The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘All this, before the snow comes?’

  ‘It is only the beginning of September, but if the weather happens to be against us the Lord will direct our actions.’

  ‘Do you really want me to go?’

  The mattress rustled as he minutely shifted his weight. ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

  ‘Very well,’ Nerys said, in a cold voice that she didn’t want to acknowledge as her own.

  Three days later, her bag stood in the mission courtyard beside the McMinns’ luggage, waiting to be loaded on to the first relay of ponies. Nerys handed out apples and dried apricots to the scrum of Leh children, not just her pupils, who were staring through the gate at all the activity. Diskit’s three grimy offspring were among them, and Diskit herself stood on the house steps in tears. She wasn’t wearing her headcloth. Nerys put down the fruit basket and went to her. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll be back in two months’ time. Sahib will bring me home.’

  Diskit only sobbed more loudly. Nerys put her arm round her shoulders, inhaling the ripe smell of her hair. ‘Don’t forget your scarf. Always when you are working. Look after Sahib for me.’

  Diskit wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘Yes, Mem.’

  ‘The ponies are ready,’ Archie announced, from beyond the gate, as hoofs rattled on the dried earth. Myrtle had put on her sola topi, with the muslin veil tied around her face, and Nerys had a wide straw hat.

  Evan stood to one side, looking unhappy now the moment of parting had finally come. Nerys went to his side and reached up for a kiss. Awkwardly he knocked her hat askew as their dry lips touched. He stood back at once and patted her shoulder. ‘It won’t be so long. God bless you, my dear.’

  She mumbled a goodbye, conscious that Diskit, the house-boys and the schoolchildren were watching, although the McMinns had tactfully busied themselves out in the street. The bolder children flung themselves at her, clasping her knees, and she bent down to hug and kiss each of them, instead of her husband.

  Archie and Myrtle were mounted and Nerys’s pony was waiting. Archie’s bearer helped her to clamber into the padded saddle, then took the reins and turned the pony’s head to the road for her. She twisted round to wave goodbye. The procession moved off down the lane, past the chapel and into the street leading to the bazaar, leaving Evan’s solitary black silhouette outlined against the stone wall of the mission compound.

  It was a cloudless day. As they wound the first miles along the Indus valley, Nerys felt heat strike through her straw hat, and wished she had brought cotton gloves to protect her hands from the blazing sun. After a time, on a high spur of land, she saw the prayer flags and brass spires of Spitok rising above the towering walls. This was the first of the great gompas on the route, and it was the furthest point she had travelled from Leh in more than a year.

  Myrtle had gone ahead, but now she reined in her pony and waited for Nerys to catch up. Archie and the string of pack ponies were already far in the distance, enveloped in a puff of swirling dust.

  ‘Would you like company?’ Myrtle asked. Only her dark eyes were visible between the swathes of veil. ‘Or would you rather be left to yourself?’

  Nerys looked up at the mountains ahead. The surprising strength that she had discovered on the long ride up from Manali seemed within her grasp again. ‘Company, please,’ she said.

  Myrtle reached out of the saddle to pat her knee. ‘Good.’

  They faced west, and rode on.

  Nerys soon discovered that travelling with the McMinns was a completely different experience from her journey with Evan. At night they stayed in the rest houses set along the route, commandeering the places regardless of who might have arrived ahead of them. As a British sahib and a proper daughter of the Raj, Archie and Myrtle automatically took the precedence they saw as their due. They felt no compunction in ousting Ladakhi or Kashmiri travellers from the shelters, even on one evening a Muslim man, with a hennaed beard, who was accompanied by several veiled wives and half a dozen small children and babies. Evan and Nerys had always been confused and unwilling to impose themselves over other people, even the humblest. Whenever they came to a guesthouse, to sleep beside the road in their draughty tent had often seemed the easier solution.

