Working on restoring a carpet - rafoogar from Najibabad I met the craftsmen or rafoogars at an exhibition organised in Delhi to display the work of the craftsmen by Priya Ravish Mehra. She of course was not well and hospitalised and I was told supervised most of the work via skype or video calls from her hospital bed. She was suffering from cancer and breathed her last in May 2018. What remains there is her remarkable work with the rafoogars of Najibabad for whom she created a platform to meet artists, connoisseurs, art collectors, historians…to whom their work was remarkable and valuable. How else can one describe dexterous hands which can repair a 200 year old Pashmina shawl or an equally priceless carpet. Priya’s tryst with them began when she remembered how these darners would come to her grandfather’s house at Najibabad and work on old textiles to mend, a tear or a hole so well that one could rarely know where the tear was. Priya Ravish Mehra, a textile historian, reviv...