Carpet Magic

Human life is framed by myths, guided by legends and moulded by stories from a young age. Carpets have an alluring magic for me, ever since my grandma told me stories of the magic carpet of Aladdin and his flight in the Arabian Nights. I knew that the reed mats at home will never be able to fly; it did not have the vivid colours and intricate patterns or the man on it smoking the hookah. I always longed to have a carpet, may be a house with a carpet, which I thought existed only in Arabia.

Years later when I moved to Australia, I was excited to move into a house with carpet, in fact with wall to wall carpets. I was soon disappointed that with the carpets stapled to the floor and with the furniture weighing it down, it was not a carpet of the flying kind. Soon my search for the real carpet started. There are carpet stores every where in Australia with authentic names, Carpet Mahal, Persian Carpet Emporium, Carpet Bazaar etc. all meaningless words for the Aussies who would have felt more at home in a Carpet Warehouse, Discount Carpets or a Carpet World. These kinds of names of pure commercialism, which the locals can easily understand would have been a betrayal of the legend of the magic carpet and the imagery of the Arabian Nights where emperors shopped in emporiums, women in mahals and others in bazaars.

Carpets are always on sale at heavily discounted prices, a $30,000 Isfahan carpet for sale at $300 is what found me at Carpet Mahal, which was on the move because the shop lease had expired. A mahal should never be on leased premises, and it should have been built ground up, marble slab by slab by the great great grandfather of the present owner. Carpet Mahal is famous, chased by the investigative television programs of the likes of 60 Minutes, alleging that the fabulous discounts are false advertising, violation the retail laws, and cheating. Little do they know that in the bazaars of the Arabian Nights the traders were not harassed by the consumer watch dogs, TV reporters and the trade-laws? A carpet sold in the sanctity of fair trade laws, without the excitement of bargaining, and secrets of authentication would have stripped it of its magic. How would the intimidating TV crew know that $30,000 could even be a fair price to stoke the fantasy of an immigrant from a remote Kerala village, moulded by childhood stories?

Being an Indian, that too from Kerala, always looking for a good deal, I could not resist the discounts and on a rare sunny day in Melbourne went to meet the turbaned owner of Carpet Mahal, advertised un-wittingly by the harassment he received in the TV programs. Ahmed Munir Khan with a beard and towering frame fitted the bill of my grandma’s stories. He spoke in broken English, a sign of authenticity of his carpets origins and his intimate knowledge of them. The magical intricacies of a carpet emanate from the heat and dust of its place of origin and English language cannot express them.

TV programs are corrosive to the mind, and the investigative kinds are nitric acid. I asked Khan

“…How come you are offering this at 99 percent discount...?”

Khan replied in characteristic carpet English

“…you watch TV…good…lease finish next month...”

“But who fixed the price at $30,000?” The TV reporter in me was kicking into life

Khan explained.

The Isfahan carpet was made by the Madani family living in the south eastern corner of the Isfahan village in Iran. The patriarch of the house, Ahmed Khuram Madani, who directed the carpet weaving for nearly a century, is losing his eyesight; this could be his last carpet, the end of an era. It is a work of art, and as an expert in carpets, it is Khan who fixes the price, who also offers discounts on it as an astute business man. He was not pulling the rug from under my feet. If a garden variety sunflower painted by Van Gogh of Netherlands can fetch 40 million American dollars, why can’t the last carpet of Ahmad Madani of Iran fetch 30,000 aussie dollars at least? Life is unfair to some, to some civilisations, and causes the clash of civilisations.

The isfahan-madani carpet was stuck on the wall, and I knew that was the one for me, stopped by the wall as it was flying out. I told Khan about the grandma stories and its influence on me. We exchanged a knowing smile and in the air of a retail shop display connoisseur he declared

“..Carpets on the wall really fly out of the shop”;

“Leaving only dollars in its wake”, I murmured.

My next shop of call was Carpet Bazaar and was greeted in Urdu by Kwaja Ahmed Quraishi of Jalalabad, Pakistan. I knew that the diminutive dark skinned man was no carpet weaving tribal from Pakistan, but had to be Joseph Kuruvilla of Kottayam in Kerala, his accent let me through the Urdu façade. A few minutes of bombardment from the cannons of the native lingo of Malayalam was enough to crumble the identity fortress, he is not from Kottayam but is from Varkala, his name is Joseph Tharakan. If Ms. Saraswati Mahalingam of Chennai can mutate into Susan McNamara in the cyber anonymity of an Infosys call centre in Bangalore, what is wrong with Joseph Tharaken becoming Kwaja Quraishi in the waft and weave of a Persian carpet in Australia. Both are progress, clash of civilisations and confused identities. Tharakan is the unknown hero of globalisation, not to be found in the world wide web, but lost with a retail identity in the tangled web of Persian carpets. The Tabriz carpet I bought from Qwaja alias Tharakan was on a rotating rack of hanging carpets, as close as one can get to a flying carpet.

Progress is changes to job related identities, but one has to draw a hard line some where even if it is on a Persian carpet. I did not enter Carpet Emporium, the chinky eyed, fair skinned, short and thin Van Nguyen of Vietnam posing as Ahmed Bin Al-Baruni from Dubai, that too with a Yassar Arafat head-gear had really crossed that line. One can accept clash of civilisations, but to listen to a Vietnamese talking about the merits of Persian carpets is like learning chopstick etiquettes from a burly Arab. I have my frailties, and limitations.

Commercialism has found its way to the magic of carpet stores; they do have annual sales, but never a Christmas sale; have you heard of a Christian magic carpet story? There are no financial year end sales in June, no stock take sales in July simply because carpet trade laws predate tax laws and modern accounting and no Khan or Quaraishi will deviate from the age old traditions and business norms. Cash and gold are the only legal tenders for carpets. The magic and mystery of carpets can only be exchanged for something tangible, like cash or gold, the ethereal cyber cash of credit cards are not accepted by carpet shops.

Carpet shops are ephemeral, they spring up un-advertised at between-lease-shops in large shopping centres, and they vanish without trace. Flying carpets are easier to move around and hard it becomes for the tax man and TV crews to chase after them. In the battle between changing legal frameworks and eternal carpet fables, the fables always win. A permanent carpet shop will be an aberration like a flightless bird, or a sitting duck to be shot at by the investigative journalists.

Khan had changed shops ten times in the last five years; I knew my Isfahan will appreciate in value, being a work of art.