Jaipur – Kebe & Fast Company

CENTRAL INDIA: Caves, ruins, and a very big tree

dfast on March 1, 2010

From Aurangabad and the cave temples of Ellora we start to arc north on our big loop through central India. The next destination is another great cave temple site, Ajanta, older and if possible even more impressive than Ellora. After that we continue on to an extremely old Buddhist pilgrimage site, Sanchi, via the infamous industrial city of Bhopal, and then, somehow or other, back to Delhi. This is the “hard travel” part of our trip. We have to find local buses, trains, or other transport as we go. There are no schedules, and no reservations.
The first leg, from Aurangabad to Ajanta, is an easy one. Although there is no English – numerically or alphabetically – at the bus stand, lots of people direct us to our bus, which is just pulling out, and magically still has seats. It drops us directly in front of the only reasonable accommodation in the village of Fardarpur, and just like that we have arrived and are settled in.
We are definitely objects of curiosity when we take a stroll through tiny Fardarpur, but the attention is unanimously friendly, and even heart-warming, as when a bullock cart of villagers lumbers past and everybody in the back – mostly women and girls – waves and flashes brilliant smiles, and keeps waving as they trundle up the road. It has been eight years since we were last here, and I remember buying a cold beer at a small shop just north of the town, but now I can’t find the place. We ask a small knot of young men, and they say it is 2 km further. There is an auto-rickshaw beside them, and I say I’ll take that, but everybody, including the driver, agrees that he will charge too much. One guy flags down a 100cc motorbike, tells him what we want, and Katheryn and I squeeze on board. Our driver’s name is Ali. He is about to move to Ireland to be with a girl he met, and has no idea what to expect. We complete our errand, and Ali refuses any payment, even a contribution to his gas money.
Ajanta is a jewel. The 30 caves were carved by Buddhist monks, the interiors covered with stupendous frescoes, and the whole thing was abandoned by the end of the 5th C. The stunning paintings weren’t seen again until 1819, when a British army officer stumbled on the site, following the Waghora River hunting tigers. There is still only the same approach, up the Waghora valley, into the box canyon where the caves form a horseshoe in the cliff face. Those of you who know Ajanta know what an amazing place it is. I won’t go into the details here, but let the pictures speak for themselves. More can be seen below, or on our flickr site, of course.
The next leg of our journey, from Fardarpur to Jalgaon, although short, could be a problem because we have to flag down and board a bus in mid-route, and you can see, if you watch some of our bus videos like this one: bus through Madhya Pradesh how full the buses can be. As it turns out, the bus nearly empties out when it stops, and we actually have a selection of seats to choose from. Jalgaon itself is just a transit town on the rail line, but it has a nice hotel, the Plaza, whose charming owner greets us warmly. There is a waiting list of 29 for the train we want to catch to Bhopal the next morning. It is an early train – 6:30 a.m. – and by the time we get to the pre-dawn platform, our seats are confirmed. This is all just too easy! Where is all the hard travel I was dreading?
Bhopal will always be associated with the worst industrial accident of all time, when a gas leak from the Union Carbide plant seeped out into the city, killing 20,000, and destroying the health of 120,000 more. Admittedly, that isn’t likely to be a big draw for visiting the city, and since we didn’t find anything else that is, I would say give the place a miss. We arrive on the eve of the loudest Hindu festival of the year, Shivaratri, and are in a room directly across from a temple. The blaring broadcast, the manager says with conviction, will stop at 11 p.m. What he didn’t tell us was that the marble tile cutting in the next room wasn’t going to stop until the room was finished. The din in the room is unbelievable, and, tolerant as we are, we have to move when the shriek of saw cutting stone drowning out the blasting loudspeaker becomes too much.
Sanchi is only a speck on the map 69 km from Bhopal, but still we weren’t expecting the bus to take 3 hr. to get there. It just crawls along through the Madhya Pradesh countryside, stopping every few hundred m to let off or pick up (mostly) passengers. People seldom get on singly, but in extended family units. The strongest – the young men – make it on first, and with the aisles already full, it often leaves old women or children to be crammed together in the doorway. The situation looks grim until the next stop, when another 8 or 12 or 20 people somehow manage to squeeze in, and then it gets worse.
Sanchi is the oldest site on our route – it has been a pilgrimage destination since the 3rd C B.C., when the Emperor Asoka built a domed stupa over a relic of the Buddha. The stupa still stands, and Buddhist pilgrims still come – a group from Cambodia are here with us – but what Sanchi is famous for are its four gates. Called “Torana” they consist of two stone pillars supporting three horizontal beams, and they are the best, earliest, carving in India. The sculpture really is spectacular, but we had hoped Sanchi would be the kind of peaceful hamlet it would be nice to spend a few quiet days (after Bhopal) in. Unfortunately it’s just a rather unattractive strip on a busy road, and we decide to move on, the next day, to a beautiful spot we know, Orchha.
This involves picking up the (packed) bus from yesterday, which continues onto the town of Vidisha. From where we have to hope for seats on the six hour train to Jhansi. The good news is we get into one of the upper class compartments; the bad news is that we were sold the wrong kind of ticket at the station, and have to pay a “fine” of 500 rupees. In Jhansi station, before we head out to the village of Orchha, we try to buy tickets for our last leg, to Delhi. It’s such a chaotic scene that I am in line for an hour and a half before I get to the window and then I can only get us on a waiting list.
It’s a hassle getting out to Orchha, with taxi drivers telling us “there are no buses”, but it is worth the effort. The village of Orchha is sandwiched between a massive palace and a huge temple from the 17th C., and the countryside is dotted with ruins. We spend a day cycling around and are attracted to a giant baobab tree standing alone on a hill. It is a tree that seems to be older than its country, to have created the magical landscape around it.

