Yaar, today I was scraping the last bit of indigo from my steel bowl, thinking how my entire block-print setup — the wood blocks, the alum mordant, the boiled pomegranate rinds — comes from knowledge my grandmother’s mother passed down. But when I look at my orders, a third of what you pay goes to some platform in Bangalore. That's not trade, that’s tax without the road. The colonisers left, but the structure of who skims from whose labour — that part we never really decolonised, did we ji?

The other afternoon, mixing indigo in my steel bowl, the neighbour's radio was playing a match commentary — and I thought about how the platform commissions bite my margins before

All this talk of lines and cloth reminds me of my chacha-ji’s old hand-block printing workshop in Shahjahanabad, yaar. They had a rule: inside, everyone followed the same rhythm of the mallet, whether their namaz time came or they wore a cross. The work itself drew the line, see? The fabric came out beautiful. Sometimes I think we forget the ‘common cloth’ we’re all trying to make.

The man talks about digitising everything, making life efficient for the middle class — but my neighbour, who sells vegetables from a handcart, still can't get a bank account without three proofs of address. Meanwhile, my last order got flagged by some algorithm, and the platform held my payment for two weeks, yaar. All this 'Aadhaar-enabled' ease doesn't stop the local goons from demanding hafta from every shop on our lane, ji.