The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  A police van skidded down the road in front of her. Against the blazing shell of the Gipsy she saw that all the passers-by had melted into the shelter of shops and hotels, except for two huddled shapes lying prone in the dirt and a cluster of people bent over them. One pair of bloodstained legs wore the khaki of the BSF troopers. An elderly man with a delta of blood covering his face was being helped away by two others.

  She realised that the brief bout of shooting was over. Uniformed men eddied between her and the injured.

  Mair looked in the other direction and saw that the door of the hotel from which she had emerged only seconds ago was held open. A uniformed bellboy jerkily beckoned to her.

  She raised herself on to her hands and knees, straightened up and began running towards him. Whorls of light from the explosion’s flash still revolved in the backs of her eyes, making it hard to move in a straight line. The bellboy grasped her wrist and propelled her into the lobby. It was quiet and warm inside, with two or three people standing beside a desk, the receptionist urgently murmuring on the telephone, the same vase of gladioli that she had noticed earlier on her way from the computer terminal in the business centre.

  It was hard to believe that the scene she had just witnessed lay only a few yards away.

  ‘Where you stay, madam?’ the bellboy asked.

  Mair told him.

  ‘You go back soon, soon. Maybe wait here a little while.’

  Obediently she crossed to a group of chairs and sat down. Her hands were shaking and the echo of gunfire still popped in her ears. After a few minutes she ordered tea, and drank it while police and army vehicles trundled past the glass door. A thin trickle of pedestrians started up again and, as if to emphasise the rapid return to business, the power came back on. Everything was illuminated, even a yellow and blue neon cola sign that flashed its reflection into the lake. The noise of generators died away, leaving only the buzz of traffic.

  Mair called over a waiter and paid for her tea. She shook some of the dust and grit out of her shawl and wrapped it round her head again. Then she walked back into the night. The first person she saw, standing on the jetty, was Farooq. He had come out to look for her.

  The Gipsy was now a blackened shell with smoke curling from its melted interior. The injured had been removed, leaving only a dark sticky patch in the dirt. A barrier of white tapes had been strung around the area and a trio of police, weapons clearly on show, guarded the perimeter. Apart from a row of broken windows, some shop walls blackened with smoke and a noticeable thinning of the evening traffic, there was little else to show what had just happened.

  Mair crossed to Farooq’s side of the road. He waved at her with relief. ‘You are not hurt, madam, inshallah?’

  ‘No, I’m all right. What about the soldier, and the others? Was it a bomb?’

  He folded his hands and bowed in the direction of a waiting shikara. As they were paddled away from the jetty she asked the question again.

  Farooq spoke briefly to the boatman. ‘I hear it was maybe a grenade, madam. Some soldiers and some people of town were injured. It is very bad for Srinagar.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly.

  In the morning, sitting on the veranda of Solomon and Sheba in the eggshell light of a crisp autumn day, she read the report in the English-language newspaper. Bollywood tunes and chatter were drifting from next door and Farooq’s white-capped head bobbed at the rear of the kitchen boat. Last evening, she read, five civilians and two BSF troopers had been injured in a grenade attack on a BSF patrol vehicle in the centre of town. The senior superintendent of police, the report continued, stated that a militant of the Hizbul Mujahideen had also been seriously wounded in the subsequent exchange of fire.

  The story was told in the barest outline and occupied only the top quarter of the front page, next to the pictures of an outbreak of fire at an hotel in another part of the city. There was no further coverage inside the paper. Mair knew that outbreaks of violence between insurgents and the Indian security forces were so frequent that they caused only a temporary stir, at least for outside observers. The lack of public attention given to them by the authorities was certainly deliberate.

  A shikara was working its way down the line of houseboats, most of which were empty of guests. It was the flower vendor known – from the painted-tin sign above the canopy of his boat – as Mr Marvellous. He fastened a line at the steps of Solomon and Sheba and stood up, rising out of a gaudy sea of cut flowers, his arms full of scarlet, crimson and orange blooms. His smile beamed out at full wattage. ‘Madam, for you today very good fortune. Please take all these, just three hundred rupees. Not many customers for me.’

  Mair didn’t even try to bargain. She reached out for the double armful and buried her face in the cool, dewy petals. Marvellous paddled away before she could change her mind, and Farooq tutted at such conspicuous over-payment.

  ‘They are so beautiful,’ she said.

  Something had happened. Until last night Srinagar and its people had seemed sealed away, unfathomable for all the showy beauty of the lakes and mountains. Then she had seen the faces in the street last night, and the way people had got up afterwards and gone on with their lives despite the violence that boiled up around them, and she had begun to interpret the place in a different way. Srinagar was battered, impoverished, decaying into its own arterial waterways, but it was proud. A seed of affection sprouted inside her, fertilised by admiration.

  Farooq sidled past, armed with a rag and a tin of polish. He worked with swipes over the table. ‘Perhaps, madam, you will be going back to England now.’ He eyed her, not wanting to lose his only guest, wishing at the same time to be rid of her anomalous presence.

  ‘No,’ Mair said lightly. ‘Not just yet.’

