Salma Begum
She learned bakhiya at eleven, sitting next to her grandmother.
That is a common enough sentence in Lucknow that it can pass without comment, so it is worth slowing down. Eleven years old, learning a stitch worked from the back of the cloth, where you cannot see the result until you turn it over. The feedback comes minutes after the decision. You learn to predict what the front will look like from what your fingers are doing on the reverse.
Thirty-four years later she can look at a finished panel and name which of the women in her group worked it, from the tension of the knots alone.
Six women work with her now. She insists that each of them signs the pieces they finish, which is not standard practice — in most of the trade the work leaves the workshop anonymous and gets a label somewhere else. When we asked her about it she was not sentimental. Her reasoning was that if a piece is signed, the person who made it will not let it leave badly finished.
Her own speciality is bakhiya and jali. Jali is the one she is proudest of: the net work where the threads of the fabric are teased apart with a needle and held open, never cut. Done properly, the cloth stays continuous. You can run a finger across the lattice and feel that nothing has been removed.
She has been asked, more than once, to work faster. Her answer has not changed.
