I have a penchant for falling under the influence of skillfully persuasive merchants of beautiful products. You may remember the rug merchant in Fes, from whom I bought a rug even though I had no place to put it (It now handsomely adorns the bed in the guest bedroom).
In Varanasi, it was the silk merchant. Dan and I were on a tour of the streets of old Varanasi with another couple, John and Marie from London. Toward the end of the tour, our guide took us to the rooftop of a five-story home in the old quarter.
Peeks of the home life as we climbed the stairs were more interesting than the views from the rooftop. In fact, the rooftop view was possibly the least interesting part of the tour.
I think it was about here that Dan suspected some kind of sales pitch would soon be coming.
And he was right.
At the bottom of the stairs, we were met by an Indian gentleman of perhaps about our own age. Our guide introduced him as Arun Himatsingka, the owner of the house. He invited us to have tea with him in a room on the ground floor that was comfortably covered with something soft like a mattress and covered with clean white fabric.
It was about here that I too realized some kind of sales pitch would soon be coming.
But the room looked inviting–like some of the tea houses we had passed on the street–and we did want the opportunity to chat with someone, the homeowner, who lived here in Varanasi. So after a quick nonverbal check among the four of us, we accepted his offer, took off our shoes, and went in.
Mr. Himatsingka had an interesting story. His house was very old (did he say three hundred years?). It had been in his family for five or six generations, but when his father died, it was inherited by Mr. Himatsingka and his brother. The house was divided into two, and the brother sold his half. Members of Mr. Himatsingka’s extended family still lived in in various apartments in this half of the house.
Mr. Himatsingka works in the wholesale silk trade, a business founded by his great-grandfather. He sells to fashion houses, designers, and department stores overseas (mostly in Europe), who appreciate the high quality of his fabric and make it into high-end gowns and sell his shawls. He oversees the production of silk materials in villages some sixty kilometers (forty miles) from Varanasi. The production, he told us, has to be done in these remote villages because the skilled and patient labor needed to do his hand-weaving was too expensive in Varanasi itself–if indeed it could be found at all. And, sadly, it was also vanishing in the villages.
As the children of his weavers become more educated than their parents, they no longer want to be weavers. Their ambitions run to the kind of work, such as computer programming, that can be found only in the cities. And so he finds himself in a business where demand is high and growing, but it is becoming vanishingly difficult to produce the supply.
And his own children, like those of the weavers, are not interested in running this local business. They want to work for multinational corporations. They will move away. “After me,” he says, “this business is no more.”
The moment is at hand.
“Would you like to see some of my shawls?”
Marie and I, as it turns out, would. Of course. We exchange looks with our husbands, who have expressions resembling the long-suffering martyrs in Baroque paintings. And with the patience of those saints, they allow us to proceed.
First, Mr. Himatsingka demonstrates that his wares are real silk by setting fire to the end of a fringe, which burns to ash and can be lightly rubbed away. This was as compared to a product you might find in the streets of Varanasi, which when burned, he shows us, melts into a black sticky globule.
What follows next is a riot of glorious color as shawl after lovely shawl is unfolding from boxes and thrown gaily like a celebration into Marie’s and my laps. We are shown first, his lowest quality shawls, which are utterly gorgeous. From there, we move to three levels of higher quality, each with a higher thread count and a more detailed, more tightly woven pattern. Each takes longer to produce and (of course) carries a higher price tag.
Oh yes, make no mistake. We want them all.
But a bitter decision time is now at hand, and the pile of glory on our laps dwindles into much smaller piles of maybe. A folding-wallah appears in the room to put away the rejects as Mr. Himatsingka encourages us to “buy both.”
Interestingly, there is no conflict between Marie and me for any particular shawls. They are all beautiful, and there are far too many of them. Our struggle is the age-old conflict desire and reason, between beauty and a place to put it. Between how much we want these new shawls and how many shawls are already hanging unused in our closets.
In the end, I have five shawls, and I have promised to give three of them as gifts, and to also give away five shawls that I currently own that I never wear. Not a bad deal.
Meanwhile, it has grown dark outside. Exhausted, we skip the Golden Temple part of the tour and head back to our hotels for a beer to celebrate surviving the silk-shawl temptations with only small financial damage.
