Woven Water

Kamrup, 1667. The Mughals rule the Brahmaputra, and twice a year their collectors come to the weaving village of Sualkuchi to take their share of cloth. On revenue day, ten-year-old Madhab is left in charge of the house, and he hands over the wrong cloth. It looks like nothing: a plain length of white silk with a clumsy border of diamonds and dots. But woven into that border is his father's secret. The river itself is there, every sandbank, every deep pool and channel down to the narrows at Saraighat, made for the Ahom army now gathering upriver under a new commander, Lachit Borphukan. The Mughals don't know what they have. Not yet. But the cloth has been entered in the revenue register under his father's name, and if anyone ever looks at it closely, his family is finished. So Madhab goes after it. He stows away on a revenue boat, talks his way into the household of the Mughal commander of boats, and finds himself living inside an enemy fort, untangling silk for the commander's wife, trading words with his sharp-tongued daughter and hiding the cloth under a brick, as the Ahom armies close in and the night of the ladders draws near. Told through the eyes of an ordinary boy who makes extraordinary mistakes, Woven Water is a story of a family, a village and a river during the year a kingdom fought its way back down the Brahmaputra. Book One of the Sualkuchi Trilogy