Cracked Portraits My grandfather's painted grandfather, son of Ali, a strange physician in embroidered robes, a white turban, the Koran lying open on a table beside him. I look for prayers in his eyes, for inscriptions in Arabic. I find his will: He's left us plots in the family graveyard. =2‘? Greabgrandfather? A sahib in breeches. He simply disappoints me, his hands missing in the drawing—room photo but firm as he whipped the horses or the servants. He wound the gramophone to a fu...
The Decca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite 0 0 0 m.CCa. 8311265, 0 o 0 —-The Picture gg Dorian Gray Not only Dorian Gray but many aristocrats of Europe wore those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew. A dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one can imagine," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved ...
The Dacca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite . Dacca gauzes. ' — Oscar Wilde/ The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, “what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a rin...
iii ABSTRACT A snow child from Kashmir, the vale surrounded by the Himalayas, the persona thinks of the snowmen, his ancestors, whose burden is heavy on his shoulders. He wants to enter Spring. But will springtime mean not only their death, their melting, but also his own? . In the streets of Delhi, washed by the monsoons, he explores myth, history, and language. Kali turns to snow in his dreams, and he wants to touch Durga. The gods become mortal, stabbed at their altars. The persona recogni...
Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir . . . for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens . . . of textile and embroidered work . . . the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency, are known in the East . . . --The Picture 2; Dorian Gray Dorian Gray wore those gauzes from Dacca known as woven air, running water, evening dew, that transparent cotton a dead art now, dead for over a hundred years. No one can imagine, my grandmother says, what it was to wear, just to touch, tha...