  The rest houses were often no more than two-roomed shacks, a living and sleeping room and an attached kitchen, and they were generally dirty and lacking any but the most basic amenities, but Sahib McMinn and his party were always greeted by the owners with extra civility and efforts to please. It wasn’t hard to deduce why, because although Archie demanded a full account of what was owing and didn’t overpay by a single anna, he invariably understood what the fair rate should be and handed over the money promptly and cheerfully.

  Their camp servants always first arrived at the rest house, and by the time the McMinns rode up, their yakdan bags had been untied from the ponies and set in the room for them. Camp beds were erected because Myrtle refused to use the charpoys provided, saying they were alive with bugs. Archie always pretended to be dismayed by his wife’s fussy behaviour, but affectionate amusement twinkled out of him. There were plenty of warm blankets, and even linen sheets, which were unpacked and repacked each day. The McMinns’ servants bought food locally to supplement the supplies the pack ponies carried, and their cook made the dinners, which were served with plates and cutlery rinsed daily in a solution of potassium permanganate. Sometimes there was even the opportunity to take a bath. A collapsible canvas structure was erected and part-filled, and Nerys was able to sit in it and luxuriously scoop warm water from an enamel jug over her skin and hair.

  At the end of each day’s journey, sitting in their camp chairs under the cobwebby guesthouse rafters, there was plenty for the three to talk and laugh about. Myrtle gossiped and joked about people they had encountered, or the various foibles of the pony men.

  ‘Do you think they have a rota?’ she speculated, about the Muhammadan and his wives.

  ‘No, I should think he favours the prettiest one,’ Archie replied. ‘I would.’

  ‘How can he tell?’ Myrtle wondered.

  ‘They don’t go to bed in their veils, darling.’

  Myrtle hooted with laughter. She smoked thin black cigarettes with opulent gold tips. The first time she lit one, Nerys glanced at her in surprise and Myrtle blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I was on my very best behaviour, you know, when we met. We were staying in the mission house. Will you disapprove hugely when you really get to know me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nerys laughed.

  Last thing at night, the bearer brought in mugs of hot cocoa. Archie tipped a slug of brandy into his own and Myrtle’s, and raised an eyebrow at Nerys.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said. This was a custom to which she had quickly adapted.

  There was only ever the one room at the rest houses, but she soon also got used to sharing with Myrtle and Archie. In bed Myrtle wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas with a Parisian label. ‘Much better for travelling, you know. The coolies drop lice in the beds when they make them up, but they slither off the silk.’

  She was right. Lice had been a feature of the Watkinses’ journey up to Leh, clinging snugly in the seams of Nerys’s flannel nightgowns.

  With Archie’s rhythmic snoring and Myrtle’s breathing as its accompaniment, Nerys found that she slept better on the Srinagar road than she had done lately in the mission house. Every morning, as soon as it was light, the bearer brought in their bed tea. After they had drunk it Archie went outside in his dressing-gown to shave in daylight while the women got dressed, and then it was time for hot porridge, scrambled eggs and the cook’s delicious fresh bread.

  They walked or rode all day, through tiny villages with narrow fields of ripe grain winding beside the rutted track, where bedraggled hens pecked at the verges and stray sheep went scudding ahead of the ponies. Banks of tattered rose bushes spread on either side, now hung with orange hips, like jewels sewn on devoré velvet. When the track rose out of the sparse villages, the
immense land was rocky and barren. The mountains loomed over them again, shadowed in sepia and purple, the most commanding ridge sometimes crowned with the massive white walls of a gompa.

  At Lamayuru, a few miles before the Fotu Pass, which was the highest point they would have to cross on the route, they stopped for the night in the shadow of the biggest monastery. It was a lowering, piled-up mass of white walls and red-painted wooden slabs, small-windowed, topped off with the squat domes of a dozen chortens with black and gold twisted spires that glittered like spun sugar. The ponies toiled up hundreds of irregular steps to reach the cluster of buildings clinging to the skirts of the monastery. Prayer flags danced against the blue sky overhead and Nerys was reminded of Spitok gompa, past which they had climbed on the road out of Leh. With a prickle of guilt, she realised she had been so busy with the small adventures of the road, and laughing about them with Myrtle and Archie, that Evan had hardly been in her mind. At this distance he seemed a dark, disapproving figure, in contrast to the light-filled days she had been enjoying.

