Dreams and Textiles

LOVE this pattern on an old Gudri blanket from Bengal


5:35 a.m. Tuesday March 10th, 2009
Jaipur
Awoke suddenly a few moments ago from a stark and all too realistic feeling nightmare: I was traveling far from home (though not here in India) and I’d been temporarily abducted at gunpoint, along with several others, and forced inside a house to a back room where I was forced to kneel face down in front of some honcho to face my fate. I instantly realized I must prepare to die immediately. I prayed for calm and courage and sought the stillest, smallest place inside of me to orient around love, forgiveness and presence, and was in a flash ordered to sit up and show my face to my captor/fate decider. I did and he seemed a bit disappointed and said something like, ‘that’s not him’ and then they said I could go, bingo. The others all remained as hostages though, and as I walked out on my own volition to take up a semi-safe station outdoors maybe 100-150 feet from the building in a gas station next door, word filtered out that about two dozen others, foreigners like me, were being held inside at gunpoint. They even sent a captor woman out with two guns to the small group of random people who comprised the folks around me, which ended uneventfully. We were mostly plotting various ways of slipping out of there back to safety. After a while I realized that it was strangely safe to either commandeer a car and drive or otherwise simply walk away and that I needed to get the hell out of there and not linger, and that seemed like it was about to happen even as more details were coming out and it was clear that whatever police and government were now involved in the process… and then I awoke to utter darkness, feeling very nervous and it all seeming very real for a while. The birds starting chirping with gusto, and the pre-dawn call to prayer started being piped over the local neighborhood sound systems, and I gradually came back. Sobering, and weird.

On the upside: it was all a dream, and I did in fact enjoy a nice day yesterday. Went to the wonderful Govind Dev ji temple in the morning with my soul brother Raju, and caught up with him a bit before climbing into work mode. Picked a sofa frame which I plan to upholster with one of these fantastic Suzani pieces, got a couple other quotes and then doubled back with my friend Robert to finish our respective buys at the textile house where we’d discovered these pieces the day or two before.

Robert’s been an unexpected find these last days—an actual friendly, open and communicative fellow westerner (of sorts, he’s from the northern tip of Australia, which is pretty far from my “west”) who’s been fun to kick around with on our hunt for cool old textiles. He had a day or so of unplanned down time which I’d overheard him mention when we were both at the same place working with one of my favorite suppliers whom he was working with for the very first time. I asked him if he had any interest in great old textiles, as I was planning to spend the next day checking out one or two of Jaipur’s best wholesale sources of same; he jumped at it even though it’s not his usual gig, work-wise, and we came to enjoy each other’s company as we ate dust and sifted through hundreds of old Gudri and Suzani and other amazing, weird, and curious items.

I came home and took a nap and then Rob and I went out to grab dinner for one of my too-rare nights out here. Talked business, margin formulas, export shop, family, life and love and have generally enjoyed a little unexpected good company on our respective journeys far from home.

Rob seems to do a pretty nice business in a range of eco-friendly items, furniture and cool lifestyle items, including working with hotels across Asia to outfit their places with various great gear. If you ever need to outfit your hotel in Asia, give a shout and I’ll hook you up with him—he knows his stuff and I’ve been impressed by his professionalism and knowledge of and sensitivity to his own business and its impact on the planet, and just his plain old decency. With so many of my friends in India here for more devotional reasons (as am I at heart), it’s also been really nice to be able to talk shop and relate about some of the other crazy and amazing reasons why he and I are both here, working.

OK, time to try and go back to bed and take some rest before the sun comes up into the cacophony of dawn birdsong.



One of the Afghan Suzani pieces I just found-soon to be an amazing custom upholstered sofa?



Jai Shree Krishna!

And Happy Holi everyone!

Happy Hunting

In my element, awash in history


11:14 p.m., Sunday March 8, 2009

Today is my father Edward’s birthday—#79. Just spoke with him by phone a bit ago, wishing him well in Concord New Hampshire during his morning and my evening of the same day.

Today was a grand adventure through two nice warehouse showrooms of textiles young and old. One I’ve been to a number of times, the other was a gem offered by our driver Surjeet, with whose car service I intend to travel to both Vrindavan and Jodhpur, in whichever order unfolds.

I went initially in search of old Gudri blankets, wonderful textiles with a marvelous variety of form and color represented in their patterns, sometimes manically different from front to back. Some I want to use for a small upholstery project, some for making some one-of-a-kind, uber-special party jackets, and some for simply bringing home to enjoy as is.

Lo and behold, the first stop even had a stack of enormous hand-embroidered vintage Afghan Suzani pieces, quite like the ones I scouted out myself last year in Afghanistan for me and some friends in New York. (Though I paid about half this asking price when I was in Afghanistan, no doubt. This year, it doesn’t feel worth the risk to travel there again.)

