The spindle spinner

Dashain is a year-round presence in Meera Sthapit’s mind. By February, the lattai-maker and artisan from Banasthali, must have already procured the wood and bamboo that go into making lattais. By the end of August, the lattais must be shipped to the kite-and-lattai stores around Kathmandu. September and October are for last-minute orders, if any. The few days around Dashain are Meera’s downtime, and then it’s back to planning for next year’s festive season and thinking about what upgrades she can make to the few tools she has in the workshop adjacent to her house.

The workshop is a small cinderblock shack with a corrugated-tin roof propped up by bamboo pillars. Inside this barebones structure, among the slats of uttis and lakuri wood and piles of bamboo stems, Meera spends the better part of the year breathing in air thick with sawdust, her body stooped over her homemade lathes.

Meera’s lathes are nowhere close to being the multitasking, precision-timed, finely calibrated workhorses that industrial lathes are, but her machines do get the work done. They are basically motor-and-belt-driven spindle units bolted to the floor, and they can be used—with the right tool-bits and a little bit of ingenuity—to cut circles, sandpaper surfaces, etch grooves and apply spirit and varnish to wood.

Way back, when Meera first started out, she didn’t have such machines to speed up the lattai-making process. Almost 40 years ago, when she was 15 years old, she took up lattai-making because her father needed another pair of hands to help him keep up with the orders. Her grandfather—a carpenter who specialised in making wooden window frames, staircases and banisters—had gotten into lattai-making more for the love of it than to make money. Her grandfather had slapdashed together his first lattai from spare wood and bamboo splints only because he wanted his own homemade lattai to fly his kites. His friends had pleaded with him to make them some too, and before he knew it, he was making lattais for all his friends. By the time Meera’s father got into the craft, lattai-making had become a family business.

For Meera, getting involved in lattai-making was initially more about having a better Dashain for herself. She wasn’t paid an actual hourly wage by her father when she started out, but the money that she was given for her effort (20 or 30 rupees, “a fair-enough tip,” Meera says, because the lattais back then sold for between two to 10 rupees) was enough for her to buy the clothes and knickknacks she had coveted over the year. As she grew older and as her sisters got married and left the family and her brothers started their own businesses and some of them passed away, she took it upon herself to buy better tools, build relations with wood mills to obtain the raw materials, hire a few workers to help increase productivity and, in general, expand the business.

Over the years, she also tinkered with the basic design and materials used for the lattai until she got the model that she wanted. The design calls for using two discs (cut out from planks of lakuri wood) connected by a truss made from bamboo splints; the cylinder thus made is further reinforced around its middle with a disc made from the cheaper uttis wood. Through the centre of this cylinder is inserted a long wooden handle that extends for a good few inches on the outer sides of both discs. Meera etches various designs on the discs to increase the kite-flyer’s grip on the lattai, but other than these variations, all her lattais—the smaller ones start at size two and the biggest one is a size seven—follow the same blueprint.

Meera’s lattais have been well-received and sought by retailers in the Valley for more than three decades now. In fact, all the way through the 1980s and up until around the turn of the century, business was very good. The Internet still hadn’t made much headway in the country, cyber cafes were much fewer, and Nepali kids back then still preferred kite-flying to video games. Today, Meera says, she’s losing customers year-on-year to these distractions.

She says she will continue making lattais for as long as she can, but she knows that to make good money, she will have to take up something else. Her nephew, who lives with her, does help out, but he is more interested in breeding dogs because that venture looks more promising in today’s Kathmandu. He has built a kennel alongside Meera’s workshop and pretty soon, as his business grows, the workshop might have to give up some of its space to the kennel. But Meera says she will still make batches of lattais, until there is no more demand, because the lattai is more than just a product for her. Every lattai that she makes is a family heirloom.