He knows things about indigo that most chemists do not. He knows that the depth of blue you want requires the cloth to visit the dye vat not once but twelve times, each immersion preceded by a wash in fresh water and a drying in open air. He knows this cannot be done in winter, because the cold prevents the dye from bonding properly with the thread.
Sufiyan Ismail Khatri is the tenth generation of his family to practice Ajrakh, the ancient resist-printing technique of Kutch, whose history is woven into the origin story of the Khatri community itself. The word is thought to derive from azrakh, the Arabic for blue, or from a phrase meaning 'keep it away today' referring to the cloth's resistance to contamination and time.
The process has sixteen steps, and the blocks Sufiyan works with are central to most of them. He carves his own blocks to teak the motifs designed using mathematical relationships between geometric units that produce an interlocking pattern when repeated.
The dyes he uses are entirely natural. The warm red ground comes from alizarin, extracted from madder root, fixed to the cloth using alum as a mordant, a metallic salt that forms a chemical bond between the dye molecule and the cotton fibre, making the colour structurally part of the cloth rather than sitting on its surface.
He has shown work in the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, and Hungary. He has collaborated with internationally known designers, Tarun Tahliani among them. UNESCO has recognised Ajrakh as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. And yet Sufiyan continues to work from Ajrakhpur, the village his ancestors established specifically to practice this craft, its name both an address and an intention.
Asked once what he hopes for, he gave an answer that has stayed with those who heard it: that when people hold an Ajrakh cloth, they feel that someone was completely present when they made it.