears if the shuttle so much as touches it.