'Invisible' woman in the public eye at last

PLENTY of people exchanging free hugs in Times Square last week travelled a long way to reach New York, but it's safe to say few covered anything like the distance Kakuben Lalabhai Parmar had.

This is not just a matter of mileage, although it's a hike from Madhutra, a rural village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, to 42nd Street.

At a practical level, Parmar's trip required a series of unusual conveyances, among them a cart drawn by a bullock, a trishaw, the flatbed of a Jeep and the open-topped shuttle bus she rode to reach an airport before boarding a form of transport she had seldom seen close before, let alone ridden.

At a deeper cultural level, her journey is yet stranger and more wonderful, embodying as it does a half-century of global feminism and the evolutionary arc of modern India. In the cattle-herding community Parmar belongs to, one among a cluster of groups classed by the Indian constitution as "scheduled castes," women were traditionally bound not just to their region or village but to the home.

"My group was treated as untouchables," said 50-year-old mother of seven Parmar. And if the community was untouchable, its female members were still more disadvantaged by being socially invisible. Married at 14, she was well into adulthood before she came face-to-face with a man who was not a close relative.

Yet here she was in Midtown Manhattan last weekend, wrapping her arms around the strangers who gather there regularly, some of them understandably astonished at the apparition clad in a mirror-spangled skirt and a tie-dyed shawl, her throat and hands and arms lavishly adorned with the homemade tattoos that are a form of what Parmar termed "affordable beautification" in the far reaches of Gujarat.

And here she was, too, a businesswoman setting up shop at the Asia Society, where a group of artisans gathered for three days to sell their wares. Not a lot seemed to perturb her. She took in her stride urban commotion, the assorted indignities of travel, the novelty of seat belts, in-flight movies and also lifts, escalators, yellow cabs, mattresses and the abundant forms so standard in life that could be unnerving to an illiterate whose signature is a print of her thumb.

"I already experienced the biggest change in my life," she said, speaking a Gujarati dialect through an interpreter, "when I first got the chance to come out of my house and participate in society."

Parmar's moment of liberation came when the not-for-profit Sewa Project formed a unit in her village to help preserve endangered handicrafts and provide the people who make them a form of alternative employment.

"We never even thought of getting income from selling this stuff before," said Parmar, who sews patchwork embroideries that incorporate vivid threads and reflective shards cut by hand from scraps of mirror she buys by the pound.

The cloth, at least, may be familiar, since it is the kind used in the making of a slouchy "It" bag being hauled around this summer by Cameron Diaz, Nicole Richie and other stars.

The price tag on a satchel made from mirrored patchwork and bearing the label Simone Camille is about 1,300, a sum equivalent to two years of Parmar's income. Yet even on the modest 40 a month she earns sewing pillow covers that require almost a week's work and that sell in her local market for 10 a pair, she has become the family's chief breadwinner.

Parmar holds title to her own cattle, has a personal account with a credit union and is quick to point out that while this may seem insignificant to someone accustomed to such symbols of Western wealth as reliable electricity and plumbing, it is considered a vast change in circumstance for a woman from rural India.

"When I was a girl, all the assets belonged to the father or the husband or the brother," Parmar said. Squatting on the floor of the Asia Society's grand marble lobby, she demonstrated her technique for cutting mirror shards into diamond, oval and triangular shapes and a pointed form called a "crow", using the sharpened edge of a terracotta roof tile. She multitasked ceaselessly, stopping to spread out pillow covers for one buyer's approval, and explain the eye-dazzling motifs she uses to another, all the while keeping a sharp eye on the sales totals, eyeglasses perched at the tip of her nose.

"In those days, the husband was in charge of everything," she explained to a visitor. "What could you do, with no skills and no education?"

Now as a globetrotter, an informal ambassador for Sewa and the Crafts Council of India - one of a growing number of groups committed to preserving traditional folkways in India, a country where, by some estimates, 40 million to 60 million people gain at least part of their living making handicrafts - she finds herself in circumstances she could never have foreseen.

She flies around the world on her own. She takes taxis. She shops at top cosmetic shops, such as Walgreens, and somehow manages to domesticate the experience of visiting a world-class museum like the Met by finding creative kinship there between her own utilitarian patchworks ("We never wasted a scrap of fabric," she said) and a Malian mud cloth or a Sudanese tent divider embroidered with Venetian trade beads and cowrie shells.

Thanks to the work she does now, she says, her role in family life inverts that played by the generations of women who came before her.

"Now that I have my own business and make my own money, my husband shows me respect," Parmar said. There are even occasions, she said, when he helps her out with her accounts. "He's my secretary," she laughed.