  At Lamayuru they were staying in the inevitable rest house, but this one was much bigger than the roadside versions because of the stream of visitors to the monastery. Nerys was shown to a room of her own, no more than a tiny stone slot with a single narrow window. It looked out over a huge drop, with black choughs gliding below the sill.

  Their dinner that night was unusually subdued, as if the proximity of the monastery and the columns of red-robed monks quietened even Myrtle.

  Afterwards, instead of going back to her cell Nerys went outside and, on an impulse, climbed more steps to the walls of the monastery itself. She tipped back her head to look at the great edifice towering above her, black against the curtain of stars. Patches of faint yellow light glowed like veiled eyes in a few of the windows and she shivered in the wind. She thought she could hear the rise and fall of voices, chanting a prayer. Archie had murmured over dinner that Lamayuru village was a bleak place to live because the tributes and food demanded by the lama to sustain the monks left too little for the villagers themselves. It certainly seemed a desolate place tonight, as she pressed deeper into the angle made by a stone wall to find a scrap of shelter. From somewhere among the tiers of ramshackle houses beneath her rose the sound of a dog howling. She tried to imagine what Evan could achieve in a place like this, offering the promises and threats of a different religion to people who would be better off providing for their families and keeping their rice and mutton for themselves.

  All she felt towards her husband was an exasperated tenderness, and she wondered whether this diminished affection, against her own belief that what he did was futile, would be anything like enough to carry her through the years ahead. I could do it, she thought, and anything else he wanted of me, if we had our own children.

  She was thoroughly cold now. The monastery loomed so high and dark it was as if it was going to topple over and crush her. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders and made her way back down the steps. Archie’s bearer was waiting at the door of the dingy rest house.

  ‘Come now, ma’am,’ he called, and she felt guilty that she had kept him in the draught when he could have been reclining on his blanket with a pipe.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hari.’

  He lifted the oil lamp and led the way up the wooden stairs, past curtained doorways to her cubicle. He lit the candle that had been left for her on a little shelf and stood back. ‘I bring cocoa, ma’am. Coming now.’

  ‘I won’t have cocoa tonight, Hari, thank you. I’ll go straight to bed.’ She wanted to close her eyes, and for daylight to come quickly. Lamayuru was an oppressive place.

  After she had blown out the candle she lay listening to the darkness. There was a series of scraping sounds, probably made by rats in the ceiling. Wind gusted through the cracks between the wall and the tiny window frame. Then she heard another noise. It was no more than a woman’s voice giving a low cry, something between a moan and a sigh, followed by a series of rising gasps. And then, as a postscript, a conjoined bubble of laughter followed by a whispered ssssh.

  Nerys twisted under her blankets and pulled the crackling pillow hard over her ears. She didn’t want to have to listen to Myrtle and Archie making love; there seemed too many things tonight that she didn’t want to hear or know or think about. Her own life seemed small, solitary and devoid of purpose.

  The next day their route led onwards, over the high pass and through the town of Kargil. With Lamayuru a long way behind them, the travellers were in high spirits. More long but ultimately satisfying days passed, until only the jagged walls of the Greater Himalaya lay between them and the Vale of Kashmir. With the mountains in the distance it seemed impossible that their caravan could find a way to the summit via the Zoji Pass, but as they came closer they were able to pick out the crooked filament of a track zigzagging upwards. In one place there was a dart of brilliance as a mirror ornament or a fragment of polished metal on an ascending pony flashed the rays of the rising sun. Myrtle was reassuring when Nerys reined in her mount to assess the extent of the climb.

  ‘It looks harder than it actually is. Remember, you’ve already climbed higher than eleven thousand over the Fotu La, and on your way up to Leh last year.’

