I arrived in Chumey in the first week of November, when the yak herds had already come down from the 4,000-metre pastures and the weavers were laying out their winter warp. Pema Zam, who would become my teacher for three seasons, met me at the door of a low mud-walled room with a single south-facing window. She did not greet me. She pointed at a stool and at the loom, and that was the whole of the introduction.
The ground of every yathra she wove was the same dark brown — a twill of yak wool sheared late and sheep wool shorn in spring, spun on a drop spindle through the monsoon. The colour came not from a single dyebath but from iron-rich mud of the valley floor, fixed with sour whey. It is a brown that holds light badly and warmth well. By the second week I understood why the panels always looked heavier in person than in photographs: they are heavier. The wool drinks the room.
“A motif is never just a motif. The diamond is the field. The star is the harvest. To copy the band without the valley is to weave cloth — not memory.”
Why the bands refuse the loom of fashion
The supplementary-weft bands — diamonds, the yungdrung swastika, the long-life vase, the endless knot — are not arranged for beauty. They are arranged by season. A panel meant for a winter cloak carries denser bands of maroon and gold at the selvedge because that is where the wind hits the shoulder. A panel meant for a saddle blanket leaves a plain band down the centre where the girth will rub. I spent an afternoon misreading a length of cloth as “unfinished” before Pema Zam turned it over and showed me the wear-marks of a horse that died before she did.
What the catalogues call a palette — pink, plum, gold, that single green — is really a calendar. Madder root for the pinks, dug in October. Walnut hull for the browns, steeped through November. The green is indigo over weld, two dyebaths weeks apart, because the weld only grows at the lower altitude and the indigo vat must sour in the cold.