The Weavers' Loom

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. The six weavers, their cooperative and Ruth Okafor are invented. Jawalakhel, its Tibetan settlement and its carpet-weaving history are real, and what is said about them, about weaving and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

The order

The order came at the end of the monsoon. Mr Gyaltsen from the office printed it out and carried it into the loom hall as if it might bite.

One carpet, six feet by nine. A field of deep blue with nothing in the middle. Round the edge, a ring of flowers, “one for each of us”. Signed: R. Okafor. There was a little drawing, done in biro by someone who could not draw.

The six weavers passed it along the bench and began, at once, to argue.

The cooperative was one long room with tall windows in the Tibetan settlement at Jawalakhel, on the edge of Patan, whose name is said to mean rice-throwing field. In 1960, Tibetan refugees started weaving carpets there with help from the Nepal government, the Red Cross and Swiss aid workers; accounts differ a little over exactly which agencies. The industry that grew out of it earned Nepal about a third of its foreign currency in the 1980s. Now the orders came one at a time, and each was discussed like a marriage proposal.

“R. could be a man,” said Choekyi, who was forty and sang all day.

“A man does not want flowers,” said Phurbu, sixty-three, who dyed and spun the wool and had opinions about men.

“My husband wants flowers on everything,” said Maiya Tamang. She had woven beside them for twenty years, one of the many Nepali weavers who learned the craft from Tibetans. “Even the motorbike.”

Nordon, twenty-three, searched on her phone and found forty R. Okafors. “Some are dentists,” she reported.

Lhadon, fifty-two, who ran the loom, settled it: they would weave first and gossip about R. while they wove. This is how all carpets are made.

Knots

Lhadon drew the design full size on squared paper and pinned it behind the warp: tall white cotton threads strung tight from beam to beam.

“How many is ‘one for each of us’?” asked Nordon. Twelve, said Lhadon, because twelve went round evenly. Nobody believed that was the reason. Lhadon simply liked twelve.

A Tibetan knot is not tied like a Persian one. The weaver loops her yarn around two warp threads and over a steel rod laid across the front, around and over, along the row. When the rod is full she runs a knife along it, the loops spring open into pile, and the rod slides free. Then a weft thread goes across, and a heavy iron comb comes down to beat it home. Thud. Thud.

Above them hung balls of Phurbu's wool like fruit: madder red, rhubarb yellow, walnut brown, and a great deal of indigo.

Choekyi sang old weaving songs and new ones off the radio, and the knots kept time. Maiya hummed wherever she did not know the words, which was most places, and sang every chorus louder than anyone.

The prayer

On the third day the singing ran out somewhere in the border, the way singing does. In the quiet, Ama Norzin began.

Ama means mother, and is what everyone calls a woman of seventy-nine. Norzin had come from Tibet as a girl and learned to weave in the very first workshop at Jawalakhel. Now she mostly spun, but some mornings she still took the end of the bench, and on those mornings, without warning, she started the Seven-Line Prayer.

It is the prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans remember for helping the Buddha's teaching take root in their country. Its seven short lines say where he came from, how he was born in a lotus, what he attained and what he is called. They show him with a great company gathered round him, wish to follow where he went, and ask him to come.

Ama Norzin never announced it. She just said it, at loom speed, the way other people hum. And the bench fell in with her: around and over, the knife along the rod, the comb coming down. Lhadon said the lines a beat behind. Choekyi joined the second time round. Nordon, who had it from her grandmother, mouthed it with her eyes on the graph. Maiya did not say it, but she had heard it for twenty years, and she hummed its shape, exactly in time.

Then it stopped, and Choekyi said, “So. Is R. married?” and the gossip came back like water.

The company

In October Nordon looked up from the border with her question face.

“Ama,” she said, “the fifth line. All those dakinis round him. That's us.”

Dakinis, in the old accounts, are female embodiments of enlightened energy. Their Tibetan name, khandroma, is often explained as “sky-goer”.

Phurbu snorted. “Sky-goers. I can't get up the stairs.”

But Ama Norzin was pleased. The line begins with khor, she said: the ones around, the company, the circle. “In the paintings he is never alone. There is always a crowd.”

“A crowd of sky-goers,” said Choekyi, “with bad knees and cold tea.”

“Exactly,” said Ama Norzin, and went back to her knots.

The blue

Two-thirds of the way up the field, the indigo ran out. Phurbu dyed a new batch in the courtyard, and it was beautiful, and it was a shade lighter.

Lhadon was furious for a whole afternoon. Phurbu was furious that Lhadon was furious. You could see the line where the old blue met the new.

Ama Norzin ran her thumb along it and said the old carpets all had this: wool dyed in small batches never comes out quite the same twice. Nordon found the word on her phone. Rug dealers call it abrash, and some prize it as a sign that real people dyed the wool by hand.

“Then R. can pay extra,” said Phurbu, and the band stayed.

Late

In November word came that R. would collect the carpet in person.

So they worked late under the bare bulb, with the windows going blue and then black. Choekyi sang until she was hoarse. Maiya brought her daughter's chilli pickle. Ama Norzin fell asleep sitting up for ten minutes, woke, and said, “The yellow is wrong in the ninth flower.” It was.

Some nights, when the rows were hard, the prayer came round again, unplanned. They wove into it and out of it, until someone said something rude about Mr Gyaltsen's new sweater.

Fog

By December the valley filled with fog every morning, and they came to work in shawls and fingerless gloves, carrying glasses of tea that steamed.

On the second Tuesday the last row went in. They cut the carpet from the loom, all of them holding an edge, laid it on the floor and stood round it. Nobody said anything for a while, which for those six was a record.

The pile was clipped level. Then Ama Norzin took small sharp scissors and carved a narrow groove around every flower, so that each one stood up from the blue in relief, as Tibetan carpets are often finished. It took her four days. She let nobody help.

They washed it in the courtyard, dragged it up to the roof to dry in the winter sun, and sat round the edges with their tea to argue one last time about R.

R.

R. was Ruth. She arrived on a cold, bright afternoon in a cardigan that was not warm enough: a woman of about sixty from Leeds, in the north of England, with grey hair and a nervous laugh.

On her street, she said, there is a hall where the women of the neighbourhood meet on Thursdays to talk and knit. Their families came from Nigeria like hers, from Poland, Pakistan, Ireland, Jamaica. The floor is cold lino. She wanted something for the middle of them.

“How many are you?” asked Lhadon.

“Eleven,” said Ruth.

There was a terrible pause. Then Phurbu said, “Twelve flowers. Room for one more,” and all six laughed so hard that Mr Gyaltsen came out of the office.

They unrolled it for her. Ruth, not knowing what else to do, took off her shoes and sat down in the empty blue middle. The weavers sat round the edge, on the flowers, because their legs were tired. Nobody arranged it. It was only when the tea came round that they noticed the shape they had made.

Ruth asked about the lighter band. “Abrash,” said Nordon grandly. “You pay extra.”

The next one

The carpet went to Leeds rolled in plastic. The weavers do not know how the Thursdays went. That is how it is with carpets: they go out of the door and do their work somewhere else.

The next morning a new warp was strung, white and tight, for an order nobody had gossiped about yet. Ama Norzin took the end of the bench. The first loop went round two threads and over the rod, and somewhere in the second row, without announcing it, she began.