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Empire.
    In and around Surat, where it had all begun, the transformation was dramatic. The city was reduced from a great international port to a strictly local one. The region's thriving and diversified economy became dependent almost entirely on cloth.

    There is a sense in which village life seems unchanging, so that I feel I might intuit, just under the surface of the Navsari of today, the Navsari of my great-grandfather's time.
    Motiram's people occupied a small neighborhood on the western side of town, and would have socialized only with their own kind. Neither wealthy nor poor, the Khatris followed the hereditary occupation, weaving. "As a class they are said to be thriftless and idle, and ... excessively fond of strong drinks," commented an 1877 British survey of castes in the area. "Their features are regular and complexion fair." Few were educated or even literate.
    A street over from Khatri lane was the neighborhood of shoemakers. Beyond that lay the fishmongers' ghetto, where one could buy bushels of the pungent dried fish that the British dubbed "Bombay duck." For fresh groceries Motiram's mother could go to the market, or simply wait for the day's catch to come through the streets in a basket on the head of a woman who called out, "Fresh fish! Ohhhh, fish! Beautiful fresh fish!" Cows wandered the streets freely, in a kind of symbiosis: women put out leftover food for the sacred animals, and in exchange the cattle dropped their dung to be collected and smeared on the walls, where it dried into a smooth, odor-free plaster. At dawn Hindu women consecrated their doorsteps with red dye, a few grains of rice, and a few flowers. At dusk, the flames of prayer and cooking glowed from each home, as they had for generations. When people died, their ashes were scattered in the local river, which poured, a few miles west, into the Arabian Sea.
    The sea had shaped the village since its origins. Because of its strategic coastal location, Navsari was more cosmopolitan than many other Indian hamlets. Temples and shrines of four faiths dotted its streets: Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Zoroastrian. It was the Zoroastrians who, fleeing persecution in Persia, had founded the town in 1142.
    In Motiram's time, the region that encompassed Navsari was divided so that it looked, on the map, like a pastiche of jerry-rigged dots and shapes. Most areas were under the direct rule of the British. The rest belonged to a local ruling family entirely beholden to the British, and as rapacious. Their territory was disconnected; Motiram's hometown of Navsari fell in one of the larger chunks, at the tip of a free-floating amoeba just four miles long. As hub of its subdistrict, Navsari had modern conveniences: post office, train station, library, and a new town hall complete with clock tower.
    Despite these innovations, colonization and corruption were taking their toll.
    In 1909, for example—the year that Motiram left home—the kingdom's major sources of income were sales of cotton, indigo, and opium, supplemented by heavy taxes on land, salt, and liquor. Navsari, a town of 21,000, had more than six hundred liquor shops and a single high school, which graduated five students in 1909. The maharaja, whose stated objective for his regime was to be "like the English," spent twice as much on his palace as on the entire school system. His annual report devoted a paragraph each to hospitals, plague relief, and the problem of child marriages—but several pages described a twenty-city world tour undertaken "for the benefit of his health," the royal youngsters' progress at Harvard and Oxford, and the fireworks exploded to entertain the visiting British viceroy.

    For centuries, weaving the plain cotton saris worn by working-class Indian women had provided an adequate living for Motiram's clan. In a typical home, a loom sat in a pit in the floor of the house. For each garment the weaver first set up the warp, the regularly spaced vertical threads that dictated