See lots more fabulous photos at https://www.kebeandfast.com and don’t miss the videos:orccha palace , sanchi ,and ajanta.

BOMBAY TO ELLORA: Maximum city to ancient cave temples

dfast on February 23, 2010

An overnight train takes us from Jaipur to Bombay. There is no pressing reason for us to go to Bombay; it’s just one of our favorite Indian cities, and we haven’t been here fortwo years. The humid coastal air, the grand colonial architecture, the vibrant culture, and the dynamic intensity of an entire country-worth of people compacted into a pressure
cooker of a space make this a place like no other. And then there is the food. If India is a collection of countries within a country, Bombay is India within India. All of its diverse parts are here, and there are just too few meals within a day to enjoy them.

On the flip side, all of its diverse parts don’t always get along. Pitched battles are currently taking place on a number of parochial fronts, all fueled by a xenophobic “Maharashtra for Marathi only” party, the Shiv Sena. Most of the city’s taxies aredriven by “Northerners”, typically from Bihar, and they have been given 40 days to learn Marathi or be tossed out by the Sena’s goons. Bollywood, of course, lives in Bombay, and its biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, came out with the seemingly-innocuous statement that Pakistanis should be allowed to play on Indian-based cricket teams. For this the Sena is screaming patriotic invectives at him, and tearing posters off theatres, and threatening to riot in any movie house which shows his latest film, which is to be released this weekend. The biggest story, however, happened today. Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru clan, son of the martyred Rajiv, heir apparent to the venerable Congress Party and P.M.
in waiting is visiting the city. The Sena said it would meet him with scores of black
flag waving protestors. Not only did the protestors fail to materialize, but Rahul, in a
masterstroke, abandoned his planned helicopter itinerary, and walked over to a suburban
station and got onto a commuter train. Everyone, including his own security, was
dumbfounded. You can’t over-estimate what the commuter trains mean to Bombay, and now everyone is enthralled with Rahul, and the Sena is left huffing and blustering, looking deflated and foolish.

From this maximum city on the coast to the ancient abandonnedof the interior is only a half-day train ride. On the train Katheryn gets to
talking with two young women beside her. They are Muslim, and although they are following events in the city closely, they are scared to be overheard talking in public about them. We are heading Aurangabad, named after the (Muslim) Moghul emperor, Aurangzeb. The Sena are great revisionists, and want to change the name to something more “Hindu”, as they did with Bombay/Mumbai. But there are too many Muslims here like Katheryn’s friends, and so far it has not been possible.

