The monsoon came late, and the palm leaves waited [demo]

We stretch and cure the palm leaf ourselves, the way my grandfather showed my father. This year the rain held off almost three weeks past when it should have come, and a dry leaf will not take the stylus the same way — it splits along the grain instead of holding the line. So we waited. Twenty-one days of doing nothing is a hard thing to explain to anyone who has not done this work. When it finally broke, we cut in one morning. What you see in the shop now came from that week.