the boy in the shop takes the folded sari in both hands and throws it open and six yards of it leap into the air between us and hang there and before it lands there is time for everything because silk takes one second to remember it is heavier than the air it was pretending to be and in that one second the whole street I was born on leaps up with it the silk street of Kanchi where the pit looms go clack clack under the floors like the heart of the earth refusing to stop where the warp dries the length of the lane so you spend your whole childhood walking through a forest of stretched gold where the dye runs in the gutters arakku red and storm blue and the green of a parrot making up its mind and over all of it the gopurams of a thousand temples standing as they have stood since the Pallava kings wore this same Kanchi pattu against their skins since the gods themselves were measured for it because everyone on this street knows you do not put cotton on a god and here I am a grown man in a good Madras shirt with a chequebook in my pocket and my daughter’s wedding three weeks off crawled back to the one street I swore on my pride I had finished with to buy her the finest thing these hands can make and the boy says this one sir the masterpiece the famous hands and it is the storm colour the exact grey blue of the sky over the Vegavathi in the hour it cannot decide whether to drown the town or spare it and the border is a red gone almost black and where the two colours meet runs that hard clean impossible line the korvai the interlock where ten thousand patient times the weaver crossed one thread of blood through one thread of storm and locked them each to each so that you may take the border of a true Kanchi sari in your fist and pull till the muscles stand out in your arm and it will not part it will not give it holds the tightest at the very seam where border and body were severed into being it clings the hardest in the one place it is most divided and no one alive can throw a korvai alone it takes two at one loom passing the single shuttle between them and I knew a girl who could make that line her name was Vimala which is to say the one without a stain the flawless one and this whole street swore her korvai was so fine you could run a wet needle down it and never find the join and I knew her cloth better than the street knew it I graded her saris in my father’s warehouse from the time I was tall enough to reach the table and in all those years I never met one dropped thread in anything her loom sent out and I loved her the way a coward loves the thing he has already decided he is not allowed I loved her across the lane across the loom across the difference my family kept clearing its throat over weaver’s daughter we are not weavers we are exporters we are modern men and I told myself she did not care one grain of rice for me she who never once lifted her eyes from the shuttle when I passed who carried her flowers to Kamakshi at every dawn and Ekambareswarar at every dusk and seemed sealed inside the cloth the way the goddess of this town once sealed herself inside her own devotion when the river rose to take the little lingam of wet sand she had shaped with her hands and Parvati did not run she put her two arms around the dissolving god and pressed him to her and let the whole flood break across her back rather than let it carry him off and I decided Vimala was sealed like that a folded cloth a woman who had chosen her gods and her gold over a man in a good shirt and so when the match was finally spoken and my mother sniffed and sent quiet word down the lane that we would be looking elsewhere I let her I let it go I told myself I was setting the girl free I told myself I had read her to the last thread and there was besides the flaw because understand I am a connoisseur I have my father’s eye and his father’s before him and every sari of hers that ever entered our house my mother’s festival silks my sisters’ bridal silks came with one wrong thread one broken thread of gold near the border sitting there in all that flawlessness and I hunted for it every time and found it every time and felt a small mean private gladness there it is I would tell myself even those hands tire somewhere even that attention must sleep she is not perfect after all there is the proof a fault in the weave a fault in the woman and a man may set down what is not perfect a man may carry his pride to the station and take the slow train to Madras and marry a district collector’s soft niece and build forty unbothered years and never once lie awake and the silk is still in the air it is still coming down and the one broken thread catches the shop light near the border the way it always did and I open my mouth to perform the only thing I have known how to say for forty years in every silk shop from Madras to here the single flaw you see madam if one looks closely and the old man at the back of the shop her brother gone grey says without lifting his head her thread does not break sir it broke only in the cloths that went up your stairs and she began this one the week the street heard your daughter’s name and there is a question lying on the counter between us that a braver man would pick up and I do not pick it up and his head stays down and my hand is still held out toward the falling border and the silk is still coming down slow as a verdict and I am counting now I am counting the threads in from the edge as though forty years too late I am learning to read and the warehouse and the house are meeting in me at last the hundred clean bales and the one bent thread that waited on every silk that ever crossed our threshold and it comes back to me the one sari they sent back unopened the spring I left the finest thing she ever wove the whole street said the one and only time she carried the broken thread away from the safe border and set it in the very centre of the cloth in the place that lies over a heart and nobody could fathom why a master would ruin her best work with a fault and I never saw it because it came to our house in red paper and my mother sent it back without cutting the string and I stood in the hall and let her and now the silk lands it touches the wood and I understand in the last splinter of the second that a woman’s heart is an ocean of secrets and no eye is famous enough to sound it no shop light good enough and the knowing of a woman was never the knowing of her secrets it is the knowing that they are there and the leaning in close anyway for the length of a life and the men this street buries happy are the men who understood that early and stayed and she never asked me to sound her she asked so much less she went down her own deep herself year after year and brought up the one thread she could spare because a weaver’s daughter could send nothing up our stairs not a word not a look nothing but cloth so she sent cloth and laid her heart along the border where I of all the men on this earth could not miss it and I did not miss it I found it every time I held it to the light with the famous eye and I marked it down and of her whole ocean I was shown this one gold thing over and over for forty years and had I understood only that much only the fact of the deep I would have crossed the lane at nineteen and spent my one life leaning close to a woman I would never finish and that would have been the life and instead I stand in a shop with a chequebook three weeks before a wedding holding my hand out for the last letter she will ever send me and I the man with the famous eye the reader of weave and woman I looked straight at it and I called it a flaw