The Emperor Aurangzeb, (d.1707) in fact, is buried not far from Aurangabad. The remarkable thing, for such a perceived iconoclast, is that three km from his tomb there is the greatest treasure of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain sculpture in India. The cave temples of Ellora pocket a two km stretch of this limestone escarpment. It’s still a mystery as to “why here”, and why the ancients chose to carve caves into solid rock rather than build temples; but in Ellora it’s the effect that matters. The monastic communities lived at this site for over 500 years, carving the whole time, until they abandoned it in the 12th C. The Buddhists got started first, at a time when a new revisionist moment was formenting in their religion. For 1000 years the appeal of Buddhism had been the simplicity of the teachings of Buddha
and the lessons of the ascetic rigor of his life. Early on there were never even any depictions of the Buddha in a human form: he was always implied by a footprint, a wheel, or a collection of geometric shapes called a “stupa”. The new teachings that were practiced at Ellora were probably coming from Eastern India, and as they developed they became known as ‘Tantra”. Tantra envisioned complex cosmologies around the Buddha, powerful associated figures like Bodhisattvas, and esoteric rituals designed to fast-track what had been a slow evolutionary approach to the final goal: Nirvana. Here in Ellora the monks were working to create what was in effect an Enlightenment Machine. In each new cave, at each new try, they were refining it further. They used the most powerful tools at their disposal: pure compassion symbolized by the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara; enormous figures of the Buddha, his hands forming esoteric gestures to instruct the initiated; and, most importantly, the monks put all the elements together to form three-dimensional mandalas which are the cave temples.

Times change and so does royal patronage. By the 8th C. Buddhism here was in decline, replaced by its revitalized older sister, Hinduism. If the Buddhist art here is cerebral, typified by rows of slightly different Buddhas, the Hindu sculpture are visceral. Take the huge panel of
Shiva as Gajahasta at the entrance to cave 10. This god is not advocating a course of sitting meditation. This is a god you worship because you are terrified of his power. He takes the biggest thing the sculptor can imagine, and elephant, and pulls it into a thin sausage above his head. He skewers a demon with one arm, collects his blood to drink with another, and causes mayhem and death with the others. His face screams with a primal roar; there is no reason in his eye, just pure, fanged destruction.

The rest of the Hindu sculpture also draws heavily on that elemental energy. It was a time when the cult of the Seven Mothers was popular. The sage Lakulisha was its proponent, and their images, and his, are found throughout the site. In the dark recesses
where the Seven Mothers are carved, they are always presided over by the skeletal goddess of death Kali; you can imagine the more extreme practices of Lakulisha taking place here. The big attention-grabber at Ellora, however, is the Kailash Temple. It is a massive
undertaking, from the 8th C.: a monolithic sculpture of a temple carved from solid rock; a cave in reverse. Deep trenches were cut out of the rock face defining the temples dimensions, and then the carving was started from the top down. It’s one of the truly audacious ancient works of art on the entire planet. All the temple courtyards, sculptures, shrines and sanctums were hollowed out and now you, and busloads of tourists and school kids, can wander through it, taking dark stairways to different levels, and wondering how it is possible to take a defining photo in such a tight space.

Many thanks to Helen for all her help in solving some of our technical problems. She has also updated our 2010 sales schedule, which is now posted on our website https://www.kebeandfast.com. The photos of our recent trip through the ancient sites of the interior shouldn’t be missed, and you can find them there by going to the flickr button at the top of the website page. There are also some great videos – go to youtube and search for Kebe and Fast. Just to give you a taste of some more Ellora pictures…

JAIPUR: THE BAGRU PRINTS

dfast on January 23, 2009

Back in Jaipur we are relieved that the cold wave which is killing people across North India hasn’t settled in here too harshly. The days are clear and sunny, around 20C, and at night it goes down to a bearable 8 or 9. Contrasting this to your reports from Canada – minus 50 with the wind in Winnipeg; too much snow one of our to drive on the upper levels in Vancouver – I guess we shouldn’t complain.

Our order here, already late, was supposed to be finished when we arrived. Far from it. Only a few samples from the hundreds of duvets we ordered are ready. At first glance they look good- the seams are serged, at least. But of the four pieces we are shown, three have problems. On one the pattern has been applied horizontally rather than vertically; on another the pattern on the pillow shams runs at a different direction to the duvet cover; and the pattern on another is one that we didn’t order at all. We had hoped to wrap up the business in Jaipur in a couple of selecting cushion covers days and get the shipment on its way – but this doesn’t inspire confidence.

