The silk I couldn't stop touching

I had four silks laid out on a table. Tussar, eri, muga, mulberry. All real, all beautiful, all from weavers whose work I admired.

I kept picking up the same one.

Not deliberately. I would be talking about something else entirely and notice my hand had gone back to it. After about the fourth time I stopped and paid attention to what I was actually doing.

What my hand was noticing

Tussar has a gorgeous slubby texture and a golden cast that photographs beautifully. Eri is soft and matte and warm. Muga has that famous glow.

All three have something in common that I had never had a word for until that afternoon: they have a surface. You feel them arrive. Your fingers register a texture, and then a fraction later, the cloth.

The mulberry had no arrival. It was already there.

That is the closest I can get to describing it. There was no moment of contact — it just went from not being on my skin to being on my skin, with nothing in between.

Why that happens

I learned the reason afterwards and it made complete sense of what my hand had been doing.

The mulberry silkworm eats one thing, its whole life. Nothing but mulberry leaves. That single unvarying diet produces a filament so consistent and so long that it can be unwound from the cocoon in one continuous thread — sometimes several hundred metres without a break.

The others are shorter. Shorter threads have to be joined and spun together, and every join leaves a tiny end standing up from the surface. Thousands of them. That is the texture. That is what you feel arriving.

Mulberry has almost none. There is nothing standing up to catch on you.

For a hijab, texture is a feature. For something that sits against your hairline for sixteen hours, it is friction — and friction is what wears at your edges.

And then the loom

The other half of it took me longer to accept, because it made everything harder.

Mulberry silk from a power loom is still mulberry silk. Nobody would have known. But a power loom pulls the warp tight and beats the weft in hard, and what comes out is compressed. Flat. Slightly airless.

A weaver working by hand adjusts the tension constantly, by feel, as the piece grows. The weave stays fractionally more open. Air moves through the cloth instead of around it.

I have held both. Same fibre, same colour, same everything on paper. They are not the same thing on your neck.

So we make it the slow way, on hand looms, in small quantities, with all the inconvenience that involves.

Because I still pick it up without meaning to.

Our silk