Alu’s loom swallowed it faster than Maya and all her hired bobbin-winders could feed it. In another two weeks Alu had woven 120 lungis.
They stared at the pile aghast, as they might at the sulky rage of a jackfruit tree bombarding the earth with heedless profusion, pouring down more fruit in a day than a district could eat in a week. Who would buy so much cloth? There was enough to crowd several shopkeepers out of their counters.
It was Rakhal who came up with the solution.
Listen, he said to Alu. I’ll sell your cloth in Naboganj. I have to go there for my classes anyway, and I know Naboganj. I’ll get a better price for you than you’d ever be able to get yourself. No one argues with me. But you’ll have to give me a tenth part of the money I earn you, and you’ll have to pay for my kung fu classes. You’ll be able to afford it.
That’s fine, said Maya. That’s settled, then.
Rakhal leapt into the air. He bent his right leg back under him, while the other shot out, parallel to the ground, pointing forward. His palm opened stiffly, swung out sideways and crashed into one of the bamboo pillars of the loom-shed. A corner of the shed buckled and slumped over. The scar on Rakhal’s cheek suddenly blazed crimson. A scream tore out of his bowels, sending a cloud of birds into the air, twittering with alarm.
He’s pleased, Maya explained.
Yes, Rakhal grinned, I’m pleased. He struck another bamboo pole with his palm. Half the shed collapsed, covering his loom with straw. And I’ll tell you a secret, he said. Soon I won’t ever have to touch a loom again. I’m getting a job — of a different kind. I’m going to be rich.
Tell us, Alu and Maya chorused, tell us, Rakhal-da, tellustellustellus.
No, said Rakhal, narrow-eyed, mysterious. It’s a secret.
They saw very little of him in the next fortnight. He left early every morning with a few lungis wrapped up in a bundle and came back late without them. But one evening he returned with a bigger, heavier bundle than he had taken with him that morning. No bundle of cloth, that was for sure. He carried it through the courtyard carefully, on his shoulders, and darted straight into his hut and hid it away under the thatch, ignoring Alu and Maya’s stares.
The next day he did not go to Naboganj. At midday Alu and Maya saw him going into the bamboo forest with the bundle perched on his shoulders. Going into the forest so late, Rakhal-da? Alu shouted. Constipation?
Rakhal didn’t deign to answer. So naturally Alu and Maya stole into the forest behind him.
They found him all but invisible in a copse, a small fortress of bamboo. He was sitting, legs folded, on a patch of grass. There were piles all around him: piles of old bottles and tin cans, of oriole-yellow powder, rusty nails and metal scraps, broken razor blades, torn rags, and other steel-grey and nondescript powders. He was working busily, filling bottles with powders and scraps, stuffing their necks with rags.
Rakhal heard a rustle in the bamboo and looked up. He saw them, four large, curious, wondering eyes in the bamboo. Get away from here, he growled. This is secret.
What are those things, Rakhal-da? Alu asked.
Get out, Rakhal shouted. But they were far beyond his reach and he had a half-full bottle on his lap.
What are they, Rakhal-da? Alu asked again.
Rakhal hesitated, drawing a finger over his lips. He could not help stiffening with pride.
They’re bombs, he said. Bombs.
Bombs! they chorused.
Yes, he smiled, bombs. He looked anxiously at them. Of course, he added quickly, they’re simple. Don’t think I don’t know that. This is just to begin with. They’ll teach me the difficult ones later.
Alu and Maya looked at him in silence. You have to start somewhere, he said apologetically. I’ll be doing better soon.
But, Rakhal-da, Alu said, what will you do with them?
Make money, he answered. There’s a good market for them. Because of the war, you know.
What war? said Alu.
Not that one. Rakhal waved a dismissive hand at the eastern horizon beyond the bamboos. There’s a war in the towns, too. They need bombs. You watch; I’ll be rich.
They did not answer. Maya raised the end of her sari to cover her open mouth. Alu stared at the piles in front of Rakhal, biting his lip. All of a sudden Rakhal whipped around, picked up a bottle and threw it high into the air.
Alu and Maya, sprinting through the bamboo, heard it smash harmlessly somewhere behind them. They heard Rakhal call out, laughing: There’s nothing in it … But they did not stop running till they reached the safety of the courtyard.
Alu leapt panting on to his bench at his loom. He had no time for bombs. At last, after days and days of persuasion, argument and reluctance, Shombhu Debnath had promised to teach him jamdani weaving.
The first lesson was a disappointment. Shombhu Debnath handed him a six-inch steel needle with a hook at one end. Get to know it like you know your own tool, he said. Better; you’ll use it more. That’ll be your god now. Kamthakur. The god of work. The god of jamdani.
Not much of a god, said Alu, fingering the hook.
You’ll find out, Shombhu Debnath smiled. You’ll find out if you ever learn.
For a long time it seemed as though he never would. His hands, too long accustomed to brute speed, fumbled when Shombhu Debnath tried to teach him to use the kamthakur to insert bits of coloured yarn parallel to the weft, between the warp strings of a ground-cloth. Every slip meant a tangle of torn warp yarn and an hour spent twisting the frayed ends of the delicate yarn together again. So every tangle meant a swish of Shombhu Debnath’s cane, and a stinging cut across the shoulder and a jubilant smile: I told you so. You’ll never learn. It’s not in your blood.
Then, when he ought to have thrown the shuttle lightly across to fix the inlaid yarn into the ground-cloth with the weft, instead, out of habit, he would slam the shuttle across and the reed after it, like a stonemason wielding a jack-hammer, and the painfully inserted strip of yarn would become a thin smudge, when it ought to have stood out proudly, like a bas-relief, on the cloth. More swishes, more weals, more triumphant You’ll-never-learns.
Alu ignored his smarting back and struggled to steady his hands. It was a bitter fight: to have to be a child again after once having conquered the loom. The trick was patience. He warred on himself, with Maya urging him on, until his thirst for speed ebbed away. Slowly, with joint-numbing pain, his fingers grew in deftness and skill. Through the whir of Shombhu Debnath’s cane he learnt to build patterns — small geometrical ones first — with the tiny lengths of coloured yarn. Bleary-eyed, squinting, he learnt to cover a whole six-yard sari with figured patterns after a fortnight’s back-breaking work.
And Shombhu Debnath drove him still harder, leaning over his shoulder as he sat at the loom, the cane poised over his knuckles. He started him on the classic patterns, the butis of jamdani: the simple star, the tara-buti, and the heart-shaped pan-buti. He made him draw the patterns on paper first, and taught him to hold the pencilled outlines beneath the warp so that his kamthakur, sifting between thousands of fine warp threads, would never vary in its precision by so much as a frayed strand of cotton.
Alu’s butis spun out of his loom: perfect, precise, without blemish.
Shombhu Debnath stopped watching him and began to disappear into the forests again. But every week he would leave a carelessly drawn pattern on Alu’s loom. From those tattered messages Alu put together the lotus, poddo-buti, and the intricate ghor-buti, row after row of figured houses, abstractions of shelter and peace. For his labours he earned tooth-rattling thumps on his back from Rakhaclass="underline" the traders of Naboganj were willing to pay half as much again over the usual price for his cloth. Money at last; plenty of it.