On the positive side we have caught the problems early, and they can be fine-tuned. We also have more goods to select, and now we can spend more time at the production centers and talk with the people there. We’ve already mentioned Sanganeer, where the “Moghul” block-print designs are bagru sai drying produced. Now we are able to make a trip to the village of Bagru, where another style of printing, which our merchant calls “Bhooti” comes from.

In many ways Bagru is like a million other small towns in this country: directly on the fault line where the tectonic plate of the old India runs up against the new. Electricity has brought light and refrigeration, but also amplified noise on every corner; new wealth has created comfort and commerce, but development is rushed, shoddy, and buildings are hideously ugly; water mains are coming, but meanwhile the roads are all ripped up, and look like they have been for a long time. Living in the middle of this slurry of one of our designs and the cow at the gates modernity is the Old Village, where livestock are part of the landscape and no woman walks out without her face completely covered. Like the town, not much has changed over the generations in the manufacture of Bagru block prints, except it now happens in a concrete and cinder-block warehouse. As if to emphasize my point about the co-existence of the old and the new, a cow is stabled just inside the factory gate. On the other hand, the cow might not be as much of a cultural leftover as a part of the production process. A small team has gathered to shepherd us through the facility including Dilip the production manager and his assistant Farooq. None of us has a very good grasp of the others’ language, so the Q & A is done by committee. Many of our queries in the midle of making a design land haphazardly in places no one seems interested or able to look for them, but I do gather that cow dung is used in one of the rinsing procedures. All the colours, in fact, are produced with natural dyes which, among other things, is a big benefit to the heath of the workers.

Unlike the “Moghul” sets from Sanganeer, where colour is applied to the block and the block is stamped on the fabric, here throwing saw-dust onto the gum they use a “resist-dye” procedure. First the block is dipped into a gum solution, and then the pattern is stamped on the fabric. Then a mixture of sand and saw-dust is sprinkled over the sheet, which adheres to the gum. The sheet is cleaned off and dyed, with the colour permeating everything not covered by the gum/saw-dust mixture. The same process is then repeated for another pattern and another colour. The effect is quite different from the refined look of our other prints. The Bagru prints are strong and bold, with a simplicity that belies the skill and time it takes to make them.

back of a Calcutta bus

KALI-TASTROPHES

Our plans are tossed into turmoil when the only train between Jaipur and Varanasi is canceled due to the foggy weather on the plains. This means we have to go by road to Delhi, and take a train from there. That vast metropolis starts to congeal about us when we are still 50 kilometers away, around about Gurgoan. school girl in a difficult world Growth has been so fast in Gurgoan that no one knows how many people are here, whether it’s 2 million or 10 million, only that the population has so far out-paced infrastructure and resources that even the model high-rises that are everywhere get only two hours of water per day, and 60% of electricity is pirated from the wires. In Noida farmers have made big money from selling to property developers, but the urban/rural divide is still stark. This last week a girl was sitting with her boyfriend parked at the side of the highway, when she was attacked and gang-raped by thirteen locals. The first reporters to the village encountered some extraordinary attitudes, including the head man saying: what’s the big deal; it was only a rape; and the grandmother of one of the accused: they shouldn’t have had a chance to rape her; she was acting indecently and should have been stoned, first.

boats and kites The trip to Varanasi is uneventful, and there we have two tasks. The first is checking up on another of our orders, which is (deja vu) supposed to be ready to go. We always like to visit Ajit, but this time he has neglected to finish some of the seams inside his duvet covers. This will take another ten days. In the meantime it is the national kite-flying festival, known locally as “khicchiri”. In our photos, the spots in the sky aren’t specks on the lens, but kites. In a play on words, the local name for the festival is also that of a dish made with rolled David and Vaune's Kali rice, and we are privileged to share it in another extraordinary meal from the kitchen of Ajit’s household.

