The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  In the kitchen a circle of faces gazed down. Bruno had laid Lotus on the nearest mattress. He knelt beside her and battled to keep her still as she writhed and screamed. He poured a trickle of water into the bite, trying to bathe it clean.

  Over his shoulder he ordered them, ‘Get more water. Soapy water.’

  Karen frantically grabbed the arm of one of the cooks. Mair caught sight of Gulam’s face as he rattled off a sequence of commands. He looked terrified.

  Lotus moaned, ‘Mama,’ as Karen knelt beside her husband. She reached out her hand and stroked back Lotus’s wet hair, murmuring softly, ‘It’s okay, baby. You’ll be all right, everything is all right, Mama’s here.’

  A basin of water was fumbled through the circle of spectators, and a hand held out the bathroom cake of soap.

  ‘A clean cloth,’ Bruno demanded. Karen stared wildly round the kitchen. There wasn’t a shred of anything clean in this house, and their bags were still in the Toyota. Mair quickly peeled off her coat and her fleece. One of her intermediate layers was a fine cotton shirt, put on in Leh yesterday morning. Only yesterday? She stripped it off and, with a strength that surprised her, tore it into rags. Bruno soaked the first, lathered it and went on washing the bite while Karen held the child. Mair prepared another strip of cloth with soap and water.

  Bruno raised his head to glance at his wife. ‘She hasn’t had any shots,’ he said.

  Karen’s body stiffened. ‘What shots?’

  He whispered, out of a mouth that was distorted with anguish, ‘You know what shots I mean.’

  Mair knew, but she had tried to stop herself thinking it. When she dared to look at her again Karen had aged, and her beauty had tipped into gauntness. Clumsily she wagged her head from side to side, trying to hold back the tide of horrified recognition.

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘No, that can’t happen.’

  ‘Will you take over?’ Bruno said to Mair. He gave her the cloth and indicated the bowl of water. ‘Keep on rinsing. Just keep at it.’

  Silently she took his place. Lotus’s shock seemed to be subsiding. She cried more normally now, as rage and pain flooded up in its place, clenching her fists and drumming her feet on the mattress.

  Bruno gripped Gulam by the shoulder. His knuckles showed white. ‘I need your mobile,’ he said.

  After that, Mair’s memories spooled away into darkness.

  She remembered hours of Bruno talking, shouting, or abjectly pleading into the borrowed phone. His face was etched with deep lines and there were navy-blue shadows under his eyes.

  When the battery went flat, she left Bruno and Karen with the child and scrambled in Gulam’s wake, through the mist-thickened lanes, to locate the generator she had heard earlier. It had gone off for lack of fuel, but with their growing retinue of interested villagers they were directed upwards to the monastery. A monk met them, listened to what they wanted, nodded with an impassive face. Freighted with sick desperation, minutes crawled into hours. Another phone was found. Frustration burnt like acid in Mair. She could see too clearly what Bruno and Karen were suffering.

  The phone connections were fragile. Bruno would get through to someone, a doctor or a consular official, or an officer at an Indian Army medical base, and then the signal would break up and he would have to start all over again.

  The information was meagre, and it changed with every call. There was rabies vaccine in Kargil. Or else it was available in Srinagar. Or there was none in the entire state, only in Delhi, and the doses Lotus needed would have to be flown up. There was a break coming in the weather. An army helicopter could fly to collect the Beckers, maybe tomorrow. The mist was going to cling for at least a week: no flights could take off. The roads would definitely open again soon; they would stay closed until the spring.

  After each reversal Bruno pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, as if this might obliterate what he dreaded seeing, then grimly resumed the pursuit. Once they had been alerted, his family and Karen’s began doing everything they could from Europe and America, but they couldn’t relay even what they were able to orchestrate from so far away.

  With Lotus in her lap, Karen watched the negotiations out of clouded eyes. Her thin body was tense as a wire.

  They all waited in the kitchen, the squalor of it rancidly familiar.

  At the end of that first terrible day, there was a clamour in the courtyard. Gulam summoned Bruno outside to see. The dog had been found, and the villagers had circled it and then stoned it to death. Its body was tied up in a sack and deposited in an outhouse. If a way of escaping from Lamayuru ever came, a sample of the dog’s brain tissue would be taken for veterinary analysis. In a low voice Gulam told Mair that he didn’t doubt what would be found. He had seen this before. A nun had died of rabies here last year. When she sickened she had begged to be taken to hospital, but there was nowhere within reach.

