You may ask--and some of you have--what has Heather been doing while John practices tabla many hours a day?
It is a valid question. One month has gone out of Heather's life in this mad city. But--it is not an easy question to answer. Her days cannot be generalized into any sort of routine. Yesterday afternoon, for example, she spent approximately 30 minutes in three bicycle rickshaws, and somewhere in the range of 200 minutes in autorickshaws (which were stopped twice to allow parades pass--the first elephants and camels Heather has seen on this continent). She was going to meet a man at a silk weaving factory; she was in pursuit of a loom. The man did not, in fact, appear... but it was alright. Heather had tea with his father and brother, and surely she expected that the pursuit would take more than one day. (John is encouraging in this pursuit, to his credit, as a loom surely takes up more space than a drum kit and is far less moveable once in place.....)
(But what one day is here--when one day lasts as it does and you see a whole city in a matter of a few hours from the cramped seat, cramped window of an autorickshaw and you want to remember everything: the man crossing the busiest street with the serenity of a monk pulling hundreds of pounds of cement on his cart; the kela-wallah with his cart bending under two feet of green bananas, bicycle-wheel spokes made from rebar; elephants and camels carrying benevolent rounded men; a statue of the goddess Durga painted silver with bloodied hands.... There were more things. I can't remember anymore. Time lasted forever and after so much it just takes on the color grey.)
Ahem. So Heather is in pursuit of a loom for her home. During the past few weeks, she's been exploring the world of the Benares handloom--specifically, the Jaquard loom. She has visited weavers in the Cantoments, in Sunderpur, in Kojwa, downtown, in Bhadaini. She has sat in showrooms on cushions while men have enthusiastically thrust silk and silver sarees and yards of fine and raw silk at her until she is buried like someone might be buried at the beach in sand. She has been learning Hindi slowly, so that now at least she can read menus and tell small children to bug off. And she has, in pursuit of knowledge on the subject of Benarsi brocade, assembled a rather motley army of teachers about her--most of whom, to her disadvantage, speak Hindi and a very limited amount of English. More on them later.
And now she is going to go and search for a stool and a mop. Because try as she might, she cannot sew with her non-electric sewing machine while standing. And cutting on the clean floor is tricky when the dust settles again twenty minutes after the floor's been swept.
