Charvi

When Charvi weaves, the loom clicks and the shuttle scuttles with a music that is made by no other carpet maker in the village, but mostly she sits listening, waiting for the fates to send their messages to her.
The pictures for her creations come to her in dreams, on the laughter of children playing alongside her veranda, in the argumentative chatter of monkeys scampering about the rooftops, and even in the taste of  figs she sucks in the afternoon.  
Charvi feels a twitch in her fingers and calls to her daughters to set the upright loom with a particular set of colours, dictates how they must be arranged and then settles herself cross legged before it.
She waits for the broken mosaic of her memory to put together colours and shapes in a fashion that will allow others to see the prophecy she needs convey. And then, with an uncertain air of experiment, she begins to send the shuttle this way and that, snapping the crocodile jaws of the loom, with a crack, that at first sounds like a cockroach crackling and slowly increases in confidence, until it assumes the speed and velocity of a riders whip. Villagers gather about the doorway to watch as the kaleidoscope of patterns take form and dance their way into life as the carpet grows.
When Charvi was blinded, her husband, deprived of her income, overwhelmed with providing for their eight children, walked away along the dusty road that leads towards Dhaka, where every man believes he can make his fortune.
Charvi and the children were taken in by her brother, and it was three months later that Charvi woke from a dream, and heard a mouse pitter pattering beneath her bed. She foresaw the mouse's fate, in the jaws of a snake currently curled up in a stack of stones beside the rice field, and then realised a more profound truth lurked in the murmurings of these visions.
She tried to express herself with words, but no-one listened to a poor blind widow, so she asked a daughter to lead her to where the village kept an old loom, its wood splintered and dry, un-worked, since the weavers migrated to work in unsafe tower blocks far away.
She wove for hours, until her palms bled, wefting and warping the heavy, badly spun hemp,
until dehydrated she was carried back to her bed, leaving a picture in the threads for all to see.
A man walking through the mango trees, and alongside, a shadow, camouflaged, prowling through the elephant grass. At one end of the road, a cluster of high rise buildings, at the other a woman and one, two three....eight children. Amazed as there were by her creation, no-one thought any more about the tapestry, until, a day later, word reached the village of her husband's demise, in the jaws of a man eating tiger.
Elevated to the prestige of a fortune teller, the villagers swept the building and repaired the loom, wound new hemp and dyed an entire spectrum of colours. But Charvi could not weave to order, was unmoved by money or threats. She waited for omens in the rhythm of life about her to reveal their stories, and allowed the prophesies in the threads to be found by those that sort them.