Read Online The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen - Free Book Online
Authors: Anna Badkhen
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whether the dunes had shifted at all.
T he village slacked through its forenoons.
After the goats had been dispatched to pasture and the boys had been dispatched to pick kindling and the dough had been kneaded in large blue-glazed ceramic basins and set under old blankets to rise for paltry lunches of nan and tea, a lassitude spilled over Oqa. A hard-earned lethargy that sagged like translucent cling wrap between the sun-bleached wasteland and the faded stratum of the sky.
During these hours, women would drift from house to house to ask for a quarter cup of salt or to gossip. Men would drift from house to house to smoke cigarettes or opium. Oqans of both genders would gather into small congregations and migrate slowly through the village to gather fodder for the next day’s yarn, or simply to squat and gaze, unblinking, at the desert. Neighbors would stray into Thawra’s loom room to squat on her loom for a few minutes and tie some knots together.
There was Juma Gul, whose name meant “Friday flower,” and who was always smiling and chewing gum. She never stayed very long. Her own carpet was stretched beneath a clothesline onto which she had pinned a drawing she had made, with soot on lined paper, of some primeval god, each of its stick arms and legs ending in three long talons. She said it was to explain human anatomy to her youngest daughter, who was three.
Jahan Gul, World Flower, whose house was taken up almost entirely by a twenty-four-foot-long loom so old the gargantuan unfinished carpet upon it had overgrown with goat vertebrae sucked clean, skeins of thread, drying lozenges of donkey dung, blankets.
Choreh Gul, Resolution Flower, gaunt and bird-faced and heavy-lidded with opium, would come by with or without her jovial ten-year-old daughter, Hazar Gul, One Thousand Flowers. These two wove with Thawra often and for the longest stretches, in exchange for a fraction of the proceeds from the carpet. Choreh Gul did not have a loom of her own because her husband, Choreh, couldn’t afford the yarn, and because there was no place to put a loom in her single-room house anyway. She had six children in various stages of infirmity. When her family unrolled their flimsy mattresses at night upon the thin bazaar-bought blankets that kept the dust down on the earthen floor, the only space not taken was the small bare square around an old and poorly soldered bukhari , which belched more smoke than heat. On a windowsill of their house, the tangled heap of wires that were intended to connect the generator to the power line, wires the villagers had entrusted Choreh to keep, shone with silver dust like a severed umbilical cord of some imagined better life.
It took a village to weave a carpet. Thk, thk, thk, the sickles counted out the long, sluggish mornings of poverty.
Sometimes something uncommon would take place. An event. For example, Qaqa Satar would spread Baba Nazar’s Pakistani rug on the ground, and double and triple over his long frame impressively in prayer: that was an event. The villagers would come to watch that. Or I would pull out my sketchbook to draw. For a few turns that was an event, and the villagers would come to watch that, too. They would click their tongues and nod and giggle in appreciation when they recognized in my messy pen drawings a particular rooster, a neighbor’s house.
After a while, my sketching ceased to be an event. The rooster and the house were old things the villagers had already seen and would see again every day, inshallah . I wasn’t telling them anything new.
A few mornings before the vernal equinox, a man from Toqai, a village half a day’s walk through the dunes, brought his she-camel to be serviced by Naim’s bull. The men drove the camels, first the female, then the male, to the northern edge of the village, where a soot-blackened ellipsis of tandoor ovens trailed off toward the dunes, signaling to the heavens some unformulated or unfinished wish, some hint not taken.
T he village slacked through its forenoons.
After the goats had been dispatched to pasture and the boys had been dispatched to pick kindling and the dough had been kneaded in large blue-glazed ceramic basins and set under old blankets to rise for paltry lunches of nan and tea, a lassitude spilled over Oqa. A hard-earned lethargy that sagged like translucent cling wrap between the sun-bleached wasteland and the faded stratum of the sky.
During these hours, women would drift from house to house to ask for a quarter cup of salt or to gossip. Men would drift from house to house to smoke cigarettes or opium. Oqans of both genders would gather into small congregations and migrate slowly through the village to gather fodder for the next day’s yarn, or simply to squat and gaze, unblinking, at the desert. Neighbors would stray into Thawra’s loom room to squat on her loom for a few minutes and tie some knots together.
There was Juma Gul, whose name meant “Friday flower,” and who was always smiling and chewing gum. She never stayed very long. Her own carpet was stretched beneath a clothesline onto which she had pinned a drawing she had made, with soot on lined paper, of some primeval god, each of its stick arms and legs ending in three long talons. She said it was to explain human anatomy to her youngest daughter, who was three.
Jahan Gul, World Flower, whose house was taken up almost entirely by a twenty-four-foot-long loom so old the gargantuan unfinished carpet upon it had overgrown with goat vertebrae sucked clean, skeins of thread, drying lozenges of donkey dung, blankets.
Choreh Gul, Resolution Flower, gaunt and bird-faced and heavy-lidded with opium, would come by with or without her jovial ten-year-old daughter, Hazar Gul, One Thousand Flowers. These two wove with Thawra often and for the longest stretches, in exchange for a fraction of the proceeds from the carpet. Choreh Gul did not have a loom of her own because her husband, Choreh, couldn’t afford the yarn, and because there was no place to put a loom in her single-room house anyway. She had six children in various stages of infirmity. When her family unrolled their flimsy mattresses at night upon the thin bazaar-bought blankets that kept the dust down on the earthen floor, the only space not taken was the small bare square around an old and poorly soldered bukhari , which belched more smoke than heat. On a windowsill of their house, the tangled heap of wires that were intended to connect the generator to the power line, wires the villagers had entrusted Choreh to keep, shone with silver dust like a severed umbilical cord of some imagined better life.
It took a village to weave a carpet. Thk, thk, thk, the sickles counted out the long, sluggish mornings of poverty.
Sometimes something uncommon would take place. An event. For example, Qaqa Satar would spread Baba Nazar’s Pakistani rug on the ground, and double and triple over his long frame impressively in prayer: that was an event. The villagers would come to watch that. Or I would pull out my sketchbook to draw. For a few turns that was an event, and the villagers would come to watch that, too. They would click their tongues and nod and giggle in appreciation when they recognized in my messy pen drawings a particular rooster, a neighbor’s house.
After a while, my sketching ceased to be an event. The rooster and the house were old things the villagers had already seen and would see again every day, inshallah . I wasn’t telling them anything new.
A few mornings before the vernal equinox, a man from Toqai, a village half a day’s walk through the dunes, brought his she-camel to be serviced by Naim’s bull. The men drove the camels, first the female, then the male, to the northern edge of the village, where a soot-blackened ellipsis of tandoor ovens trailed off toward the dunes, signaling to the heavens some unformulated or unfinished wish, some hint not taken.
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