  ‘Many wild dogs now.’ He shook his head and then sadly shrugged. ‘We try to kill, but …’

  Mair remembered reading somewhere that the modern veterinary drugs given to livestock poisoned the vultures that had always cleaned up the carcasses of dead animals. With the near-extinction of vulture species, and the abundance of carrion, there had been an explosion in the numbers of feral dogs. And with the dogs came disease. This was what happened.

  Acceptance of circumstances and the belief that what would ensue was inevitable was Buddhist, she supposed. Her own response was the opposite. Whatever could be done must be done, and everything beyond that should be attempted. But she fought to suppress all her own urgencies, even a flicker of feeling, beyond what would be immediately helpful to Karen Becker.

  Performing grotesque contortions, time alternately crawled and galloped into the second day.

  And then the third.

  ‘When?’ Bruno pleaded yet again into the phone. ‘How long?’

  Lotus wore a bright white square of antiseptic dressing taped to her face, but otherwise seemed herself again. She was bored by the enforced confinement, and all three of them did their best to distract and amuse her. Mair saw the separate tenderness that her parents poured on their child, but with each other Bruno and Karen were minutely considerate, and distant. Every exchange about what was to be done, what might happen in the next hour or the following day, was too freighted with importance for them to admit their dread. The fluid intimacy she had envied, long ago in the bazaar in Leh, had solidified into a sheet of clear glass. The two of them moved alongside each other, but not together. Mair couldn’t even imagine what their nights must be like.

  On the third day of imprisonment, Karen wanted to take Lotus up to the monastery to be blessed by the lama.

  ‘No,’ Bruno said. His weary face tightened.

  ‘I want to.’

  Bruno turned his head. ‘Mair, would you take Lotus outside for a minute?’

  She grasped the child’s hand and they went out into the courtyard. Filaments of mist twisted over the rough roofs. The sky was nowhere; the world was thick and grey. Lotus was fretful and hung off Mair’s hand, refusing to walk another step. Karen came out to join them. Her white face was tinged with grey.

  ‘C’mon, Lo, back to Pappy. Wait for me, Mair?’

  When she emerged once more, she begged Mair to come up to the monastery with her.

  ‘My husband,’ she began precisely, ‘won’t let our child be blessed. He calls what I believe in mumbo-jumbo.’

  Mair remembered the praying.

  Inside the inner door of the prayer room, Karen fell to her knees. In smoky lamplight, the rows of monks sat cross-legged in front of their bound texts. Their mumbled chanting was without beginning or end, rising and falling, under the ancient dim wall paintings of pot-bellied gods and beasts and the blank eyes of golden statues. The beams of this hall, at the heart of the monastery, were hung with dozens of mask-faces but all were swathed in blackened muslin because they were too terrible to behold.

  Staring straight ahead of her, Karen was weeping. Tears ran
down her face and she mouthed a prayer.

  Mair cried too, out of impotence.

  On the fifth day, the mist broke up. A filmy layer obscured the sky for another hour, and then a tentative blueness appeared.

  Bruno rasped hoarsely into the mobile phone and at last he lifted his head. ‘A helicopter’s coming. We’ve got to get her down closer to the river where they can land it.’

  Lotus was hastily bundled up and her father lifted her in his arms. A procession wound down the steps from Lamayuru village to the appointed place. At last, against the hazy blue, a black dot appeared. Mair pressed a scrap of paper with her email address scribbled on it into Karen’s fist. ‘Please. Let me know.’

  ‘I will.’

  Bruno’s eyes were fixed on the sky. The Indian Army helicopter briefly landed, the Beckers ran beneath the rotors, the doors closed on them and they were lifted away.

  Mair waited in Lamayuru for another four days, until the Kargil road was cleared for traffic. Then she and Gulam made the long day’s drive over the pass, through Kargil and onwards to Srinagar.

  SIX

  The two women picked their way between tables and parasols, passing busy waiters who swivelled under trays of cocktails. The pontoon rocked gently on the lake water and Nerys put out a hand to steady herself.