I picked a few out, sent some pics to a couple of clients to see if they were of interest, and picked a few that were nice enough to want to keep for sure, even though my budget didn’t include a Suzani score. That’s why God made credit cards, right? And scored almost twenty sweet Gudri pieces along the way, too. I’m having those cleaned and delivered to my guest house tomorrow—nice!


A splendid Afghan piece from the day's exploits


Got textiles?

Back to Rajasthan

Sun rising through the smog leaving Delhi en route to Jaipur

8:18 p.m. Saturday March 7th, 2009
Jaipur, Rajasthan

Finally, dear Delhi departed—huzzah! Not a moment too soon, I swear. I hopped a pre-dawn ride with my friend Raju’s driver Mukesh, who was returning to Jaipur at 6 a.m.—worth waking up early to grab that easy flow. Groggy as I was, it felt great to enter incredible and evocative Rajasthan again, leaving Delhi far behind.

Mukesh and I are old pals of sorts, if language-free ones—he ferried me about quite a bit on my first true Dharma sourcing mission here several years ago. Always interesting to spend time with someone when verbal language is largely missing from the communication equation. He knows about as much English and I do Hindi: “photo, tea/coffee, thank you sir, coming (as in ‘Jaipur is coming’), midway” (though that’s cheating because it’s the name of the main Delhi-Jaipur highway stopping point of food dhabas and chai walas).

Actually, I know much more Sanskrit than Hindi; all that time learning yoga asanas and chanting kirtan has paid off in kind. What Hindi do I know? Not much! And I’ll prove it here, by brevity, spelling and translation: Danyawad (thank you), nahin or nayee/nay (no), thik hain (OK, or something close to it) and my old standby, acha, which means something like “ah” or “I see” or “yep.” Pretty weak conversational tea, believe me—so here for me, it’s all about the twinkly eye contact and the heart’s intention! Lucky for me, India is about nothing if not twinkly eye contact. I fall in love at least several times a day with passing strangers and rikshaw walas and our shared moments of eye connection, nods and smiles, all in recognition of some deeper soul connection that America has managed to largely bleed out of its daily social interactivity. Our loss, in a sad and big way.

So, Mukesh and I shared a ride unpunctuated by any need to catch up on the latest news or blues to keep us amused. Still, we shared warm smiles and a hug upon me meeting him in front of Delhi’s Imperial Hotel as we had planned through Raju the evening before. In fact, we shared one of those blessed moments of twinklyness on the phone, when Raju had me on the cell and Mukesh on the landline, and was brokering the details of the meet. When I said, “oh, is that Mukesh who used to be Induji’s driver?” it all came back to Raju that of course we’d met many times, and he then shared with Mukesh that I was the passenger and we all laughed in a friendly round of “Jai Sri Krishna!”

Sometimes a little Sanskrit goes a long way.





Enjoying a 50 cent shave

Pics

A man dresses up as Hanuman on Tuesday (Hanuman Day) and cavorts in downtown Delhi, busking for donations



"Let's see--I wonder which this wire is?" More classic Indian wiring!



Poster in the Delhi Metro system museum: Patel Chowk Station



School children returning home, by the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi



The chihuahua Bandito: the newest addition to the Abracadabra guest house family.

From Shopping to Sickbay

Vintage Banjara textiles, round 1

9 a.m. Thursday March 5th, 2009
Slammed. This sore throat started creeping up on me last evening, just after getting an ayurvedic oil massage that left me diving for a shower to wash all the oil and powder off of my Delhi’d skin. I’d hoped that with extra doses of super-green powder, probiotics and Yin Chiao I’d be able to fight it off, but it had a ‘nother think. I hope I can still avert the worst, but this all the earmarks of a cold that could well lay me up for a few days of serious unhappiness. Damn Delhi, I can’t wait to get out of here, in spite of its various joys.

Too bad, because I’d just finished a raging day of productivity: a swift half-day of sorting through old furniture picking a few gems from among a lot of dross, followed by a visit to TARA Projects, one of India’s pioneering fair trade advocacy groups and my main source of officially certified ‘fair trade’ goods. There I looked through various new items, restocked on some stone goods and visited with Puneet, one of my main regular contacts there. Good folks.

Almost snuck in a visit to the upscale FabIndia to look for a bit of more local-style wear, but the driver I’d hired for the day (an infrequent luxury but a necessary one given the distances I’d had to travel into the deep south Delhi suburbs) was clearly getting ready to return to the fold. Maybe later.

This morning, in just a few minutes, I’m heading off with Vasant to Old Delhi to scout out the Delhi Musical Systems shop in search of some groovy instruments. My old friend (and occasional Dharma client) John put in a special request for me to look for “any weird percussion instruments” while I’m here; also I’ve been hankering for a good drone-ish thing to play, maybe an ektar. Who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and find a sweet harmonium too? I’ll never learn to play unless I have one around, I suppose. Then we plan to make a pilgrimage to Gulab Singh’s ancient house of attars, perfumes and essential oils.

