muslin gauze

When Manan posted this, my first response was exhausted outrage (and the impulse to make snark in the comments) but then in short order, I found myself wandering off to my bookshelves in search of The Half-Inch Himalayas, because my strange little mind works like that.

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 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

(“Muslin is a type of finely-woven cotton fabric, introduced to Europe from the Middle East in the 17th century. Its first recorded use in England was in 1670. It was named for the city where Europeans first encountered it, Mosul, in what is now Iraq, but the fabric actually originated from Dhaka in what is now Bangladesh.")