The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  It took a little more time before the women tried to show her how to spin, and then there was much hilarity because her efforts were so clumsy.

  In all this time the peacock’s feather shawl grew by a narrow hand’s breadth.

  The weaver was a thin young man who always wore a red skullcap. He rubbed his eyes, and looked up at the white mountains to rest them for a precious minute.

  One morning in the middle of February Nerys woke up to daylight instead of greyish dawn.

  It wasn’t late. The boy who drove the goats from their barn to the grazing every morning had just passed – she could hear their bells and his low whistles as the flock streamed uphill. She never needed to look at her clock up here because the time of day was evident from what was going on in the neighbouring houses or out in the fields. The days were lengthening and although the cold seemed just as implacable there was a difference in the light that suggested winter might some day turn to spring. The thought of this gave her a quiet beat of happiness as she got dressed. Through her window she could see the wide-branched chinar tree planted at the centre of the rough square, and it became easier to recall its welcome summer shade.

  She stoked the fire in the iron stove, dipped a jug into her water bucket, filled a tin kettle and placed it on the heat. When the water finally boiled she made tea and sat in her chair, wrapped and hooded in her pheran, warming her hands on the cup.

  Faisal would be here at any moment.

  She had no sooner thought of him than she heard the scuffling of small feet and an urgent rattle at the door. The little boy bounded in to crouch next to her and close to the stove’s warmth. She solemnly wished him good morning.

  ‘Good morning,’ he repeated proudly, in his singsong voice. His English words were accumulating fast.

  In just two months, he had grown taller and straighter. He didn’t rock himself or linger in the shadows at the corner of the room. This morning he was happily rolling a ball, humming to himself and keeping only half an eye on Nerys and the preparation of porridge and eggs.

  ‘Hungry?’ she asked him, tapping her hands to her mouth to reinforce the question.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he answered, as she had taught him to do, but his attention was still on his game.

  Faisal was good company. He was alert, he loved playing and imitating, and he learnt everything she taught him with incredible speed. She missed Myrtle and Caroline, and Rainer’s visits were limited by the availability of fuel for the Ford, but it was Faisal’s rapid progress that convinced her she had done the right thing in leaving Srinagar.

  The rice porridge steamed in what had become a lemon-rind slice of sunlight. She gave Faisal his spoon and they sat down at her plank table to eat.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Good.’ He beamed.

  She took a mouthful, and above the voices of two women carrying water and a cock crowing, she heard the approach of a vehicle. Before it turned into the square and rattled to a halt, she already knew that it was the Ford.

  ‘Car,’ Faisal said.

  Nerys got up and hurried outside. With Rainer in the cab of the truck were Myrtle and Caroline. She ran across to them. Myrtle flashed a warning glance at her and she saw that Caroline’s face was as white as chalk. Rainer didn’t smile a greeting.

  ‘Come inside,’ Nerys murmured, conscious of the eyes that followed every event in the village. They made a protective guard round Caroline as they crossed the few steps to the house. Nerys told Faisal to go and play with the other boys.

  ‘What has happened?’ she demanded, as soon as she shut the door.

  ‘Ravi Singh,’ Caroline managed to say. It was Myrtle who had to take up the story.

  Yesterday afternoon, they had been sitting beside the stove in the Garden of Eden. Myrtle was reading and Caroline knitting a matinée jacket. She was sure that the baby would be a boy, and she had chosen pale blue wool from a shop on the Bund.

  Majid came from the kitchen boat. He never hurried, so Myrtle knew from the way he bumped into the door that something was wrong.

  ‘What is it, Majid?’

  He pointed. ‘A boat is coming.’

  The lake ice had thawed and now flat grey water stretched from shore to shore. Heading straight for them was a private motor-boat with a uniformed boatman at the helm. The small cabin was curtained but the two women recognised the servants’ livery.

  Caroline’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh, God. What does he want?’

  Out of consideration to Majid she was wearing a loose embroidered wool coat and Myrtle was similarly dressed, even though the house-boy must have worked out long ago what the situation was. There was no time to run away, or try to disguise matters. All Caroline could think of doing was to hide her knitting in her work bag.

