The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  Karen waved a languid hand. ‘That’s my husband’s partiality. It’s a reasonable trade-off, I guess. My monasteries for his mountains. Although we met in New York, we’re based in Geneva right now because Bruno is Swiss. These days, he gets to go skiing and mountain climbing pretty regularly from home, but we agreed that this holiday shouldn’t be all Buddhist. Lotus would protest about that too, although she’s generally pretty easy-going. Not that she looked that way when you saw her this afternoon, I admit, but she doesn’t often freak out like that.’

  ‘You’ll take her on the trek with you?’

  Karen looked surprised, then shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not? Bruno carries her in a backpack most of the way. Everywhere we go, Lotus comes along. That way you get a balanced, open-minded kid.’

  The child wriggled away from her admirers and came to show off her manicure, spreading her small hands on Mair’s knees and beaming up at her. The ribbons fluttered in her ringlets. There was logic in Karen’s theory, Mair thought. She remembered her first glimpse of the little family in the bazaar and the intimacy that had impressed her then. Lotus was certainly the most confident two-year-old she had ever met.

  ‘You look lovely,’ Mair told her. ‘Just like a picture.’

  ‘Oui – comme Maman,’ Lotus agreed, admiring herself in the mirrors.

  The door of the salon opened, setting the lace curtains fluttering. A dark head and shoulders were framed in the doorway. ‘Karen?’

  Karen glanced up from her scrutiny of her toenails. ‘Hi. Did you get everything fixed up already?’

  ‘Pappy.’ Lotus dashed across and leapt into her father’s arms. He swung her off her feet. ‘Jumping lady,’ she clamoured, pointing at Mair. ‘Jumping high.’

  ‘Bruno, this is Maya,’ Karen called. ‘My new friend.’

  ‘Hello,’ the man said, nodding at her. There was a smile buried in him, Mair thought, but it wasn’t close enough to the surface to break through. She started to explain her name, which Karen hadn’t quite caught.

  Mair was Welsh for Mary. When she was young she had tried to persuade her friends to adopt this more sophisticated version, but it had never caught on. ‘Mair, Mair, pants on fire,’ the local kids used to chant. She didn’t actually utter any of this, though. Something about Bruno Becker’s level, interrogative stare silenced her.

  ‘Mair,’ she said quietly. ‘Hello.’

  The introductions were cut short because the beauty-parlour staff were shooing Bruno out of the door. Ladies Only Beauty clearly meant what it said.

  He carried Lotus with him. He indicated to his wife that they would see her back at the hotel when she was ready. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, over his shoulder, to Mair, and was gone. The introduction of a new friend of Karen’s was clearly nothing unusual.

  Karen stretched out her toes and smiled. ‘Peace. That means you and I can go and eat cakes once we’re through here. We can have a proper talk.’

  Mair felt like a pebble being tumbled along by a tsunami, but Karen Becker was too insistent – and too interesting – for her to make any real attempt at resistance. In any case, what else would she be doing?

  Once their toenail polish had dried to Karen’s satisfaction they strolled down a nearby alley to the German bakery. Over apple cake and coffee Karen confided that she had wanted to come to this part of the world for years, really ever since she had gotten interested in the Buddhist way in her early twenties. So far it had totally lived up to her expectations. These places were holy – they touched your soul directly. You hardly ever encountered that depth of spirituality in Europe, did you? And never in the US of A. Not that she had ever recognised, anyway, Karen concluded. Did Mair – was she pronouncing it right? – did she know what Karen meant?

  Mair thought of the whitewashed hilltop gompas she had visited in the last few days. The dark inner rooms with dim wall paintings and statues of the Buddha were thick with the scent of incense and wood ash, their altars heaped with offerings, often touchingly mundane ones like packets of sweet biscuits or posies of plastic flowers. The murmured chanting of monks rose through the old floors, and windows gave startling views of braided rivers and orchards far below. There was a divinity here, she reflected, but more than anything it troubled her with its elusiveness.

