The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘His own child, their flesh and blood,’ Nerys whispered to Rainer in disgust.

  ‘Their rules are not the same as yours,’ he answered. ‘There has been dishonour. The daughter was disowned.’

  ‘We can’t leave those children here. Let me take them back to Srinagar. I’ll look after them somehow.’

  ‘This is where they belong, Nerys. These are their people, not you and Myrtle and the Srinagar Club ladies with their ideas of charity. Don’t let sentiment cloud your judgement.’

  ‘You’re so callous. I’m surprised at you.’ She was angry with him because she was confused.

  In the end money changed hands, and Rainer gave stern instructions to the villagers about how the children were to be cared for.

  As they drove away, Nerys wept.

  Three days later she insisted that Rainer drive her back to the village to see how they were getting on. What they saw was not reassuring. The baby was silent and limp, even though he was being nursed by an aunt, or perhaps it was a cousin, who had recently given birth herself. The boy, Faisal, cried or rocked himself in a corner and Farida stood in bitter silence.

  They had brought more food with them, as well as extra clothing, warm blankets, and a crib for the baby. The villagers stood looking on as Rainer unpacked the supplies, just as fascinated as they had been by his magic tricks. Nerys thought they probably made no distinction between that conjuring and this materialising of desirable food and clothing. The goods were quickly whisked away.

  ‘They’re going to take everything for themselves,’ she whispered, looking at the ring of dark, unsmiling faces. In the grip of winter Kanihama was a far harsher place than it had seemed on that sunny afternoon back in the autumn.

  ‘Of course they will. Wouldn’t you in their place? The idea is to show them that keeping the children in the village brings benefits that wouldn’t come their way otherwise. Whoever actually eats this food and sleeps in these blankets, the children will be better off in the end.’

  Nerys wasn’t convinced, but for the time being she didn’t have any other ideas.

  Rainer went off to smoke a pipe with the men and she was left among the women. Apart from the kani weavers, always bent over their looms, it was the women who seemed to do most of the work. She nodded and smiled at them as they passed and tried not to draw too much attention to herself. Faisal stopped crying, apparently from exhaustion, and she took the opportunity to lift him into her arms. After a moment he fell asleep, and as she rocked him she studied the wet black eyelashes curling against his brown cheek. To her surprise, one of the women brought a wooden stool and pushed it in front of her. Nerys thanked her in Kashmiri and sat down.

  Farida didn’t even glance in their direction.

  From where she sat, Nerys could look out into the square. She noticed that three or four of the little mud-brick structures were empty because the shawl workers had begun to migrate down to the city in search of work. The old, traditional ways of village life were breaking down, the shawl trade was in decline, but the craftsmen’s families still had to be fed. Rainer had told her that some of the skilled workers had gone to little factories in the city, set up by Kashmiri middle men to mass-produce cheap approximations of the precious hand-made pieces that took countless hours to weave and gave their makers far too little return for their labour.

  Faisal moaned and kicked in his sleep. She wondered how bad his dreams could be. She didn’t want to leave him again and go back to lotus-eating down in Srinagar. Thoughtfully she gazed out at the empty houses, and by the time Rainer came back she had made up her mind. He drew up another stool and sat down beside her, and the women glanced covertly at them as they went about their work.

  She said, ‘If the children are going to live here, I will stay with them. They’ll be with their own people but I can make sure they’re well and getting what they need. Perhaps I can teach them some games and English words, just like I did over in Leh.’

  He looked into her face, grasping her idea but doubting that it was practical. ‘It’s a harsh life. Can you survive up here, do you think, on your own?’

  She lifted her chin, thinking back to her life in Ladakh, to the physical demands of the climb from Manali and after that the relative ease of the journey over the Himalayas with Myrtle and Archie.