  ‘Here we are,’ Myrtle announced over her shoulder. ‘The Lake Bar, Srinagar Club.’ She slipped into a seat at a table for two and indicated its partner to Nerys. When they were settled Myrtle took out her cigarette case and lit one of her gold-tipped cigarettes. She reclined against the cushions, blowing out smoke through clenched teeth and looking at the throng. ‘The centre of the universe, to some people.’

  ‘Not to you?’ Nerys asked lightly. She felt intimidated. The tables were full of smart women, and men in well-cut riding clothes or the uniforms of the various cavalry regiments. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and to be extravagantly at ease, laughing a lot as if they were all in on some enormously amusing joke. Myrtle had been greeted by at least a dozen people on their way in.

  A white-jacketed waiter bowed in front of them and wished them good afternoon.

  ‘Are you having a cocktail?’ Myrtle asked.

  Nerys shook her head. ‘Just some tea.’ Myrtle’s eyebrows rose and Nerys hesitated. ‘Well, maybe …’

  ‘Two gin fizzes,’ Myrtle ordered briskly. ‘No, it’s not the centre of the universe to me.’

  ‘Darling, where have you been?’ a voice cried. A woman swooped out of the crowd and pressed her powdered cheek to Myrtle’s. ‘You’ve missed a heavenly season. Such fun, honestly. Just look at you! You’re so thin – you’ve gone quite jungli. What on earth were you doing up in those mountains? Is Archie with you? Because I’m going to tell him just what I think of him, dragging you off into the wild for weeks and weeks like that. And did you hear about Angela Gibson?’ She lowered her voice and murmured in Myrtle’s ear.

  Myrtle gently disengaged herself. ‘Frances, let me introduce you. Nerys, this is Mrs Conway-Freeborne. Frances, my friend Mrs Watkins.’

  Mrs Conway-Freeborne’s glance slid over Nerys’s plain linen skirt and home-stitched blouse. Nerys felt even dowdier, if that were possible, under this fashionable person’s scrutiny. ‘How d’you do?’ the woman said perfunctorily. She spoke quietly to Myrtle again, but her avid expression contradicted the discreet murmur. Nerys only caught snatches of the conversation. ‘Bolted again,’ and ‘He won’t take her back this time, mark my words.’ She tried not to overhear any more and gazed at the view instead. This was only her third day in the Vale of Kashmir. She was still not quite convinced that what she saw could be real.

  Behind her lay the windows and flags and awnings of the club, where Europeans in Kashmir gathered to eat and gossip and play. A little distance away was the Bund, the main street of Srinagar’s new town. It was lined with shops with strange names like ‘Poor John’ and ‘Suffering Moses’, selling silver and beads, papier-mâché and rugs, shawls and silk hangings. In the distance was one of the city’s seven bridges spanning the Jhelum river. A horse-drawn tonga clopped slowly across it, forcing a lone car heading the other way to a standstill. The river was the old town’s central thoroughfare. It wound between wooden frontages and ancient stone ghats, and was crowded with barges and water taxis, and lined with markets. Nerys shifted in her chair. There was so much to explore and so much to discover, yet she was sitting here in front of another gin fizz hearing nothing but shrieks of laughter and titbits of gossip about people she didn’t know.

  A snatch of swing drifted out of the club’s french windows as someone turned up the gramophone. She was struck by the incongruity of the juxtaposition – dance music with this dream landscape. Straight ahead of her, beyond the pontoon ropes, lay the lake. The water was shadowed at the margins by tall poplar trees where dragonflies ringed the black mirror surface, and out beyond the moored boats it was a vast sheet of dappled amethyst and silver. A sudden breeze fanned it and the reflections of the high mountains trembled and broke into fragments, their snowy crests scattering into white and pewter ripples. The late-afternoon sun was hot, but as soon as it dipped Nerys knew the evening would be deliciously chill and scented with charcoal smoke.

  A pair of Kashmir kingfishers perched on a loop of rope, only a yard away. Their plumage was an intricate marbling of black and white. The birds returned her gaze out of unwinking eyes, rotating their black-crested heads in unison.

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  Myrtle’s apology broke into Nerys’s thoughts. ‘Why? What for?’

  Mrs Conway-Freeborne had gone away. Myrtle swallowed half her gin fizz and began to pleat the stiff cover of a Srinagar Club matchbook. ‘The club chatter, I suppose. Always the same. Always malicious, never charitable.’