  At one monastery the guide had beckoned her into the kitchen where an old monk was tranquilly preparing the community’s dinner. With a wooden ladle he scooped water from a bucket into a blackened pot set on a wood-fired stove. Cold balls of rice were gathered into cloths ready for distribution. Kneeling beside him at a rough table, a boy monk of about ten chopped vegetables from the monastery garden. The old man nodded to indicate that he was satisfied with the effort as successive handfuls of carrot and onion were dropped into the pot. The two worked in silence, and it had occurred to Mair that, apart from her presence, this scene would have been exactly the same two or three hundred years ago. The monks’ quiet service to the unending routines of cooking and providing for others had touched her more eloquently than any of the religious rituals.

  She tried to describe this tiny epiphany to Karen.

  ‘But I understand completely,’ Karen interjected. She reached out and covered Mair’s fingers with her own. ‘There are many paths to recognition, but they are all the same road. You do know what I’m talking about. I was sure you would. I felt it in you as soon as I saw you.’

  ‘Even though I was turning somersaults?’

  ‘Because of that, as much as anything else. Why suppress what you wanted to emote? You are the complete you. I endorse that.’

  Bruno wasn’t spiritual in the same sense that she was, Karen continued, but he understood where she was coming from because he related to the mountains. They were his temples, and he made his own pilgrimages among them. ‘Take Lotus, for example. I believe in letting her experience the whole world as essentially benign. I want her to grow up as far as possible without fear, without unnecessary restrictions, without petty rules, so she can become her intended self within the stream.’

  Mair wondered if Lotus – quite understandably – dealt with excess benignity by having a tantrum or two.

  They had finished their coffee and cake. Karen dotted up the last of the crumbs with a fingertip and licked it. She said, ‘I must go. What are your plans? We’ll be out of town for four or five days.’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff to look into here. I don’t know how long that’ll take.’

  Karen studied her, her finger still resting against her lips. Mair noticed how the two or three other tourists in the bakery couldn’t help gazing at her companion.

  ‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ Karen said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Mair protested.

  ‘But you’ve never let on why you’re in Ladakh. You’re not just here for a sightseeing holiday, I can tell that much.’

  Mair wasn’t going to try to describe the shawl to Karen, or the lock of hair, or the blanks in the family history that had colonised her imagination with such force. Awkwardly, she said, ‘My father died recently.’

  At once, Karen’s face flooded with sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said warmly. ‘That’s sad for you. You were drawn to a Buddhist country for a reason. Have you heard of punabbhava? It means “becoming again”. That’s the belief we have in rebirth. It doesn’t annihilate grief or loss, and it isn’t meant to, but contemplation of it provides comfort. Sometimes it does, at least.’

  Her new friend meant well, Mair realised, and the way she talked might sound alien but it was certainly sincere. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled.

  Karen squeezed her hands and stood up. She paid for their tea, waving away Mair’s proffered money. ‘Where are you staying?’

  Mair told her.

  ‘So we’ll see you when we get back.’

  The next day Mair went to visit the Leh Pashmina Processing Plant. The weather was changing, as if to underline the Beckers’ absence. The gilded autumn sunshine Mair had begun to take for granted was filtere
d out today by low, thin grey clouds as the last leaves were chased down from the poplar trees by an insistent wind.

  A small man in a baseball cap emerged from one of the plant’s grimy buildings to meet her. ‘My name is Tinley. I am assistant manager of production. This way to see the magic, ma’am,’ he joked, as he led her across the yard to a concrete shed. Mair followed, not sure what he meant.

  Inside, four women squatted in a circle. They had shawls drawn over their heads and across the lower half of their faces. Between them towered a heap of fleece, thick curled clods of raw goat’s hair matted with dung, grease and twigs, looking exactly as Mair had seen it when it was stuffed into bags up on the plateau. There was no doubt that this was the untreated pashm fibre as it arrived by truck from distant Changthang. The women were teasing out the clumps by hand, removing the worst of the filth and sorting the hair into smaller heaps according to colour, from palest grey-white to dark brown. The air in the bare room seemed almost solid with the rancid odour of goat.