  ‘Perhaps, Memsahib …’ Majid pointed down the length of the boat to Caroline’s bedroom.

  ‘Yes, go,’ Myrtle said to her. ‘Stay there and don’t make a sound.’

  The motor-boat’s engine cut out and the boatman brought it in a smooth glide to the steps. As soon as he had made fast, the cabin door opened and Ravi Singh’s sleek figure emerged. He was wearing riding clothes, impeccably cut in British style, which had the effect of making him look even more haughtily Kashmiri.

  Myrtle greeted him at the veranda door.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs McMinn,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Ravi, I am Myrtle, you know that perfectly well. How lovely of you to drop in, though. What a surprise treat on this grey afternoon. What shall it be? A cup of tea or a cocktail? I rather think a cocktail, don’t you? Majid, please.’ She clapped her hands and the house-boy bowed his retreat. ‘Please sit down, Ravi. You do rather tower over one.’

  ‘I have come to see Mrs Bowen.’

  Myrtle widened her eyes. ‘You should go to her bungalow, then. Unless she’s at the club this afternoon? We sometimes meet there for tea, but I’m a little tired today.’

  Ravi slapped his pale kidskin gloves against the palm of his other hand. ‘She is not at her house. I think she is here,’ he said flatly. He looked at Myrtle’s ambiguous silhouette. ‘I have heard something.’

  Myrtle’s voice was sweet and silky. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘That is not for discussion.’

  ‘I see,’ she breathed. ‘I’m so sorry to disappoint you, Ravi, but Caroline is not here. Maybe she is away. I did hear her mention that she might go down to Delhi, now that the ice is gone. You know, to do some shopping, to see a few people. She is lonely with her husband away, as we all are, and Srinagar is so dismally quiet, these days, what with winter and the war. Don’t you agree?’

  Majid padded into the room again, carrying the clinking tray and ice-bucket.

  ‘Gin fizz?’ Myrtle smiled. She clicked her lighter to one of her gold-tipped cigarettes.

  ‘No, thank you. Please tell Mrs Bowen that she can’t conceal anything from me, and it is folly to imagine that a Kashmiri noble family can be held in contempt.’

  ‘If I see her, Ravi, I shall give her your message. I am afraid, though, it will be as baffling to her as it is to me. Unless it’s a game. Is it a clue?’

  ‘No, Mrs McMinn, it is not.’ His manner was frosty enough to ice the lake all over again. ‘Good afternoon.’

  Majid bowed and opened the veranda door but Ravi swung back. He had caught sight of Caroline’s work bag with a loop of pale blue wool trailing from it, and his eyes flicked from it to Myrtle again. ‘May I congratulate you, by the way, on an impending happy event?’

  Myrtle could do an imperious face too. Her eyebrows rose a fraction but she gave no other sign of having heard his question.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Ravi finally repeated. A moment later his launch was carrying him back across the lake, trailing a furrow of mint-green water.

  Caroline shrank in Nerys’s chair, her arms crossing over her belly. ‘The dhobi-wallah, someone, maybe the yard-boy, has told a story to another servant, and the news has passed all the way up to Ravi Sing
h. Now he’s looking for me and the bastard baby that will bring dishonour to his family name.’

  Myrtle looked over her head and met Nerys’s eyes. ‘Don’t be afraid of Ravi Singh,’ she ordered. ‘He can’t know anything for certain, and Srinagar servants’ talk is no more than that. What we did, Nerys, was to send a message to Rainer and he came straight away.’

  ‘We left this morning at first light,’ Rainer said.

  ‘Can I stay here with you?’ Caroline implored her. ‘No one will guess I’ve come all the way up here, not even Ravi.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ she soothed.

  Rainer knelt in front of the stove and deftly blew the embers into a blaze.

  Myrtle said, ‘Rainer’s got another idea, too.’

  By Nerys’s reckoning it was less than a month to Caroline’s due date. Whatever it might be, the idea had better be a good one.

  Rainer took his time. When he was satisfied with the fire he sat back on his heels and gave Nerys the warm, half-sleepy smile that immediately made her aware of her skin under the layers of clothes. ‘South-west of here, on the road out of the Vale in the direction of Rawalpindi,’ he said, ‘at a place called Baramulla, there is a Catholic convent. The sisters run a small hospital with the help of a French doctor and his wife. If you agree, Nerys, Caroline will stay here with you out of Ravi Singh’s reach – he will naturally assume that if she is not in Srinagar she must be in Delhi.’

