"The Dacca Gauzes" by Agha Shahid Ali

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.

Source of the text – Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, pp. 15-16.

TJB: Precolonial textile; fineness as artisanal & spiritual virtue. This gently compressed lyric compares life to fabric, the gauzier the better.