Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
late 1980s
During my years living in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, in the late 1980s, one of my favourite non-teaching day rituals was to catch a little city bus into the heart of Kuala Lumpur. The journey itself was part of the pleasure, leaving behind the leafy suburbs for the treeless bustle of the capital city's centre, where hawker stalls, goldsmiths, textile merchants and pre-war shophouses lined dusty streets.
More often than not, I found myself wandering off Jalan Sultan Ismail onto less busy sidestreets such as Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, then one of the city’s older commercial thoroughfares, where traditional family businesses still flourished like they had for decades.
Among the shophouse storefronts was a narrow, double-storey carpet shop that seemed almost untouched by time. Inside, carpets were stacked from floor to ceiling in towering piles, a range of woven colours stretched beneath subdued lighting. The unmistakable scent of lanolin and wool lingered in the humid air.
The proprietor of that one particular shop was an elderly Pakistani gentleman whose appearance remains clear in my memory to this day. He always wore a light-coloured knitted prayer cap and a traditional shalwar khamis beneath a well-worn vest, and he sported a wispy gray beard that framed his long, weathered face. He possessed none of the mannerisms of a modern salesman. Instead, he welcomed visitors with slightly indifferent courtesy, speaking in a South Asian English accent that seemed to come from a bygone era. Our interactions were always extended without me ever feeling the slightest pressure to buy.
As he and I talked, a young assistant would appear carrying small glasses of teh tarik (milk tea). There was no hurry. One carpet after another would be carefully unfolded across the wooden floor in front of me, each accompanied by stories of tribes, villages and distant landscapes. It felt less like a commercial transaction than an invitation into a centuries-old tradition. Looking back now, I suspect that I was witnessing a world that has now largely disappeared.
On one of these days, among the richly coloured Bokharas and elaborate Persian silks, one rug immediately drew my attention. Unlike the others, it seemed almost to glow. Its open ivory field provided an elegant canvas for rows of elongated Turkoman guls—those ancient tribal emblems that have appeared in Central Asian weavings for centuries. Between them sat smaller diamond motifs, while a succession of restrained geometric borders enclosed the central field without overwhelming it. The broad use of ivory allowed the design to breathe, giving the carpet a balance and quiet confidence that attracted me then and continues to do so today.
The dealer explained that the carpet had Turkoman roots and came from the Khorasan region around Mashhad in northeastern Iran. Nearly forty years later, that assessment -- according to professional sources I've checked -- appears remarkably accurate. It was almost certainly woven by settled Turkoman villagers in Khorasan, probably sometime between the 1940s and early 1960s. Its lustrous hand-spun wool is woven upon a cotton foundation using finely tied Persian knots, while its palette of mellow madder reds, deep indigo, soft camel and touches of burnt orange has mellowed beautifully with age. The shiny wool still reflects the light much as it must have when it first left the loom.
Like so many treasured objects, this carpet has enjoyed a remarkable journey. Woven in a small village somewhere in northeastern Iran, it travelled to the shop of an elderly Pakistani merchant in Kuala Lumpur before finding a home with me. Since then it has accompanied me through later chapters of my life in Japan, Singapore and, ultimately, to Bohol in the central Philippines.
The woman who sat before her loom in that Khorasan village could never have imagined that her work would one day lie beneath bare feet on a tropical island thousands of kilometres away. Nor could the elderly merchant who had tea served for a curious expat American have known that his stories would still be remembered nearly four decades later.
Today, when I look at this classic carpet, I see far more than wool, dye and craftsmanship. I remember a leisurely mid morning journey into old Kuala Lumpur, the aroma of tea in a naturally lit carpet shop, and the gracious man whose knowledge connected distant carpet-weaving villages with contemporary lives.
As all this shows, beautiful objects like this rug have journeys of their own.