  Nerys quoted one of the four rules: ‘Misdirection.’

  ‘Exactly. Why would she head up into the hills, if she is in the condition that he suspects? I have to go away now to do a small job of work, but when I am back again I will come up to Kanihama and we will take Caroline to the doctor and the nuns at Baramulla. She will be quite safe to deliver there.’

  Caroline’s head was bent and her fingers constantly pleated the edge of her pheran.

  ‘It’s a good idea. But couldn’t we take her there now?’ Nerys asked.

  ‘Baramulla is on the road. There are routes north and west, and therefore all sorts of people passing through. Who knows where Ravi Singh’s spies might be? To stay out of sight here is safer, for as long as possible.’

  Caroline did look up now. Her blue eyes were full of fear. ‘I don’t want Ravi to find me. I’m afraid of him,’ she whispered.

  Outside the window there was only the handful of houses and patchy fields and then the mountains. Almost no one came to Kanihama unless it was pedlars bringing essentials to the villagers, and few of the people ever left it, except Zafir and the other head men who took the village products to market further down the valley road or in the city.

  ‘We’ll stay here,’ Nerys agreed.

  Rainer nodded. ‘Good. I am leaving this morning, and I will stop at Baramulla convent on my way and tell them to expect us.’

  ‘You have to go so soon?’ Nerys gasped.

  Myrtle had fallen silent once she had described Ravi Singh’s visit, but she jumped up now and said that she would bring Caroline’s belongings in from the truck. Rainer took Nerys’s arm and led her outside to stand under the chinar tree.

  He said, in a low voice, looking round first as though enemy agents might be perched in the branches overhead, ‘It is a job I must do. There is an airfield, strategically important. The British and the Americans want me to move it.’

  ‘To move it? An airfield? Would that be single-handed?’ Nerys asked.

  ‘Not quite. I shall have a small team, carpenters, painters and so on. It will be a trick, of course, an illusion performed with camouflage, dummies, lights – I don’t know what else until I see the place from the air. But through my skills the Japanese will bomb an empty patch of jungle instead of an airstrip with thirty fighter planes. There is no one in India or the whole of Asia who can succeed in this job other than me. I am the magician.’

  She smiled through the chafe of her anxiety. Rainer would never be short of confidence, whatever feat was expected of him. ‘Good luck,’ was all she said.

  He lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘I will be back in two weeks.’

  She didn’t say, ‘Promise me,’ although she longed to.

  She waited under the tree, watching, until the red Ford had jolted out of sight.

  In the house, Myrtle and Caroline had unpacked a second charpoy and erected it in the confined space. Caroline stood with her hands to her back, easing the ache. The folds of her pheran hardly disguised her bulk.

  ‘It’s hard, I know,’ Myrtle said softly to Nerys, ‘but Rainer will be all right.’

  Nerys lifted her chin. ‘Of course. Now, let me find us all some breakfast. You can’t have had time to eat before you left. There’s rice porridge and eggs, and I should think my neighbour will have baked our bread by now. I’ll send Faisal for some. It’s so good.’ She could just see the top of the little boy’s head bobbing outside the window.

  Myrtle said, ‘I’ve brought my bedroll. Can I stay, too, for a couple of nights? After that I’d better go back and show myself at a Women’s Aid meeting or in the club. The story, by the way, is that after a touch of fever Caroline has gone south to recuperate with a nurse cousin of mine.’

  ‘Of course you can stay. What fun,’ Nerys smiled.

  To have Myrtle and Caroline for company made Kanihama seem a sunny, benign place, and her dusty mud-brick house almost as luxurious as the Garden of Eden.

  If they sat knee to knee on their stools, there was just room for the three of them at the plank table. After his errand Faisal played with his ball at their feet.

  Myrtle took a crust of bread and some spiced apple, but she didn’t eat. ‘Have you heard the grimmest war news?’ she asked.

  Nerys gestured briefly at the bare room. There was no news here, except what they could bring her.