  ‘Yes, I can. The Garden of Eden and cricket matches aren’t exactly what I’m used to. It was fun, but I don’t want to live like that all winter. I’m going to have to move out of the houseboat soon anyway, because Caroline needs somewhere more secluded than the married quarters. I’d thought of looking for a room in the old town, maybe near your house, but coming up here and doing something similar to my work in Leh would be much more useful. l won’t be alone, either. Look around you. Kanihama is full of people.’

  ‘You don’t know their language.’ He didn’t have to add, ‘There are no Europeans here and British ladies, even missionaries’ wives, don’t live alone in Indian hill villages,’ because it was implicit.

  ‘Rainer, I can learn.’ Her voice carried an edge of rebuke.

  He looked at her for a long moment, and then he touched her cheek. ‘You are formidable. All right, Nerys. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.’

  ‘Let’s start by asking the head man what and who I have to pay to rent one of these houses.’

  The negotiations were complex and protracted, but in the end a house – more of a hovel, really, but Nerys was confident that she and Rainer between them could make it habitable – and a steep price were agreed. She handed over a wad of rupees to the village elders, on the understanding that Rainer and she would be coming back very soon, and that this time Nerys would be staying.

  ‘Just a day or so, I promise,’ she whispered, to the uncomprehending Faisal. The little boy held on to her leg, then turned away. Farida stared into the distance and didn’t acknowledge their departure.

  A tight knot of villagers gathered to watch them leave. It was one thing, Nerys thought, to visit Kanihama on an autumn afternoon and to be welcomed as a rich tourist maybe with the money to buy a shawl or two, but quite another to propose a life among the shawl-makers. Apart from what they hoped to get out of her, her intrusion would be entirely unwelcome.

  As the Ford bumped over the ruts past the ravine where she and Rainer had picnicked, her resolve temporarily failed. It would be so much easier to stay comfortably in Srinagar until Evan arrived. She reminded herself that she had felt the same anxiety at Shillong, and even more so at Leh, where she had been merely her husband’s adjunct, and yet she had been able to make herself useful in both places. And Evan would understand why she wanted to be in Kanihama. The thought brought him oddly close, at the very moment when they had never seemed further apart.

  ‘You are quiet,’ Rainer said, over the truck’s rattling din.

  ‘I’m making plans,’ Nerys told him.

  They returned to the house by the river, and the curtained bed.

  With Rainer, the physical intricacies and elaborations were turning out to be much as she had imagined them when she had lain awake for the long nights beside Evan, but what did surprise her was the way that two bodies could be ordinary together, and also comical and available without ceremony.

  There was no diffident my dear? about Rainer, and not a flicker of embarrassment. He could be ardent at one moment and at the next he might break off to talk about the significance of America’s entry into the war, or to enquire casually if Nerys was hungry. He could get up from the bed and wander away naked to find a plate of food. If she was eating, or had just dressed herself, he would slide urgent hands inside her clothes or lick the nape of her neck. She realised that, for Rainer, sex was on the same spectrum as eating or arguing, and after Evan’s guilt and inhibitions such freedom was a revelation. And it was highly endearing. Yet, oddly, all their physical intimacy didn’t seem to bring Rainer closer.

  He was massively there, a dense slab of muscle under warm skin, but no deeper knowledge of him emerged f
rom their long kisses, or from the way that their limbs twined in an attempt to get closer and deeper. It was like the reverse of a honeymoon, Nerys decided, with amusement. While he had courted her, there had been the promise of a perfect fusion of minds as well as bodies. That had been her romantic dream. Now that they were greedily exploring each other, and she discovered what pleased her as well as him, it was as if the erosion of mystery nudged him further away from her.

  She remembered his words, ‘I can’t stay in one place,’ and that warning seemed more intelligible now. She felt it was quite likely that, any minute now, Rainer would step into one of his own painted boxes and disappear.

  Nerys tried to explain to Myrtle and Caroline what was happening.

  Myrtle caught Nerys’s face between two hands and looked hard at her.

  ‘Are you running away from him? Is that what this mad Kanihama scheme is really about?’

