The Knitting Lesson

Recently, I decided that I wanted to learn to knit. The emergence of this wish coincided with a planned visit home for spring break, where I shortly found myself in possession of a little booklet—an instructional manual—called Learning to Knit. This booklet was put in my hands by my mother, whom I asked to teach me while I was at home.

My mother, raised in India, was educated at a convent school, where learning about what she likes to term “the domestic arts” was an ongoing part of the curriculum. At our home outside Toronto she still has with her some needlework projects she made as a young woman, as well as exercise books in which are glued small samplers of an array of needlecrafts: smocking, embroidery stitches, preternaturally neat seams, and crochet work. Searching for what she needed to get me started, she pulled these treasured objects out of the far reaches of her closet, delighted that—twenty years later—I was finally interested in the skills I had refused to learn as a child, despite her profound desire to teach me.

However, these projects of hers were not just school projects. She had carefully saved them because they were also family projects and mementos. In addition to learning from the nuns, my mother was schooled by her mother and aunt and practiced with her cousins, all of whom were skilled in these arts and shared their knowledge and labor. Among this collection, in a bag of its own, was the knitting booklet, which she now retrieved for me. Unlike the other objects, however, this booklet had only come into her possession in Canada, purchased by her sometime shortly after she immigrated in the late 1970s, and had been in a plastic bag all this time, untouched since its purchase.

In the days that followed my mother taught me the basics of knitting. When I returned to New York, she gave me the booklet to consolidate what she had taught me and to prevent me from forgetting this newly and precariously learned skill.

Yet there is a mystery about this book that preoccupies me. Why would my mother, who knew perfectly well how to knit, buy the most basic beginner’s guide to knitting? I have several theories, by no means mutually exclusive, to try to explain this seeming incongruity. Perhaps, for my mother, who came to Canada alone to be with my father and whose family stayed behind, the little booklet was an attempt to reaffirm the world she left—something purchased in Canada but evocative of home. Perhaps it was an attempt to shore up her knowledge against a possible forgetting; the women who had taught her these skills were now far away. But as the book appears to come from the early 1980s, which would have been shortly after my birth, I also like to think that, for my mother, the purchase of this beginner’s guide to knitting pointed to a possible future in which what she knew would be taught and transmitted to me. For my mother, the acquisition of the knitting booklet, purchased prospectively, would have borne witness to an implied promise to (and for) the future and expressed a commitment to transmission. Today, having been passed to me, the booklet appears ultimately to have served this purpose, if a couple of decades later than expected.

As the speculative nature of my theories suggests, however, the significance of the booklet to my mother cannot be so readily fixed, or her intentions so transparently accessed. My belated receipt of the booklet suggests not just a delay but a disruption in transmission—transmission of the booklet itself, of the art that it teaches, and of the entire complex of practices and life-ways that it represents for my mother. With transmission thus disrupted, does the object mean the same thing to my mother and me? Can it possibly bear witness to her—to the dislocations of a diasporic life, and to her hopes or fears for her life in Canada—in the way I imagine it does? Most important, what does this disruption in...