  Later, in the fourth shop she visited in the neighbourhood of the Bund, the middle-aged shopkeeper took her grandmother’s shawl out of her hands. He walked to the window of his shop, screwed a lens into his eye and examined the workmanship. By now, she was used to this procedure. While she waited Mair looked at the display of expensive modern pashminas in tasteful tourist-friendly colours, the highest-priced ones with pleasingly contrasted bands of hand-embroidered paisley design. She remembered the flocks of goats on the sleet-raked Changthang plain, and the processing plant in Leh. This shop on the Bund in Srinagar represented the heart of the final stage of the yarn’s journey, although sadly it lacked one essential presence.

  There were no customers to purchase the lovely goods.

  In each of the four shops, she had been the sole browser. She could only hope that somewhere along the links that radiated from here, in the boutiques of five-star hotels elsewhere in India or the expensive shops of Fifth Avenue and Bond Street, there would be plenty of interested women with money to spend.

  At the rear of the shop a bead curtain shivered, even though there was no draught. Mair was being watched, probably by the female members of the shopkeeper’s staff or family.

  The man returned to the counter. ‘Very worn condition.’ He sighed inevitably, dropping his lens into a drawer and closing it with a sharp click. He rearranged the shawl folds to expose the yellow stain, and picked at the tiny frayed ends of silk-stitched blossoms. The limpid colours of leaves and flowers revealed themselves as exactly true to nature, now that Mair had seen them in their proper setting. She smiled at the man. It was evident from the most casual glance at her heirloom, alongside the modern versions, that it was an exquisite piece of work. As if she had ever thought otherwise.

  ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  The man shrugged. He pointed to the tiny reversed BB signature and the accompanying symbols. ‘Seventy years date. It is right in time, but this, this sign, is from very small workshop of finest quality. Finished since long ago. Kani work, yes. To stitch on top, for effect like this, I have seen only once before. Your shawl is nice, you see, but it is copied from real makers. If not, it would be for museum.’ He paused, to let his verdict sink in. ‘A pity
. But I will give you fair price, if you like to sell.’

  Mair smiled again. The beads at the back of the shop faintly tinkled in the incense-rich air. ‘Thank you. I will keep it.’

  ‘Maybe you look at new shawls. Presents for your friends, you know. Christmas comes soon.’

  He was a Kashmiri salesman like every other, already spreading armfuls of merchandise over his counter.

  ‘Maybe next time.’

  She had walked a hundred yards along the street, thinking about where she might go to drink tea and eat lunchtime yoghurt when a hand pulled at her sleeve. She whirled round, tightening her grasp on the bag that contained her shawl, to see an old woman, her face covered with a white scarf.

  ‘What is it? What do you want?’ Mair blurted, pointlessly in English. The only answer was a scrap of paper that was shoved into her hand before the woman turned and hurried away into the crowd. Mair unscrewed the paper and looked at what was clearly an address.

  The place hadn’t been easy to find. It was buried in the alleyways of the old town and she had asked a dozen different people for directions, gesturing and signing vigorously all the way. She had walked or been led through refuse-clogged yards where hens clucked between sagging huts, past the open-fronted workshops of dyers and tanners, past windows that gave glimpses of women squatting at carpet looms, and the shanty-shops that sold rice and dried beans from rows of open-mouthed sacks. At every corner there was a thread of waterway, viscid black or blanketed with green weed. But now she was at her destination. A toothless old man sitting in a broken plastic chair in the middle of an alley waved her to an open doorway.

  Mair tapped on the doorpost as she peered into a dim passageway. ‘Hello?’ she called. And then repeated, louder, ‘Hello?’

  A pair of tracksuited legs appeared at the top of a flight of stairs. A voice asked, ‘Excuse me? What do you look for?’

  Mair didn’t wait for an invitation. Walking in and starting up the stairs, she saw a young man in a Nike hooded top. He would have passed unnoticed in the high street back at home, even with his black beard and skullcap. ‘I’m not sure. I was given this address, and I wanted to show this to somebody …’ She extricated the shawl from her bag as she spoke and held it up like a backstage pass. The young man didn’t exactly bar her way, but he didn’t stand aside either. ‘I was led to believe that someone here might recognise my shawl,’ she said, raising her voice.

  From the room at the top of the stairs a voice called something and the hoodie youth answered over his shoulder. Mair reached his side and slid past him, smiling politely as she did so. She looked into a room that was empty of furniture but full of men, seated cross-legged against the four walls. It was cold in there with the tall windows on two sides standing wide open.

  Everyone looked up at her. There were ripples of soft wool covering every lap. They had all been sewing. ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured.

  ‘May I help you?’ At the far end of the room, a man stood up. He seemed a little older than most of the others, maybe in his mid-twenties. ‘Are you here to buy shawl?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ She explained that she had been sent here, and named the fourth shop in the Bund. The old woman who had given her the address must have been watching and listening from behind the bead curtain. Most of the men bent their heads to their stitching again. One wasn’t sewing, she noticed, but his cupped palm was thickly blackened with dye. The only sound was a rhythmic slapping of flesh as he pumped a block into the dye and worked the black print border design on a delicate pink pashmina length.

