I'm not usually a big consumer - I don't buy things, especially new things. But figuring 'I'll only be in India once', I made sure to indulge myself when it came to the beautiful textiles that figure so heavily in daily life there.

The frontmost stack in the image are four Madras plaid lungi. We flew through Chennai (which was called Madras until 1996), a city along the south-western coast of India, which was where the thin, lightweight plaid known as 'Madrasi checks' and 'bleeding Madras' got its name.

I bought these four machine-woven 'Cock Brand' lungi from a shop in the grand bazar in Pondicherry; each piece is about 2 yards long and is generally worn by men like a sarong, wrapped around the waist and held with a twist of some sort, then left to hang to the floor or are folded up to knee-height. Before you start thinking this might not be a practical garment, we saw scores of fellows building houses, digging ditches, climbing coconut trees and doing anything else you can imagine wearing their lungi, which just seemed to get more beautiful, soft and faded with age. The patterns are complex and dense without the balance of a more traditional plaid, and generally in shades of blue with bits of yellow, purple, and green or even a little ikat stripe of some sort. I couldn't get over how beautiful they were!

Our photographs are mainly black and white and are so far unscanned, but hopefully I'll have some in the near future! And of course, better -and more- pictures of these stacks...