  Nerys had noticed Myrtle’s changed mood since their arrival. On the road she had been humorous, affectionate and curious about their surroundings. Here her manner was more brittle and her impatient attention danced too rapidly from one subject to the next. But there was so much else for Nerys to take in, Srinagar seeming such a dazzle of sights and scenery after sleepy Leh, that up until now she hadn’t given this difference much thought.

  She studied Myrtle’s face. Vertical frown lines marked her friend’s forehead and her wide mouth turned down at the corners. ‘You seem to know everyone,’ she began cautiously.

  Myrtle hitched one shoulder. ‘It’s rather a small circle. The old faces passing round what they think is new gossip. That’s why I’m so pleased to have you here. You are, as they say, a breath of fresh air.’

  The McMinns had made Nerys extravagantly welcome. Their home was a houseboat, moored under the shade of trees on the far side of the lake from where they now sat, but it was not the kind of houseboat that Nerys could ever have imagined. The local laws prohibited Europeans from owning property in Kashmir, but the British and others had neatly sidestepped this by buying or building boats to live in. Rows of opulent floating palaces lined the banks of the lake, and whenever the owners fancied a change of scenery, they had only to summon the barge men and have their home poled to a different location.

  All the boats had fanciful names: Cleopatra’s Delight, Maharajah’s Palace, Royal Pleasure. The McMinns’ was called the Garden of Eden. It was a broad, imposing wooden structure on a flat barge base, painted a soft shade of pale toffee brown. There were twisted pillars and intricate wooden lattices, carvings and pinnacles, a deep veranda at the front, with a sweeping view of the water, and sparkling white awnings all down the sunny side to shade the windows. Within, every surface was lined with carved or inlaid cedarwood. Nerys had never actually seen a cigar box, but she imagined that this polished, sweetly scented interior must be rather like a giant one. Her bedroom contained a huge canopied bed and a miniature chandelier; it was hung with crewel embroidered curtains and lined with rugs. Her bathroom was as elaborately panelled as everywhere else, and pairs of dim mirrors reflected her pale nakedness into infinity. Whenever she
wanted a bath or tea – or anything else she could think of, most probably – Myrtle had instructed her to ring the little brass bell that stood on her windowsill. A moment later Majid, the McMinns’ chief house-boy, would tap softly on her door. Another much smaller boat, where the cooking was done and where the servants lived, was linked to theirs by a gangplank. All day long smoke rose from its crooked chimney topped with a conical tin hat.

  ‘Yes, ma’am? Hot water for you? Masala chai? Small chota, maybe?’

  Nerys seldom rang. She didn’t want to give Majid unnecessary work to do, although she knew that if she even hinted this to Myrtle she would be scolded.

  The Garden of Eden seemed just that, and it amused her to imagine Evan’s reaction to the decadent luxury of it all. But already Nerys was feeling anxious about trespassing for too long on the McMinns’ hospitality. She thought vaguely about looking for a room to rent, ready for when Evan arrived, perhaps in one of the tall wooden houses that jutted imposingly over the Jhelum river in the old town.

  ‘You will stay, won’t you?’ Myrtle insisted, as if she were reading her thoughts. ‘You’re looking slightly less like a ghost, but you’re not fit yet, you know.’

  Nerys stayed in bed late every morning, where Majid brought her breakfast of rice porridge with delicious Kashmiri honey and fresh bread rolls. When Myrtle went off to pay a call or to shop or to accompany Archie on what she dismissed as some tedious business socialising, Nerys could spend hours reading, choosing books at random from Archie’s imposing shelves, or just sitting amid the deep cushions of the veranda, watching the light as it slid over the water. She already felt more robust, as if her body had been remoulded over a firmer set of bones.

  ‘I’m better,’ she protested.

  Myrtle snapped her fingers at the waiter and pointed to their empty glasses.

  Nerys had noticed how she would drink two or three strong cocktails, and then over dinner she would be at first brightly talkative, teasing her and Archie, then argumentative, and finally sleepy. In the argumentative phase Archie would put out his hand to catch his wife’s gesticulating one, as if he were trying to net a butterfly, and murmur to her, ‘That’s enough, old girl. Time for bed.’