The first time I went to Pampore, I went uninvited. I'd been buying their saffron through a middleman for two years, and I wanted to see where it came from. I wanted to meet the women whose hands had been on the threads in my bottles.
Pampore is two hours from Srinagar by car. In October, the fields turn into a sea of purple. Crocus sativus, the only flower that produces saffron, blooming all at once over a window of about fifteen days. Miss those fifteen days and the year is over.
Five in the morning, with Mehbooba
The harvest starts at five in the morning. I followed Mehbooba, sixty-two years old, fourth-generation saffron picker, across her family's two acres. She moved faster than I could keep up with. Each crocus has three threads of saffron inside it. She picked them by feel, in the half-dark, without breaking a single petal.
By eight, the picking was done. The flowers were carried back to a low-roofed room where the women, only the women, this is their work, sat in a circle on the floor. Each took a flower, opened it, removed the three saffron threads, and placed them on a brass tray. The petals went into a separate basket. Nothing wasted. The petals get distilled into rosewater. The threads are what we wait for.
I asked Mehbooba how long she'd been doing this. She thought about it. "Since I was eight," she said. "But my hands have been doing it longer than I have. They learned from my mother's hands. Her hands learned from her mother's."
Three generations of attention
We pay Pampore directly. No middleman. No "saffron sourced from Kashmir region" vagueness. Mehbooba's name is on our supplier list. So is her daughter's, who's twenty-six and learning the trade now, and her granddaughter's, who's eight, and just starting.
That's what's in the bottle. Not a thread of saffron. Three generations of attention.