How a Garbo Is Made: Clay, Holes and the Nine Nights

I know Navratri is close from the pavement, not the calendar. Some time in the last week of September the garbas appear outside the pottery shops — leaning towers of them, the small ones stacked at the top, the big-bellied ones holding up the bottom, every one of them full of holes.

This year the nine nights open on Sunday 11 October and run to Maha Navami on Monday 19 October, with Dussehra the day after. Which means that in potters' yards across Gujarat the work is mostly finished already. A pot that will hold a lamp in October was a lump of wet clay in July.

We talk a great deal about the dance and almost never about the thing it goes around. So this one is about the pot — what it is made of, how the holes get into it without the whole thing falling in, and what to check when you are choosing one with a child pulling at your arm.

It starts as a lump, not a pot

The clay does not arrive ready to use. Potters dig it from the banks of local lakes and tanks, cart it home, then spend days on the unglamorous part: drying the lumps hard, beating them to powder, picking out roots and grit, mixing with water and kneading until it has the give of dough.

The picking-out matters more than it sounds. A stone left in the wall will not show while the pot is being thrown. It shows in the fire, when the clay around it shrinks and the stone does not, and a crack opens through a week's work. Bits of lime are worse — they can sit quietly through the firing and then, weeks later, take a chip of the surface off with them as they draw damp from the air.

So a potter kneading clay is doing two jobs at once: making it even, and reading it for anything that should not be in there.

On the wheel

A garbo is, underneath the decoration, an ordinary round pot — a globular body, a wide open mouth, a base narrow enough to sit in a ring of straw or cloth. The Prajapati and Kumbhar households who make them throw hundreds of the same form in a season, and it shows in how quickly the shape comes up off the wheel.

Wall thickness is the whole argument. Too thick and the light stays trapped inside: the holes read as dull dots rather than points of flame. Too thin and the pot will not survive what happens next, because what happens next is that somebody cuts a third of the belly away.

There is also a reason this happens now and not in August. You cannot shade-dry a pot in heavy monsoon air, and you certainly cannot fire one in an open kiln in the rain. The Navratri stock has to come out of the window between the last serious rain and the festival — which is why the yards look frantic in September.

The one hour the holes can be cut

This is the part I find most satisfying, and it does not happen on the wheel at all.

A freshly thrown pot is far too soft to pierce — press a tool into it and the wall folds inward. A fully dried pot is too brittle, and the same press cracks it. In between, clay passes through a stage potters call leather-hard: cool, still slightly damp, no longer able to bend, firm enough to carve, join and pierce. That window is where the garbo gets its name and its character.

The holes go in with a sharpened stick, a length of cut tube, a nail — whatever the household has been using for two generations. Not scattered at random, either: in rows around the widest part of the belly, in diamonds, in bands, always leaving ribs of uncut clay standing between them. Those ribs are the pot's remaining skeleton. Cut two holes too close together and you have built in a weak point that will announce itself in the fire.

A large garbo may have its whole belly opened into a lattice; a small home one might carry three or four rows. Either way the piercing gets done in one sitting, because clay keeps drying while you work.

Drying is the slow part

Once the holes are cut, the pot goes into shade. Not sun, and that is deliberate. Sun dries the outside faster than the inside and the rim faster than the base, so the pot shrinks at two speeds at once and splits along the difference. In the yards you see them under a sheet or in a lean-to, turned every day, drying for anything from a few days to a couple of weeks depending on how much moisture is still hanging in the air.

A pierced pot is more fragile at this stage than a plain one, because every hole is an edge and every edge dries faster than the flat wall beside it. Hurrying here is the most common way to lose a garbo before it has ever been near a flame.

The fire, which is shorter than you think

Village firing is not a slow, instrumented kiln cycle. The pots are stacked into an open clamp kiln on a bed of fuel, packed around with dung cakes, straw and wood — in Kutch, with the thorny stems of the gando bawal that grows everywhere — then sealed under a skin of earth and old broken shards and lit from below.

Earthenware needs less heat than people assume. Clay becomes ceramic somewhere above 600°C, far short of what stoneware demands, and an open firing like this is finished in hours rather than days. The fuel decides the colour: plenty of air gives the familiar orange-red, while a smothered, smoky fire pulls pots towards grey and black, which is why two pots out of the same stack can come out different shades.

When the stack is opened, the sorting begins, and the test is sound. A well-fired pot rings when you flick it with a fingernail. A cracked or underfired one gives back a flat thud. Potters do it one pot after another, well under a second each.

Then it gets loud

The garbo that reaches you is almost never left plain. The older decoration was done in clay-based paints — the red, black and white slips that potter women in Gujarat have used for generations, in patterns particular to their own community.

Most of what reaches the pavement now is enamel paint, lace, mirror work, glitter, sometimes a string of battery lights. I am not going to be sniffy about that. In my mother's house the painting is a children's job, done on spread newspaper two days before Ghatasthapana, and the mirrors go on crooked every single year. It is a ritual object and a family craft project at once, and both of those are true.

What you are actually choosing on the pavement

Four checks and you are done.

• Flick it. You want a ring, not a thud.
• Hold it up to the light. The wall should look even, with no hairline running between two holes.
• Sit it on something flat. A garbo that rocks on the shop counter will rock on a stool with a burning lamp inside it.
• Look at the spacing. Generous ribs of clay between the holes mean it was made by somebody who was not in a hurry.

The lamp does the rest

A diya burning inside a closed clay pot needs air, and the perforations are what supply it — cool air drawn in low, hot air leaving higher up. That is the practical reason a garbo pierced only near the rim burns badly, and the reason the belly is the part that gets cut away. The meaning and the draught happen to want the same thing.

Nine nights of that leaves the inside black with soot, which nobody minds. In our house the pot sits with the rest of the evening things — the lamp, the flowers, an agarbatti named for one of the jyotirlingas, Somnath in our case because that temple is ours — and by Dussehra the whole room smells of oil smoke and sandalwood.

After that it goes up onto a high shelf, or back to the earth, or it cracks and is replaced next year. The potter has moved on regardless. Diwali follows about three weeks behind Navratri, and the diyas do not make themselves.