The Dacca Gauzes

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 were embroidered

With gold thread paisleys

Were distributed among the

Nieces and daughter- in- law

Those too now lost.

In history we learnt: the hands

Of 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.

- Agha Shahid Ali