Agha Shahid Ali - The Dacca Gauzes lyrics

...for a whole year he sought to accumulate the more 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, and heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring. Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England History of little use to her, My grandmother just says how the muslins of today are so coarse and that only in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.