The Hands in Ghornash

Jaba Dey. Thirty-five. Weaver. Wife. Mother.

Journal — May 2026

I have been to many villages. I have sat in many homes, drunk many cups of chai, watched many hands move across many looms. Each time, I think I am prepared. Each time, I am not.

Ghornash is a weaving village. Not by accident. By lineage. The looms here are not in factories. They are in homes - pit looms, dropped into the floor, the weaver sitting level with the ground, the cloth rising up to meet her. You walk through a front door and the first sound you hear is the loom. It is the heartbeat of the house.

Jaba Dey did not grow up here.

She came through marriage. A young woman, twenty or so, leaving her family, her village, the landscape she had always known, and arriving in Ghornash as a wife. Grade ten completed. Then marriage, as the culture moves. A new home. A new village. A new craft entering her hands.

She is thirty-five now. Quiet. Precise. Shy in the way that is not smallness - it is reserve. A woman who observes before she speaks.

Her home is modest and immaculate. The pit loom sits at its centre. Beside it, a charkha - the spinning wheel she turns in the hours between cooking and weaving, preparing the thread that will become the cloth. An aromatic vegetarian curry was on the wooden stove when I arrived. The scent of it moved through every room. She has a son. He goes to school.

Her husband is Sukanto Dey. Master weaver. The knowledge in his hands has been passed down across generations - the intricate Jamdani technique, the kind that cannot be taught from a book or copied by a machine. Jamdani is not decoration applied to cloth. It is cloth and pattern woven simultaneously, the supplementary weft worked by hand, figure by figure, across the ground weave. It is extraordinarily slow. It is extraordinarily precise. It is one of the rarest living textile traditions on earth.

While Sukanto weaves the Jamdani, Jaba weaves the plains. The quiet cloth. The foundation. The pieces that make up the body of our collections.

There is no hierarchy in this. Plain weaving done with real attention is an act of mastery. It is cloth that must be even, consistent, honest. It cannot hide.

We sat together on the floor. My translator beside me. Chai between us. We do not share a language. Not a single word. And yet the conversation found its way.

I told her, through my translator, what happens to her cloth. That it leaves Ghornash and travels. That women in Australia, in Europe, in America, put it on in the morning. That they carry it through their days - to markets, to dinners, to quiet evenings, to all the ordinary and important moments of a life. That her hands are in every one of those moments.

She listened. She nodded slowly. Then she said something I did not need translated. The expression on her face said it plainly. She is grateful for the platform. For the fact that this work - this careful, daily, patient work - reaches beyond the village. That it is seen.

We connected on something else too. Motherhood. The particular juggling of a woman who is always several things at once. I am a designer and a mother. She is a weaver and a mother and a homemaker and a spinner. We laughed at the sameness of it, across every difference. Two women, no common language, completely understood.

This is what the cloth carries that no photograph can fully show.

Not just skill. Not just tradition. The life of the person who made it - the food on the stove, the child at school, the charkha turning in a quiet room, the loom in the floor, the morning beginning again.

Jaba Dey's work is in our current collection. She is begging preparation for our Summer collection. It is named. It is hers.

What an honour it is to know whose hands.