The second task is to find a statue for our friends David and Vaune. The parameters they set are quite wide, but Kali is at the top of the list. Kali is a very interesting and enigmatic figure. She is often called the dark, horrible aspect of the Goddess, a symbol of death and destruction. She has a garland of skulls around her neck, a severed head in one hand, a sword in another, and a skull to drink the blood from in another. And yet many texts refer to her as very beautiful, and she dances on the prostrate form of her lover, Shiva, who is obviously enjoying himself. Varanasi is the city of Shiva par excellence, and being a place of death there are many Kali shrines here. We find a nice cast-bronze figure in the market, and Katheryn decides it will add significance if it is blessed at one of the shrines . There are three that I know of on the way down to the Manikarnika Ghat, the famous open-air cremation site on the banks of the Ganges. The first one is managed by a guy we have known for years. He is also a fairly heavy user of a certain sacramental herb favoured by Shiva, and is apparently unavailable somewhere in the back. black kali on the steps The second is a statue set in a wall on a steep flight of stone steps. In the dark, if it wet, the garbage and cow shit on the steps becomes so slippery and hazardous we have knick-named it “The Stair of Death”. Today the image is covered with a sari, with only the eyes peeking out. When we ask someone if we can unwrap it, just for a second, the response is so emphatic we figure we should just leave it alone. The third shrine is open, and there is Kali is all her black-faced, red-tongued glory. We take a couple of snaps. Since we are nearly at the river, and there are still five hours before our train goes, we decide to take up one of the touts yelling,”Boat! Boat!” krishna the boatman and have a row on the Ganges. Krishna is our boatman, and, as ever, the light is extraordinary in one of the most amazing places in the world.

The first Kali shrine is open when we return, but our friend is still nowhere in sight. By this time we have to think about catching our train to the real city of Kali – Calcutta. Back at our hotel we log onto the Indian Railways website, and find out our train is running 8 hours late. Rather than spend the night on a platform in Varanasi station – a grim prospect – we take a room, and set the alarm for early. I still can’t sleep, and repeatedly phone the info line for updates. At 6:00am I am told it is due at 8:35. At 7 the message is the same, so we get to the station by 8:00. The shock comes when we are told that our train has already left! This is a significant blow, in a number of ways. We have flights booked from Calcutta to Bangkok the next morning, and now the next scheduled train, even if it is on time, probably won’t get us there. I never thought that with 36 hours to do a 14 hr. trip we wouldn’t make it, but now that is a distinct possibility. To make sure the authorities know that this is not our fault, I dial the info # and give it to the clerk. He has a mini-tirade good luck with the guy on the end of the line telling him the train which left ½ hr. ago isn’t there yet. But this doesn’t help us, not even with getting a refund. The rules state that if you miss your train, you can get a 50% refund within the first three hours. It seems self-evident to everyone we talk to that a) the train has been missed and b) the refund will be 50%. But my hackles are fully up, and I end up bouncing around the station like a pin-ball trying to make my case for a full refund to the proper authority. All my avenues lead to one Man, the Big Boss, the Station Master. But he won’t be in until 10:00. Officially. Who know’s, they say (meaning: he can do whatever he likes) maybe 10:30. In the meantime, my 3 hours of 50% refund grace expire at 10:25, after which the penalty is 70%. And we still have no way of getting to Calcutta. I suggest to someone we could take a bus. He is shocked. “The road!” he says, “You will not make it!” The only possible flight is routed back through Delhi, and is more expensive than our Bangkok tickets. The one concession I manage to wring out of the station underlings is that they will honour the 50% refund until after I have talked to the Station Manager. Finally my sleep-deprived, emotionally-exhausted brain has a good idea: we can change our Bangkok flights! With some of the pressure off, I go in for my interview with the Big Boss. He is sympathetic, but about a full refund he spreads his hands. “Even I” he says, “can do nothing.” He also assures me he will pull some strings, and get us berths on an otherwise-full train this afternoon.

It isn’t until we are in the taxi travelling the marvelous early-morning streets of Calcutta to the airport, and checked in and on our plane that we finally feel that Kali, the destroyer, has taken her sacrifice and is done with us. David and Vaune be warned: that’s one spunky lady you are getting!