By then, my sense is I’ll be about ready for some rest. Plus, I still need to figure out if I’m doing anything crazy like heading to Jaipur tonight…

8:40 p.m.
Well, so much for traveling anywhere tonight. I can barely stand, at this point. The fever is beginning to make its play and the achey breakies are coming up the backstretch. Just found out I have to leave the confines of the Abracadabra guest house tomorrow, a day or two before schedule, due to an houseful of visiting French—so I’ll steward my energy this eve and go hunting through Paharganj for a good place to lie in bed and be sick and read. Ah, there’s no place like thousands of miles from home…

Time to swallow the red pill of fever reduction and climb under the covers.

Martin "Vasant" Brading returning from the chai hunt in Old Delhi, a happy man!

It begins

Ah, the comforts of home on the road...

10:40 p.m. Tuesday March 3rd, 2009
Finally got to bed at dawn, vainly trying to adjust my biorhythms to a suddenly polar cycle, so it was early afternoon before I really got myself down to banjara alley. I clambered up on the platform and sat amidst the piles of old textiles, diving on in. It’s increasingly clear that the old style banjara textiles are done, just disappearing from the markets. I did find 16 pretty nice old pieces today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s my biggest score of the trip, banjara-wise. On the other hand, I can’t wait to get back to Jaipur where I can get even closer to the source of the gorgeous vintage Gudri cotton blankets I love. The fabrics get my blood moving, somehow.

Tomorrow I hire a car ($20-25 including driver and some mileage limits) to take me in the deep Delhi ‘burbs, Tughlaqabad Extension, to hunt for antique furniture. If it doesn’t eat up my entire day, maybe at night I’ll get to visit some folks with whom my sister Jenny recently connected on her first trip to India, family of friends sort of thing. I’m loaded down with gifts from Jenny to them, so better I see them before lugging their goodies all over Vraja and Rajasthan.

Feels like the week is starting slowly, but actually I’m ticking some things off the list too; got my bindis and bangles all taken care of today, tomorrow get the furniture ball rolling, and Thursday go to Old Delhi for musical instruments, statues and a visit to the fabled Gulab Singh oil house.

The big question now is: next stop Jaipur, or Vrindavan? Holi is coming up in about a week so that’s a factor in timing: it’s like Christmas in the States in that work utterly shuts down for one or more days. In plenty of places, the unusual temporary release from the restrictive norms that the color festival of Holi allows also breeds an element of chaos or danger that can be more than I feel like dealing with on the streets. Then the question is, where to hunker down inside a room or a compound for a few days? Vrindavan gets first dibs on that, I think, for now at least.

NYC>Delhi

Farewell from the flight Goddess of JFK airport

Early Monday March 2, 2009
I write this while nestling into my small room here at the Abracadabra guest house, tucked behind the Janpath Tibetan markets near Connaught Circus in downtown Delhi. It’s just past four twenty in the morning, and the jetlag has begun. The long flight direct from New York via a cramped middle seat on Air India finally ended, after offering me aerial glimpses of the mountains and deserts of Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Landing, phone charging and gear acquisition all went smooth, and after dropping my gear off at my guest house I hit the streets just at sunset for a quick hello.

Was very happy to see on the street some of my old friends among the banjara ladies, still holding court; I will visit more later during daylight hours. Ended up talking with a Kashmiri guy and going back to his house to drink tea and look at shawls; I met his wife Fatima and young daughters (Arvina, 8 and Sabrina, 5) who were doing homework and quickly invited me to draw pictures with them. After tea Manzoor’s neighbor the Kashmiri shawl wala showed me some truly incredible hand embroidered woolen shawls, including one that was so gorgeously done I was tempted to buy it for myself. The asking price of 85,000 rupees (or approximately $1800 US) steered me clear. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to take a photo of it later; it was a real beauty.

One fresh anar (pomegranate) juice and a thali plate at Saravana Bhavan later, I wandered back to Abracadabra and swiftly unwound into a dream state. Someone rang my mobile around 1 or 2 and I ended up being awake for the last hours. Spent some time reviewing and updating all the spreadsheets I use to track my buying, my expenses, my whole economic life over here. I imagine tomorrow will be slightly lazy, but I expect to hit the ground running and try and get all the balls rolling here in Delhi by the end of this week.

This year I have a fantasy, seemingly even more grounded in reality than every year’s phantasm, that I may be able to complete all my work within several weeks, and have a couple weeks left over to travel a bit to unseen realms and melt away into village devotional Indian life for a while. So motivation is high to work diligently and efficiently! Of course, working efficiently in India is definitionally oxymoronic, but at least I can tilt at the windmill…

5:35 a.m., and the city begins to stir. Droning, muffled chants echo through distant streets, the ongoing Doppler of traffic starting up along the offices, craft emporia and high-end hotels of Janpath Avenue. Maybe if I can sleep some more now, I’ll wake up on a local time schedule…