Five or Six Pieces, If I Am Careful

On Saturday I take the ferry across the Buriganga and walk up to the cloth lanes. It costs a little and takes longer, but I like arriving by water. The dock is all noise before eight: porters, sacks, chickens, a man shouting prices for something nobody is buying. By the time I reach the shops my shirt is already finished.

I carry four thousand taka in an envelope and I do not carry a card. The rule is that I cannot spend money I did not bring, because the whole plan rests on a number that must not move. I write the number on the envelope in pencil. When it changes, I rub it out and write it again.

What a Meter Actually Costs

The shopkeeper knows me now, which is a problem. He pulls out the good rolls first because he knows I will touch them. Two meters of heavy cotton, wide enough for a dress, at four eighty. I offer four hundred. We settle at four forty and both pretend it was difficult.

You know a cheap cloth by the way it falls: it asks permission.

I hold the roll up against the light and look for thin places and pulled threads. A fault in the middle of a meter is nothing in a factory; you cut around it and the marker eats it. For five or six pieces it is a wasted sleeve, and I cannot afford to be generous.

On the way back I stop at the tea stall by the ferry and open the notebook. The studio is written down in numbers now: rent for a small room in Mirpur, one second-hand machine, a cutting table I could have built for less. Nine months if nothing goes wrong. Ten or eleven if something does.

One Room, One Machine

The room matters more than the machine. It needs a window, because I have to see cloth in daylight and not under a tube light that lies. It needs a door I can lock, because I will be there at night. My mother says a woman alone in a room after dark is a conversation she does not want to have with the neighbors. She is not wrong. I am still looking.

Nine months if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Ten, then.

The ferry back is slow and the water is the color of tea with too much milk. I hold the cotton on my lap like something alive; three months of saving are rolled inside it. When we reach the other side I will walk home, eat rice, and cut nothing tonight. Tonight I only look at it and think about the first cut.