My Magic Carpet Ride In India

Several years ago, when I was looking for Oriental carpets to furnish my three-story Brooklyn (N.Y.) brownstone, a friend took me to a merchant he knew in upstate New York. I bought three gorgeous rugs, all of them made in India.

More recently my husband Ken and I decided we needed four more rugs for the house: one for our bedroom, one for the living room, and one each for the two staircase landings. This time, however, we were planning a family vacation to India and thought it would be fun to buy at the source. In December we traveled to north-central India, a major rug-production center. Our challenge was to find rugs of higher quality and lower price than we could get in New York. To see how we fared, I lined up a carpet expert back home to evaluate my finds when we returned.