The Lady and the Loom
by Sara Zahidi

                                                               Bumburet Valley

Ispata baba! I greet a woman in an orange headdress
and a midnight-dark robe, and a headpiece
with a band with a tail at the back – shushut.
The woman squats in front of a large loom outdoors.
Her deft fingers quietly twirl loose scarlet yarn.

It is a bright April morning,
light shines haphazardly through leaves casting shadows.
Chak wai siau. The sun has cast shadows.
The woman sits in neither sun nor shade
as shapes with no meaning or boundary
are projected onto the loom, the yarn and her headdress.
Her black robe devours light.

Two wooden posts stand against a wall
of stacked stones and lightless caves.
The loom’s frame is heavy and
it makes little sounds, klik klak.

It is summer and the woman
is weaving cewbew for harsh winters.
I think of my own store-bought sweater
and of privilege and irony,
for she would not be the subject of my photo
without the identity of a Kalash woman’s outfit.

I twist the zoom ring on the lens barrel. It is as if
the fate of all of winter’s clothing, no – of all of winter –
rests on the single log keeping the yarn taut.
I zoom out again.

All things for the Kalash are pure or impure.
The loom is impure, pragata in Kalasha-mundr,
the Kalash mother tongue

What does the Kalash woman feel as she weaves?
I am content with the April breeze,
with light and shadow, with the employment of my hands
at the tool of my craft, my camera.

Outside, they are called the Siah Posh
who live in Kafiristan.
The Kalash too have names they call the outsider:
Musulman and Pharangi.

It does not matter if we do not share
the same feeling, she and I, the self and the other.
And a single thought disappears the boundaries erected between us,
that we are here in this same moment,
in the same unit of time,
each doing something she knows.