Check out more of our photos, like the view from the taxi below, by going to https://www.kebeandfast.com and clicking EXPLORE.

on the way to the airport

INDIA: SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS

dfast on December 7, 2008

Heaven, Heaven is a place

A place where nothing,

Nothing ever happens

David Byrne

Events never stand still for long in this part of the world. Entering India from anywhere, even if it’s just walking over the border from Sonauli, Nepal, like we have done, is like getting caught up in a maelstrom. And that’s when nothing particularly special is happening. Last week, as we were on an overnight train from Varanasi to Delhi, a group of terrorists stormed our old stomping ground in Colaba, Bombay, and went on a killing spree around the neighbourhood we are so fond of (including the Gokul, where we bought beer, and where a bomb was found). Like much of the country, we watched events unfold with a horrified fascination, flipping from channel to channel as reporters tried to coax meaningful tidbits of information from a story that was exploding around them like a mushroom cloud. We were staying in the Tibetan Colony in Delhi, which in these circumstances is about the best place to be, since our little burgundy-robed community is hardly a prime target for someone who has a grudge against the “Crusader/ Zionist/Hindu” axis. Nevertheless, we went about our business as usual, riding the metro to Pahar Ganj to change money, and going to see our scarf suppliers, Parmindar and Amrita, at their place in Patel Nagar.

Pahar Ganj, the noisy bustling market opposite the New Delhi train station, had been the victim of a bomb blast last year. The security response was to put in a walk-through metal detector, the kind that is used in airports. It is still there, and it is still as futile a device for protecting the market as a mop and a pail is for stopping a tsunami. Cycle rickshaws, scooters and even cars just zip past it, and pedestrians ignore it all together. Sometimes we walk through it because it’s the only space available in the crush of the street, and the poor thing bleeps dutifully into the cacophony, and no one gives a second glance. As we were about to leave through the forlorn security gate a reporter from the Times of India and her photographer approached us, and asked a few questions about our reaction to the situation. Were we afraid? Would we change our plans because of the events? They were talking to an Italian tour group who were catching the next flight home Well, that’s just not our style. We weren’t planning to go to Bombay on this trip, but if we were, we wouldn’t change our plans. Fear-based reactions to an event make things much worse than the event itself. We coddle this idea of security which is an illusion, that we can somehow control the big boot of fate that is stomping all around us. Like the French tourist who left Bombay because of the attacks, came to Jaipur (where we are now), and died falling off the palace wall. Maybe we were a bit too vociferous for the reporter. Instead of the front page spread we anticipated, we didn’t even make the entertainment section in the paper the next day.

Understandable, in retrospect. Last Saturday was also the state election in Delhi, so there was a lot to write about. For the last 8 years the Congress Party has held power in the Capital District. This in itself is almost enough to doom them, since Indians are notorious for their “anti-incumbency” pattern, voting for a different set of scoundrels every time as if it will change anything. In this case, however, our little burgundy-robed community was watching closely. The Tibetan Colony, as it is known, was established as an illegal squat on unwanted land in 1959. It has grown into a small but prosperous and well-organized community, even though only a few of the residents has citizenship, and all the properties that are bought and sold and rented don’t officially exist. Delhi is to host the 2010 Commonwealth games, and this site was to have been torn down for one of the venues. Last year when we were here everyone was quite pessimistic. But since then the pending case has been settled, and the Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit, assured the Tibetans they could stay. The new fear is that if the BJP win, who are unabashedly pro-Hindu, the colony’s fate may once more be up in the air. But enough of serious subjects with grave consequences.

“So, how’s the shopping going?” you ask. Well… It’s been a frenzied circus of out-of-control extravagance. Bucking the trend of belt-tightening and penny-pinching in the face of looming global financial catastrophe, we have hit India like a monsoon of dollar bills. It’s part of the Kebe and Fast plan for economic recovery – similar to Stephen Harper’s: we take a healthy surplus from last year and run it into a free-spending orgy of a deficit. The good news – for all our loyal shoppers out there – is that we are getting great stuff, and lots of it. The Nepal shipment has already arrived in Vancouver, and with the generous help of Robert and Nicole* and Marianne and David, has been safely cleared and stored. *(A footnote: We are unbelievably pissed off that R and N’s trip to Asia, where at some point we were to meet up, has been the victim of the PAD blockade of Bangkok’s airport. These were the same demonstrators we met two blogs ago; how could they do that to us?)