  ‘No, I’m not. It’s nothing to do with Rainer. I want to be useful, you know that, and I can’t do it here, not by going with the wives to charity sales and first-aid demonstrations and committees.’

  This came out sounding like a criticism of Myrtle, not just her friends, and Nerys regretted it immediately. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. You’re a missionary’s wife.’

  And now the mistress of a magician, neither of them added.

  ‘I am,’ Nerys acknowledged.

  It was a time of general uncertainty, so one more area of confusion seemed hardly remarkable.

  Myrtle had had no recent news of Archie. ‘He’ll write when he can,’ she said, and always changed the subject.

  ‘You’re so brave,’ Caroline declared, when she heard about Nerys going to Kanihama. Her round face had grown rounder and was permanently pink these days as the flush of pregnancy deepened. She was worried that her house-boy spied on her and that the dhobi-wallah or the woman who did her sewing must have guessed her secret. ‘What am I going to do?’ she cried.

  Myrtle was helping Nerys to pack, and Caroline was sitting in an armchair. Her eyes were shiny with tears and her voice shook with anxiety.

  Myrtle told her firmly, ‘You are quietly moving in here with me. Majid is discreet, Rainer and I will look after you, and Nerys is only a few miles away.’

  There was no definite news of Ralph Bowen, either. With the rest of his Indian Army regiment, he was in the thick of the battle for Singapore.

  Nerys was ashamed to catch herself wondering whether it would be for the best if he were killed in action, but then Myrtle confessed to the same dark thought.

  ‘God help us all.’ She sighed. ‘Nerys, you won’t make the same mistake as Caroline did, will you?’

  ‘I will not,’ Nerys assured her. She had her own talcum-powdered device in its box, and used it.

  ‘All right. Let’s go out and buy what you’ll need to set up your home in the hills,’ Myrtle said. She brightened up at the prospect of shopping.

  On 1 January 1942, a day of heavy frost, Nerys moved into the village house. It consisted of one room with a door that opened straight off the square and a single window, and another room that was hardly more than an alcove leading out of the first. The familiar audience of villagers gathered to watch as she and Rainer staggered from the truck with a charpoy, sheets and blankets, food and clothes, pans and floor coverings and armfuls of rough woven tent fabric to hang against the crumbling walls and keep out the wind.

  Rainer hammered the drapes into the old wooden beams, spread out the rugs and got the squat iron stove going for her. It was identical to the one Diskit had tended in the kitchen at Leh, as introduced by the Moravian missionaries. He carried water from the well while Nerys made up her bed and slipped her kangri between the blankets. She was so used to carrying it within her pheran that she felt light and girlish without its bulk swaying in front of her. She lit the paraffin lamp and a series of candles, and the rough little place looked suddenly homely. Rainer’s tin kettle began to whistle on the stove, and she laughed again at the familiar sound. There was only one chair, so he sat on the floor resting his back against her knees while they drank their tea. She knotted her fingers in his tawny hair.

  Making a home together that they were not going to share seemed of a piece with the honeymoon that hadn’t revealed the man. She watched the candles flicker and wondered, if she were actually married to him, whether the entire marriage would have the same quality. She concluded that it would, but the thought didn’t in any way diminish her feeling for him.

  Rainer reached up and clasped her hand. ‘Shall I stay?’ he murmured. The charpoy was inviting and the room hadn’t warmed up yet. But this wasn’t busy Srinagar. Nothing that she did in Kanihama was going to pass unnoticed. She remembered what had been dealt out to the yarn-spinner. ‘Better not.’ She smiled, with regret.

  ‘And will you come to Srinagar?’

  ‘When I can.’ Even in the depths of winter, farm vehicles and traders made their way up and down the Vale, and she thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to pay for a ride.

  ‘I’ll bring you food and supplies and news as often as I can.’

  ‘Will you be able to get enough petrol?’

  ‘I have useful contacts,’ he answered, tapping the side of his nose with a knowing air.