  Tinley made a small gesture of regret. ‘This is a colour-separating process. It can only be done by the human eyes.’ Then he brightened. ‘But, as you will see, the rest of our process is modern. Highly mechanised. Come this way, please.’

  A metal door slid open on runners and Mair stepped into the next section of the plant. She had been aware of the hum of machinery, but she blinked at the sheer size of what lay beyond the door. The machine must have been fifty yards long, a leviathan of rotating belts and spinning flywheels, vast rubber rollers and steaming tanks. At the end of the line was a drying chamber from which the wool emerged cleaner and softer, but still with thick coarse hairs and fragments of dirt trapped in it.

  ‘What now?’ she asked, as she twisted a hank between her fingers.

  A second metal door opened ahead. A wave of humid air, heavy with the smell of wet wool, rolled over her.

  ‘Why is it so hot? And so damp?’ she choked out.

  ‘It is a humidified chamber,’ Tinley said proudly. ‘It makes the wool easier to work. This is the dehairing section, see?’

  They peered into the machinery. At each stage the remaining wool emerged whiter and softer, as the pure fleece – the goat’s innermost insulation against the Himalayan cold – was separated out.

  At the end of the line, after another drying chamber, the belt turned back on itself. One man sat in reverent attendance as the cleansed and blow-dried end product billowed from the jaws of the machinery.

  Mair couldn’t help herself. She stepped forward and plunged her arms up to the elbows into pure pashm. It was like handling a cloud, weightless and pure, and exactly the same colour. She remembered that one kilo of the greasy, reeking wool she had seen at the beginning of the line produced a mere three hundred grams of this airy fleece. ‘It is a kind of magic,’ she agreed.

  Tinley’s eyes glinted. ‘Come with me.’ He settled his baseball cap squarely on his head and led the way out of the processing plant.

  The back lanes were too narrow for two to walk abreast, and were overhung with washing lines, the branches of knotty old trees and the projecting balconies of houses. Tinley walked so fast that Mair had to concentrate on keeping up. At a collapsing set of gates in a whitewashed wall he suddenly stopped and nodded her through. Hens scratched in refuse and the call of the muezzin rose over the housetops.

  ‘Julley,’ Tinley called, to a man leaning on a broom.

  Up four stone steps and through a narrow door, they came into a roomful of women seated at wooden looms. There was a steady creak of floor treadles and the flash of shuttles as they worked. They were weaving plain pashmina lengths, in soft shades of grey and brown. These workers, Tinley told her, were producing shawls for sale through the state-sponsored craft-industry outlets in Leh. ‘Very traditional methods preserved, nice work for women here. They can work what hours they can, make some money, and also take care of families.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Mair acknowledged. But she was puzzled by how different these pieces were from her own.

  They passed through the weavers’ studio and the women looked up at her and smiled as she passed. The front of the building, to Mair’s surprise, opened out on to a view she recognised – the main street, with the minarets of the central mosque rising against the hill crowned with the old palace. Via the backstreet labyrinth they had come into a shawl showroom, lined with the now-familiar shelves. A salesman grinned a flash of gold incisor at her as he began to slide his wares out of their plastic bags.

  Leh could sometimes seem like one large wool-based retail opportunity.

  There was no question of withholding her custom, though, after Tinley had patiently taken her through the manufacturing processes. Mair obediently picked out three shawls: a pearl-grey one for Eirlys, a toffee-brown one for herself, and a cream one for Hattie, which would suit her friend’s dark colouring. She paid twelve thousand rupees in all, and reminded herself that it was not such a great deal of money for all the work that had gone into producing the pashmina fibre.

  The salesman took her purchases away to wrap, and on a sudden impulse Mair opened her rucksack and pulled the folded pouch from the innermost recess. Tinley watched curiously as she unfolded her grandmother’s shawl and gently spread it on the shop’s plain wooden counter. The colours of water and blossom made a pool of brilliance in the subdued light of the shop. The goods on the shelves appeared suddenly drab and coarse in comparison. Tinley gave a sharp sniff as he bent over to examine the shawl more closely, and the salesman swung round to take a look.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about this?’ Mair asked.