Our first Indian stop was Varanasi. For the first time in all of our visits here, we decided to stay outside of the noisy carnival of the old city. What we didn’t take into account was the advent of Wedding Season. As with everything here, an Indian wedding is not a subdued, timid intimate affair. Usually the number of guests is in the hundreds or thousands, and the venue is an expensive hotel, a “marriage hall” or a “farm” outside the city center. Which is exactly where our hotel happened to be. Our first night we had weddings in stereo, coming from the hotel courtyard where the tents, the buffet and the band were set up, and from a location behind our room. When we went to see our merchant Ajit the next day, he was in worse shape than us. The height of Wedding Season is six weeks in Dec. and Jan. when the astrological configurations are favourable, and during that time, he said, he was invited to a different wedding every day. Most he turned down, but for some the connection was too close/too influential to be avoided. The later was the case with the politician’s family the night before, which he was still sleeping off. A few days later it was a case of the former: a family friend who pedaled around the old city selling milk from jugs on the back of his bicycle. He was by no means well-to-do, but had invited 1500 people to his daughter’s wedding. Much of the cost for these extravagances is defrayed by the guests, who leave an envelope with a donation, but this man had cut the catering corners so fine that it appeared the event would run out of food – which would be a major loss of face. Ajit and some others had to leave on a mission to replenish the supplies and save the situation. It’s one of those near-disasters every wedding seems to have, and reminds me of last summer when we were set up in the middle of our sale on Denman Is., where our display tables had apparently been double-booked for a wedding, and only some frantic running around averted a disaster.

With Ajit we stocked up on a number of our staples, including a duvet set we designed to be even more robust than last year, and some of the specialties of the area like the zardozi work.

We changed hotels after our first night, and I have to admit it was nice to be away from the hype and intensity of the old city. For one thing we didn’t have the barrage of touts targeting us everywhere, from the sleazy whispers of “hash” in the alleys to the smarmy solicitations of “see my silk factory” to the interminable “Hello, boat?” along the ghats. It is a fact of life you get used to and can generally brush off quite easily, but once in a while you come across one that just floors you. At the train station in Kandy, Sri Lanka, for instance, a vendor of stuffed toys yelled out at us “Hello Small Chicken!”, and now, walking down the crowded Gowdalia market Katheryn was approached with the line “Hello Madam. Undergarments looking?”

Now I am sitting in the very pleasant garden of our hotel in Jaipur. As of this year Jaipur has become the major source for our goods, since a number of other suppliers have consistently disappointed us with the quality of their work. We made a small order with Kishor last year and were very pleased by it, so this year we have gone a little crazy. Jaipur is the clearing house for much of the textiles and jewelry that comes out of Rajastan, Gujurat, and Pakistan, and we have stocked up on the wall hangings made with salvaged pieces of old clothing that are so endlessly fascinating. Kishor and his family come from Sind province in Pakistan, and were Hindu hold-outs there for 25 years after partition. His father is an authority on traditional tribal embroidery, and has pieces in his collection which are fantastic, but far out of our price range. What we did get is far more Zari, the metallic-thread embroidery which comes from Baluchistan, on the Afghan border. It is such impressive work it should be in the “for collectors only” category, but even though the good stuff is over 20 years old, it is still relatively plentiful, and therefore affordable. Jaipur is also the center of the block-print universe, and it seems perverse we didn’t pick up more of it earlier. Perhaps we were just reacting to the glut of faux-peasant skirts and warriors-on-camels bedspreads that have for so long been the standard of the back-packer entrepreneur. What Kishor has done is dip into the vocabulary of 17^th C Moghul architecture, particularly the inlaid marble work, and made blocks from these motifs. We visited the studio where the work is done, south of the city, and while it would be romantic to say it was a village of mud huts in the desert, the reality is that the village has come to the city. The workshops are bright and spacious, and the block makers and printers are Muslim men.

With Kishor’s help we have designed some new product lines for 2009. Probably the one we are most excited about Kishor calls “Moghul” work. We have selected seven patterns of this to be made into king and queen duvet sets with shams, on the best Indian cotton that he has, as well as table cloths and napkins with the same designs. One of the things about block-print, to the untrained eye, is that it can look like machine print. This is like comparing a poster to a painting. The “Blue Cornflower” pattern, for instance, requires the use of five different blocks, applied by hand, for every flower on the sheet.

This is our last day in Jaipur, and tomorrow another adventure begins. We are heading into the deep south of Gujurat, into a little-visited area called the Kathiawar peninsula. Stay tuned for more.

Your foreign devil correspondent.