  ‘Would you like to come with me?’ the foreman softly asked.

  Mair followed him into a windowless office backing the workshop. There was a neon overhead strip, harsh after the natural light suffusing the other room. The only furniture was a cheap laminate desk and two chairs.

  ‘I am the karkhanadar,’ he said, in the same soft voice. The workshop chief. ‘My name is Mehraan.’

  ‘How do you do?’ By this time, Mair knew better than to offer her hand to a Muslim male. She spread out the shawl instead, covering the desk top with glory.

  Mehraan had no lens. He took up a fold of fabric and gently stroked it. A minute passed in silence, then another. At last he looked at her. ‘I recognise the work.’ His English was good.

  ‘Please tell me about it,’ she begged.

  The man’s liquid stare was intelligent, curious, and without a hint of prejudice or hostility. Mair was suddenly convinced that here at last was someone she could talk to. She said, ‘I don’t want to sell it, or find out what it’s worth, nothing like that. But I’ve come all the way to Srinagar to trace its history. It belonged to my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and I think she was here in the city maybe seventy years ago. That’s all I know.’

  Mehraan nodded. It was obviously his way to consider his words before he spoke. ‘It is a beautiful thing. The maker was in the same village as my grandfather.’

  Mair’s face broke into a wide smile. Through the open windows came the first cry of the muezzin, taken up across the old town.

  ‘Excuse me. I have to go to pray,’ he said.

  ‘Wait. Please, you can help me. The shawl meant a lot to my grandmother, I know that. I’ve followed the story from Changthang to Leh, and on to here. I’m sure you can tell me more.’

  Mehraan hesitated. ‘You can wait here if you wish. I will not be long.’

  He turned and followed the troop of karkhana workers down the stairs. They slid their bare feet into the row of plastic flip-flops and muddy trainers ranged by the door. Mair sat listening to the muffled sounds of hooting and dung-heap cocks crowing. Once she got up and looked into the workroom. The shawls lay on the matting in pools of colour, the tiny leaves and petals taking shape in minute stitches of silk.

  Within half an hour, the men filed back. The youngest of them couldn’t have been fifteen. He ought to be out playing football, she thought. He shot a look at Mair before he bowed his head once more, and she noticed that his eyes were sore and reddened from the close work.

  ‘Come,’ Mehraan said to her. ‘We will drink tea for ten minutes.’

  He led the way to a corner dhaba, a workers’ place with plastic tables and chairs that was steamy with hot food and crowded after prayers. He exchanged greetings with half a dozen other young men as he passed to the back of the room, and sat down at a table next to the wall. A picture of the Hajj, its shiny surface rippled with heat, hung above them. A waiter brought cups and poured tea from a metal pot.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘England.’

  He regarded her over the rim of his cup. ‘Why are you in Srinagar?’

  ‘As I said, to follow my grandmother. She was married to a missionary, and they worked here in Kashmir during the Second World War. I never knew her, though. She died before I was born. Is your grandfather still alive?’

  ‘No, nor my father. I have my mother and two younger sisters in my family, that is all.’

  ‘That’s a lot of responsibility for you.’

  Mehraan acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Tell me, you make this journey just to see some goats and a workshop for embroidery? It is unusual.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Most people are concerned with today, and with wishing for better tomorrow.’

  At first sight Mair had recognised in Mehraan someone she could talk to. There was no point in making a connection like this and then not talking. So she told him about her father’s death and the uncovering of the shawl on the last night in the old house. She explained that her sister and brother were married and had young families, but she was single and free to make the journey. ‘On behalf of all of us,’ she concluded, as if to legitimise what he might consider a self-indulgent as well as an eccentric undertaking.

  ‘I see,’ he said. He placed his empty cup neatly on the table.

  Mair knew that he didn’t completely accept her explanation. She said, ‘I needed a quest. All the obvious signposts in my
life were pointing down roads leading to places where I didn’t particularly want to go, so I chose a footpath. If I’ve learnt anything from following it, in the last month, it’s how much I love the place where I grew up. And how much I value my family. I never did while I was there.’

  Now Mehraan smiled. It was the first time he had done so. ‘That is good. You are here in Kashmir alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are not a journalist?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And you are unfortunately also not wholesale buyer of fine Kashmir pashmina to stock your shop in London?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’

  ‘That is a shame for me.’

  They both laughed. He looked at the clock on the wall above the Hajj picture. ‘I must go back.’

  The bag with her shawl in it lay in Mair’s lap. ‘When will you tell me about your grandfather?’

  ‘I can meet you tomorrow. I take a few minutes to eat, before afternoon prayers.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Of course.’ He stood up to go.

  She asked, ‘Do those young men I saw enjoy their work?’

  ‘It is work at least. But do you not think they would rather be teachers, or doctors, or even work in a bank? Today there is nothing for them in Kashmir. Nothing.’

  Thoughtfully, Mair watched his retreating back.

  The next day, she was sitting in the same seat when he reappeared.

  ‘Have you eaten some food?’ he asked. A tin plate of chopped onion and sliced limes was placed between them, sprinkled with green chillies.

  ‘Not yet. If you order for both of us, I would like to pay for it.’