  Tinley picked up a small hand lens from behind the counter and minutely examined the weave, running his fingers over the embroidery before flipping the fabric to examine the reverse. He traced the outlines of the paisley shapes and peered even more closely through his lens at one corner of the piece.

  ‘This is Kashmiri work,’ he said. ‘Kani weaving. We don’t do this here in Ladakh.’

  The salesman said something to him.

  ‘You are selling it?’ Tinley casually enquired.

  ‘No. Definitely, no. It belonged to my grandmother. I am … just trying to find out something about the shawl’s history, and maybe through that a little about my grandmother. I never knew her, you see.’

  Tinley put aside his lens and straightened up. ‘Then you must go over the mountains to the Vale of Kashmir,’ he said.

  ‘I think my grandparents were here in Leh, though. During the 1940s. My grandfather was a Christian missionary.’

  ‘A Catholic? Moravians?’

  ‘No. He was Welsh, a Presbyterian.’

  Tinley shook his head, shrugging. This clearly meant nothing to him. ‘The Europeans came, not many stayed. They opened some clinics and founded schools for children and for that we owe them a debt.’ The unspoken rider was that for other things the missionaries had attempted, presumably the work of religious conversion, less gratitude was due.

  Mair said, ‘I wanted to take a look at the European graveyard here, but the gates are always locked and I can’t find out who has the key.’

  Tinley grinned, showing good teeth, and pushed his cap to an angle. He spoke rapidly to the storekeeper and they both laughed.

  ‘That’s easy. Tsering, my friend here, his uncle is the caretaker.’

  The two men exchanged more information and Tinley told Mair that if she came back to the shop tomorrow, perhaps at three o’clock, the uncle would bring the key and take her to visit the graveyard.

  She thanked them both and promised she would be there promptly. She began to fold the shawl again, but Tinley touched her wrist. ‘You have seen this?’ he asked, pointing to one corner of it. He put the lens into her hand, and she leant over to see what she hadn’t noticed before. There was a tiny embroidered symbol, like a stylised butterfly or perhaps the initials BB, with the first letter reversed, and next to it another indecipherable mark. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is the maker
’s signature, and the numbers “42”, which is perhaps the date of completion. It is a fine piece, and it would have taken many months, even years, for the craftsman to weave and then embroider. Probably it was made for a bride, as a wedding shawl for her to take with her to her husband’s home.’

  For Grandmother Nerys Watkins, as a gift from her husband the Welsh Presbyterian missionary? Mair thought the shawl was far too opulent for that. Nothing she had learnt about her grandparents’ circumstances or their restrained faith matched its rarity and value. The mystery seemed only to deepen.

  She put the new shawls into her bag with the precious old one, thanked the shopkeeper, and repeated that she would be back at three the next day.

  Tinley smiled broadly. ‘You must be wearing your new pashmina. The cold weather is coming. Winter is early for us this year.’

  As she walked through the old town the next afternoon, she saw how the place was turning in on itself under a bitter wind scything down off the mountain ice fields. She could smell snow in the air, as Tinley had predicted, and she was glad of the warmth of her muted brown shawl round her throat. Most of the house windows were now protected by old wooden shutters, and almost every roof towered with bundles of wood and stored animal fodder. There were fewer people about in the bazaar and she passed only one or two Westerners. In another week or two the last of the cafés and guesthouses would be closed, the summer migrant workers would head down to the beaches and hotels of Goa for the winter season, and Leh would sink into its winter isolation as the snow piled up on the passes. She thought of the Beckers, and wondered how they were coping in their tent in this cold weather.

  At the showroom there was, of course, no sign of the uncle with the elusive key. Tsering the shopkeeper waved his hand at her impatience. He wanted to show her a new consignment of shawls, just arrived from the finisher. They drank masala chai and nibbled almonds and dried apricots as Mair admired the wares. She was learning that the ritualised exchanges of buyer and seller must take place even though they both knew that money and shawl were not going to change hands today.