We begin with shirts.
Sixteen of them. Linen woven with cotton for the plain ones, Indian Oxford for the stripes and the checks. The fish is stitched small at the chest, and nothing else is added.
A stripe is rain.
Rain falls. So a stripe runs down the shirt and never across it. How hard it fell decides the rest — narrow and close for the downpour, hairline and wide-set for the last of it.
Woven into the cloth on the loom, yarn-dyed, never printed on the surface.
A check is the lattice.
The planking of the boat. The net Manu tied. Because it is a lattice it stays square and even, and never becomes a plaid or a tartan.
The Oxford basketweave gives the cloth a fine pebbled surface and enough body to hold a collar.
The fish grew until no vessel could hold it.
the matsya story · मत्स्य
Two that took longer
Tideline
The colour rises through the shirt, pale at the collar to deep indigo at the hem. Dyed into the yarn and woven, so there is no edge where one colour stops.
Tideline
Shoal
Small pale fish laid into dark indigo by hand on the loom, in the jamdani tradition. No two are quite alike, and one larger fish is stitched at the chest.
ShoalThe plain shirts
The striped shirts
The checked shirts
A good cloth is chosen because it is good. We cut it here, stitch the fish small at the chest, and leave the rest alone. The shirt is made to last for years.
Letters
We write when there is something worth saying — a new cloth, a shirt back in stock. Rarely, and never twice about the same thing.