Every year, approaching winter, I set aside large chunks of my writing time to knit. It can only be now, of course, like so many other winter-only Delhi things: picnics at Lodhi Garden, barbecues, lazy barsaati terrace afternoons reading, eating oranges, outdoor concerts. It’s difficult to even think of touching wool during the rest of the burning year. But yes, come November, and I pull out balls of yarn from the back of the shelf, and rummage through a folder on my computer named (most creatively) “knitting” where I’ve ambitiously saved innumerable free patterns off the net.

To begin with it hasn’t been easy to find wool. An online search led me to Punjab Woollen Co in Munirka, where they stocked a limited range, and only acrylic. “Nobody knits anymore,” the proprietor told me. Demand had fallen lower every year. The “pure wool” yarn I was looking for had to be ordered in for me specially. It wasn’t the best quality, but it would do. So for one winter, in 2015, my friends and colleagues were recipients, willing or not, of snoods and scarves and mufflers and more scarves. In case you haven’t inferred already, these are the only things I can knit. Something simple, and more importantly, straight. Not for me are complicated shapes like socks and sweaters. I like to begin casting on a set number of stitches and keep going until I cast off at the end. Besides, who doesn’t need scarves and more scarves? Right? Right.

Knitting, like writing, can be obsessive.

You are caught up with a train of thought, with working out a pattern, and seeing it through until it takes a recognisable shape. They both, as I told Tishani Doshi in an interview for The Hindu in January 2016, also require vast amounts of patience. For both it’s important to “know when you’ve slipped up, lost a stitch.” Knitting, for me, I told her, is also a meditative space. To be engrossed by the utter repetition of things, repeating faithfully without variation until the end (perhaps this might explain my penchant for simple, “straight” garments). I find it soothing. It is also a relief, sometimes, to create something with my hands rather than my head. Unlike writing, to see, touch, hold a real object at the end of some effort. It is, so to speak, a different process of creativity; an employment of an alternative part of my mind that relishes a long focus on something other than words. Yet I find, I admitted to Doshi, that while knitting I think a lot about my manuscript. About plot. And character. Working out niggles in the story. It’s a quiet meditative space that allows for this, and I enjoy it immensely. “To knit, to purl, to knit again.”

Stories swirl around knitting.

I find that when I take out yarn and needles on the metro, the air around me changes. People glance, and smile, and watch curiously. They seem to be conjuring memories of childhood, of remembering mothers and grandmothers knitting at home. Of wearing scratchy hand-knitted sweaters as children. Sometimes, passengers happily get more involved. They ask me questions, they chat freely as though we’re not strangers. One woman joyfully plucked the needles out of my hands, and knitted, oblivious to the pattern I was keeping. I didn’t have the heart to stop her, and had to unravel the section back at home.

Once, while waiting at Jahangirpuri metro station for the shuttle to travel to Ashoka University where I teach, I wandered behind the dusty walls opposite the station to find an acrylic wool factory. There, I found a huge hall, filled with women, buying and selling wool that spilled out of boxes in abandon. It looked like a garden of multicoloured flowers.

This year I am better prepared.

I’ve procured a set of variously-sized wooden needles, and found an online retailer that sells mixed wool and acrylic yarn. I’m still sticking to scarves. Recently, I met an artist who uses natural wool for art installations, and he’s shared his source’s address in Sadar Bazaar where I hope to make a trip soon. His colleague invited me home to knit along with his mother and aunts, who take up the terrace on sunny winter afternoons, knitting. I imagine them sitting and swapping stories as their needles click, their hands nimbly hooking the yarn over and under. I’m sure they share gossip, and confessions, they sip their teas and settle their shawls. It is very much an image from my own childhood, of my grandmother (who taught me to knit) sitting by the fire knitting woollens for me, my sister, my grandfather.

Why do these things matter?

It isn’t an answer that can be easily placed into words. But I sense it when I’m on the metro, knitting away, and people put away their phones, and watch and engage. There is something to making things with your hands, I think. It deals directly with memory. With some primeval tactile sense that we’ve almost lost. Making is what makes us human.

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart, out in this month; @janicepariat

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