  Nerys assumed that he meant his tough-looking American friends. Since Christmas he had met them several times, and she hadn’t asked any questions.

  ‘Are you sure I can leave you here, my sweet girl?’

  His words and his concern touched her. She kissed the top of his head and he twisted to scoop her into his arms.

  After he had gone, she blew out all the candles except one. She lay down in bed and looked at the shadows. There was no sound except the wind scraping in the branches of the trees, and she realised that she was happy. She wouldn’t have gone back to the houseboat on the lake, even if she could.

  The days and then the weeks slowly passed.

  There were plenty of times during that cold January when she would gladly have run away, but she stayed put. At first it was enough of a battle to eat, keep warm and sleep, and to see Faisal and Farida. The baby turned a corner, began to thrive, and soon became part of the small tribe of infants who were carried or propped up or left to sleep as the village work went on around them. In time Faisal also became less sad. He learnt that Nerys’s door led to food and warmth and unfamiliar games, even music and singing, and he came so regularly that he almost lived under her roof. Tentatively at first, and then with more confidence, some other children followed him. They sat in a row on her floor and she told them stories, taught them a clapping song, or drew pictures. Up from Srinagar came Rainer with crayons and paper, sometimes a bag or two of sweets, and once a dozen brightly coloured balloons. That was a day to remember.

  Nerys looked up one afternoon and saw one of the mothers peering in at her. They had sold her milk and vegetables and yoghurt, and let her collect wood for her fire, but this was the first time anyone had come to visit. The woman pulled her shawl across her face and drew back as soon as Nerys noticed her, but Nerys insisted she come inside and drink tea. They managed a stilted conversation, with more gestures and smiles than words. After that, some others came with their children. By the beginning of February, Nerys had the beginnings of a classroom set up in a room in one of the bigger houses. She had nothing at all, far less even than in her primitive schoolroom at the Leh mission, but for a couple of hours each day she did her best to entertain a dozen infants. They sat there, round-eyed, staring or laughing at her, but the next day they remembered what she had done, and if she changed a tune or a story mime there would be an outcry.

  There was a school in a village further down the valley, but it was a long walk in midwinter snow and most of the parents preferred to keep their children at hand to watch the animals, or to mind the even tinier ones. Some of the bigger boys went further away to the madrasah, but not all the families were able to manage the fee.

  Nerys’s ske
tch of a school was regarded with suspicion at first but then, seemingly almost overnight, it was accepted and she was part of the village.

  ‘English,’ said Faisal’s grandfather, Zafir. ‘Please teach some English.’

  The British were no longer particularly welcome in Kashmir and it was accepted that soon they would leave the Vale and India itself, but everyone still coveted the passport to prosperity represented by their language. She did what she could, returning to the choruses of hat, shoe, finger, nose that reminded her of Leh, and therefore – constantly – of Evan.

  He would approve of what she was doing. That, at least.

  Only Farida remained aloof and silent. Sometimes she hovered in the doorway, but then she would whirl away and not reappear for a day.

  Rainer brought news of the Japanese bombings of Singapore and the fighting in the Libyan desert, messages from Myrtle and Caroline, and a warning that he too might soon be leaving Srinagar.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Nerys asked.

  ‘I have some skills that the military can use. Like you, I want to make myself useful,’ was all he would say.

  When she wasn’t with the children, she loved to watch the shawl-makers at work. She discovered the dye workshop at the edge of the village where a stream ran between jaws of ice and rock. She saw the spun yarn immersed in copper vats that simmered on wood fires, sending great clouds of mingled steam and smoke into the colourless sky. The dye workers prodded their cauldrons with long sticks, fishing out the hanks of yarn to examine the depth of colour. The pure water and natural dyes gave the rose-pinks, blues and ochres the clarity she had admired in the weaving room back in the village. The dyers were more gregarious than the kani craftsmen, who were too intent on their bobbins to take any notice of her coming and going, and she was soon an accepted presence in the steam-filled shed.