Parmatma Handmade Papers

You can find us at 23, Sarani Sheri, right in the Mandi Ki Nal area. It is a place that stays pretty damp because of all the water we use for the paper. Parmatma Handmade Papers is a bit of a maze with all the screens and vats we have set up for the pulp. The smell of wet cotton and fiber is something you get used to after about five minutes of being here. We spend hours every day lifting the frames out of the water and laying the sheets out to dry. The lane outside, the Sheri, is quite narrow, so when the delivery carts come through, everyone has to squeeze against the walls to let them pass. We have sheets of paper hanging from lines across the ceiling, which makes the whole place feel like a paper forest sometimes. Our hands are usually stained with different colors or just wrinkled from being in the water so much. The neighbors often poke their heads in to see what new colors we are working on this week. It is a slow process and you can't really rush it, or the paper comes out wrong. We use old recipes for the pulp and try to keep things simple with the tools we have. When the sun is out, we take the boards outside to the little courtyard to speed up the drying. It’s a quiet kind of work, mostly just the sound of water.