  ‘I’m not worried. I know we’ll do it. I’m just wondering what the view will be like from the top.’

  Myrtle’s eyes shone between the folds of her veil. ‘Like nothing you could imagine. It will be like looking down into Paradise.’

  This thought sustained Nerys through the long, baking ascent. Dust clogged her nose and throat and her water-bottle was soon empty. The sun rose higher, beating down on her head and shoulders. While she rode, her pony walked more and more slowly and she felt its shudders when the pony boy whipped its quarters. When she slid to the ground the stones dug up through the soles of her boots and the sun blazed fiercely. The jingle of the ponies’ harness set up a rhythm that was only broken by the occasional whistling of marmots from their burrows among the rocks. Black lammergeiers cruised the empty air spaces, lazily turning on their fretted wings.

  The pass itself was obscured by intermediate outcrops, and Nerys thought grimly that they would be climbing for ever. Archie was far ahead but Myrtle matched her pace to Nerys’s. They exchanged occasional words of encouragement, but most of their energy was taken up with just placing one foot in front of the other.

  As they mounted higher, Nerys began counting the number of bends still to be negotiated. There were seven, then five, then only one more.

  ‘Is this it?’ she begged Myrtle, dreading a false summit and a concealed cliff still to be negotiated.

  Whenever she glanced backwards the wide brown desert of Ladakh had receded further, and she knew that they were crossing into a different country.

  ‘Nearly,’ Myrtle puffed. ‘Why must Archie dash ahead all the time?’

  They came out on to a broad stretch of ground with chortens outlined ahead against the sky. Archie and the forward party were waiting for them. Down the slope Nerys glimpsed the picked-over bones and hide of a dead pony that must have fallen from the line of a caravan. It was a still day, but the air surged around her and she retied the strings of her straw hat.

  They crossed the saddle of the pass, thankful for the almost horizontal ground, until they drew level with the chortens. The rough stone mounds were strung with hundreds of flags, faded or still bright, with ragged white streamers festooned between them.

  Myrtle and Archie stood with their hands linked, silently looking west. Nerys came up beside them, and stopped short. Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir.

  The folds of land swept up towards them, lower ridges cloaked with ranks of sombre fir trees and the higher ones bright with silver birches. Long seams of snow lay in the shaded gullies, and waterfalls laced silver threads down purple rock faces. A haze of warmth blurred the great hollow of the Vale, but she could see distant pasture lands, ripe fields, and
the curves of a river. After the bare grey and brown landscape she had just crossed, the soft blend of a thousand shades of blue and silver and lavender mingled with pale green and gold seemed too sumptuous to be real. She stared at it for a long time, with the scent of rich earth and sweet water drifting up to her.

  Myrtle had not been exaggerating.

  It was the most beautiful place Nerys had ever seen.

  FIVE

  To get across the mountains from Leh to Srinagar, Mair’s options were to take the public bus, to find a group of people who were making the trip and needed another passenger to fill their vehicle, or to hire her own car and driver for the two-day journey. The buses ran every day, but they halted briefly overnight in Kargil and left again at one in the morning. Soldiers at the army checkpoints on either side of the Zoji La closed the road at five a.m. in order to leave the hairpin bends clear for army convoys, so official civilian traffic was supposed to be up and over the pass before then. She had seen notices pinned up in some of the Internet cafés offering spare seats for shared expenses in trucks or cars, but when she made her way to a phone office and called one of the numbers, she found herself talking (she was almost certain) to one of the Israeli boys who had been on the Changthang excursion. She made a hurried excuse and rang off. The option of her own car and driver had seemed by far the best until she went into the last travel agency that was still open for business and enquired about the price. She would just have to square up to the legendary discomforts and adrenalin shocks of the bus journey. She packed her bag, ready to leave Leh the next morning, and headed out for a last dinner at the best of the Lonely Planet Guide’s recommendations.

  ‘Hi there,’ a voice called, out of the frosty twilight, as she turned downhill towards the bazaar. ‘We were really hoping you were still in town.’