he workshop in Aminabad does not open until the heat goes out of the afternoon. The women — and most of the hands on this cluster are women — arrive at four, sit in a long line along the wall on a single cotton dhurrie, and lay their work across their knees. There is a low brass lamp at each end of the room. There are no chairs. The chikankari is laid down in the slow hours after dusk, when the workshop quietens and the stitches go finest, and the senior woman at the head of the line will not begin her own work until she has walked the length of the room once to look at everyone else's.
I bring the cloth from a mill in Kanpur that still makes the muslin we want — fine enough that the bakhiya shadow reads cleanly from the right side, sturdy enough to hold a hool eyelet without tearing at the edge. The drawings come from our Melbourne studio, traced first onto butter paper and then block-printed onto the cloth in fugitive blue so that the stitchers have a guide that will wash out in the final rinse. From there it is hands, and only hands. A senior chikan-worker can hold seven different stitches in her vocabulary on the same square inch of cloth without writing anything down. I have asked, and she has told me she does not count — she remembers the way you remember a song.
Mukaish is the second layer. After the chikan is finished and the cloth has been washed and pressed, the mukaish-walla — almost always a man, by tradition — sits with a small hammer and a length of badla wire and beats the metal into the cloth in tiny stars. The mukaish goes on last because it cannot be washed. It is the layer that catches the lamplight at a dinner, the layer that makes a white muslin kurta look as though there are pinpricks of starlight in it when the wearer moves. It is the oldest survival of the Lucknow court atelier, and there are now fewer than forty mukaish-wallas left in the city. We work with two of them.
