Letters from Kanchipuram.

The loom sits in a pit dug into the floor of a courtyard three streets from the temple tank. It has been there longer than anyone in the household has been alive. The pit is not romance; it is engineering. Sinking the loom keeps the yarn at a constant humidity and lets the weaver work the treadles with the whole leg rather than the ankle.

A week is four inches

On a heavy border, a good day yields perhaps four to six inches of finished saree. A pallu with a temple motif can take eleven days on its own. When we quote lead times of ten to fourteen weeks, we are not managing expectations. We are reading a calendar written by the loom.

• Warp preparation and dyeing — two weeks, weather permitting.
• Setting the jacquard cards for the border — four to six days.
• Weaving the body — three to five weeks.
• Pallu and korvai finishing — up to two weeks.
• Washing, pressing, and the house's own inspection — one week.

Nothing here can be hurried without being visibly cheapened.

We were asked, more than once, why we did not simply order the same design from a power loom in another district for a fifth of the price. The answer is in the selvedge. A hand-woven edge has a faint irregularity, a breathing line, that no machine reproduces because no machine has a wrist.

We left with four sarees and a list of things we had assumed and been wrong about. That list is now, quietly, the beginning of our standards document.