  ‘Yesterday Singapore surrendered. The city’s occupied by the Japanese.’

  Caroline pecked at her food with small, precise movements.

  Myrtle added, ‘It seems likely that a lot of our men who survived the battle and the bombing will have been taken prisoner by the Japs. The reports are very confused.’

  ‘Ralph is alive. I know he is,’ Caroline said. She seemed unnaturally calm now, almost remote, as if too much was happening for her to be able to deal with it all.

  ‘Have you heard from Archie?’ Nerys asked Myrtle quietly.

  ‘One letter. I don’t know for sure but he and his men are probably involved with the evacuation of wounded from Malaya. It is … Well, we can imagine how it is.’

  Caroline put her hand to her belly. She said dreamily, ‘This baby kicks all the time. He’s like a bull elephant.’

  Thin sunlight filtered into the room. The three sat thinking of the child that would soon be born, and the world of uncertainty that would greet him.

  For two days they sat by the stove, keeping warm. Caroline knitted blue baby clothes, and they played with Faisal and his brother, the yarn-spinner’s baby, now grown almost plump. Farida watched from the margins but if any of them beckoned to her she turned and ran away. Myrtle and Nerys visited two or three of the other houses to drink tea with the women, and as they walked out in their kangri-distended pherans they told each other that they must look like a pair of little round teapots on legs.

  In the weaving house, Myrtle leant over to examine the peacock’s feather shawl that the thin weaver hopefully uncovered to show her. The lake blues and shimmering silvers made an iridescent pool in the drab chill of winter’s end. ‘It is exquisite,’ Myrtle agreed, but she shook her head at the man’s imploring gesture. ‘I haven’t got anything like enough money. If I did have, honestly, I would buy it.’

  On the third morning, Myrtle said she must go back to Srinagar to listen out for the latest rumours. An old man taking tree trunks down to a wood-carving workshop said that she could ride with him on his bullock cart, as far as a place where it was possible to pick up the public bus onwards to Srinagar.

  Myrtle climbed on to the seat of the cart, spreading folds
of tweed to cover her knees and enclose her kangri. ‘I shall be heartily glad when this pregnancy finally reaches its natural conclusion,’ she murmured to Nerys.

  ‘Try to enjoy the ride,’ Nerys advised.

  ‘Life is quite a strange adventure at present, isn’t it? Before Rainer whirled us up here, I was looking at those tops of Archie’s – you know, the stags and mountain sheep that he shot in Ladakh. Back then, I thought a hunting trip with my husband was very daring. That was before I met you, Nerys Watkins.’

  They both laughed, even though there seemed to be little enough that was genuinely funny.

  ‘I’ll be back with Rainer,’ Myrtle promised. ‘Then we’ll go to Baramulla and our baby will be born, eh?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ Nerys said, and stood back to let the cart pull away.

  The days passed very slowly. The villagers were curious about the new arrival, but not overbearingly so. With her usual mixture of sign language and the simple words of Kashmiri she had picked up, Nerys indicated to the friendlier women that Caroline’s husband was away at the war, and soon she would be going to the hospital to have her baby. They accepted this with a shrug. In Kanihama babies were born behind a curtain in one of the mud-brick rooms.

  Caroline watched the children when they came to play with Nerys. She would join in the singing, or draw pictures for Faisal – tree, sheep, flower – but more often she sat with her hand on her stomach, where the protrusion of a tiny heel could often be seen through the stretched muscle wall. Her abstracted air intensified and Nerys put it down to the inner absorption of late pregnancy, remembering how the mothers at Shillong had retreated into themselves in just the same way.

  At night they lay side by side on their charpoys. Caroline slept badly, sighing and shifting under the weight of her belly, and Nerys listened anxiously to her movements. She left a candle burning in a niche, and the draughts sent shadows wavering over the roof beams.

  Thoughts of her own lost baby came less oppressively now.

  She had chilblains and a cough, but apart from these minor ailments her body felt taut and surprisingly strong from the straitened life at Kanihama, and she took a new, less shy satisfaction in it because of what Rainer had shown her. Putting her own concerns aside, she concentrated her thoughts on what Caroline was likely to need.