The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Can you wait here for five minutes, Mehraan?’

  She raced back to her room and found a large picture postcard of the Shalimar Garden. On the back she wrote a message of thanks for the loan of the letters, and promised that she would make sure they were returned safely even if she couldn’t deliver them in person. ‘I hope, though, to hand them back to you myself,’ she promised, and signed her name.

  Then she put the card into a big envelope, addressed it and gave it to Mehraan. ‘Next time you visit her, will you give her this from me?’

  Aruna would read it to Caroline, at worst.

  ‘I will,’ he said. He put on the enormous helmet and pressed the bike’s starter button.

  Mair would have liked to give him a hug, or at least shake his hand, but she limited herself to a warm smile and a nod. ‘I hope we’ll see each other again, Mehraan, next time I come to Srinagar.’

  ‘Inshallah.’ He kicked off the stand and zoomed away towards the Bund.

  Early the next morning, Farooq waved her off in a taxi to the airport.

  ‘Soon safe back with family in England,’ he said gleefully, palming her generous tip and slipping it into the pocket of his shirt.

  When the Delhi flight took off at last, Mair peered out of the window to watch as the lovely valley dropped out of sight and the brown plains opened beyond. Now that she was actually on her way, she was profoundly sad to be leaving Kashmir and all of India behind. She reminded herself that she was going home, and at the other end of her journey, Hattie would be waiting at the airport to meet her. Her spirits immediately lifted.

  She would come back to Srinagar. She had already half promised Caroline Bowen that she would.

  On her lap, still in its brittle envelope, lay the single letter that she had taken out of the box to read on the flight.

  THIRTEEN

  The chapel was small, austere and brown-varnished. The windows were clear glass with a view of grey hillside through the drizzle. As she took her black hymnal out of the slot in front of her, Mair thought of the abandoned chapel in Leh. She touched the folds of the brown pashmina tucked inside the collar of her best coat.

  The minister took his place, the organist brought a meandering voluntary to a close and the congregation rustled to its feet. The bride came down the aisle on her father’s arm, and Mair’s old friend Tal turned to look at his Annie. His red face was anxious and, just as it had done since he was a boy, his stiff shirt collar looked as if it was half an inch too tight for his neck.

  All weddings are the same, Mair thought, however different the superficial trappings. Anxiety and eagerness and the fizz of happiness popping just like a bottle of champagne.

  The minister welcomed them all in Welsh, and her thoughts turned again to Nerys and Evan Watkins.

  Afterwards, in the hotel receiving line, they shook hands with Annie’s parents and then Tal’s, and Mair batted away their well-meaning questions with ‘Oh, I’ll have to meet Mr Right first.’ The bride and groom smiled, acknowledging their rightness for each other.

  Dylan, Eirlys and Mair moved into the crowd of guests. Weatherbeaten faces nodded over best suits and farmers’ meaty hands gripped thin-stemmed glasses. Huw Ellis would have enjoyed this gathering of neighbours at the highly suitable joining together of two local families. He had always mildly regretted that not one of his three children had chosen to stay at home in Wales, although he had never complained. He had never even really objected to Mair and the circus.

  ‘I wish the old man could have been here,’ Dylan said, speaking for them all.

  The reception was followed by the early meal and then long speeches, by which time a dozen exhausted children were chasing each other between the tables. Eirlys’s husband Graeme rose from his place next to Annie’s aunt, the headmistress from Liverpool, and announced that he would remove his boys and Dylan and Jackie’s little girl, and put all three of them into bed at the holiday cottages where they were staying.

  ‘No, really, I don’t mind,’ he insisted. The tables were being cleared and in a corner of the room a deejay was setting up his decks under a row of coloured lights. Mair withdrew with Dylan, Jackie and Eirlys to the bar.

  From somewhere near waist-level, a voice chirped to Mair, ‘Hello, dear. You’re the image of your mother, aren’t you?’

  She looked down. The corner table was occupied by a little old lady wearing blue brocade and a spray of white carnation with maidenhair fern. Her rakish fascinator looked all the more so for having tipped forwards over one eye. Mair slipped into the empty chair beside her.

  ‘I’m Mair Ellis,’ she said, not certain that she hadn’t been mistaken for someone else.

  ‘I know that. I said, you look like your mother. I’m old enough to remember when she was born. Not long back from India, were they, your nain and taid Watkins? Gwen must have come as a surprise to them.’

  Nerys had been forty-one – Mair knew that because she had verified the dates. She had half hoped that her mother and therefore she herself might have had a closer connection to India, but when she consulted Hope and the Glory of God again she had been reminded that the minister and his wife finally left the missionary service in 1947 and Gwen hadn’t been born until 1950.

  ‘You’re a proper Watkins in your looks,’ said her new friend. ‘Your brother, now, he favours your dad’s side.’

  ‘And me?’ Eirlys wanted to know. Of course, she had missed none of the exchange even though she had also been negotiating a drinks order and a simultaneous conversation with Tal’s brother.

  The old lady pursed her lips. ‘Well. Very proud of you, Gwen was. Always top of the class, she’d say. Doctor now, isn’t it?’

  Dylan put his arm round his sister. ‘Consultant.’

  Eirlys smiled, turning slightly pink. With her abrasiveness melted by a few glasses of wine she looked younger and – almost – carefree. ‘Were you a friend of our mother’s?’

  The explanation, involving several farms, intermarriages and cousins on Tal’s mother’s side, was far too complicated for Mair and Eirlys to follow, although they nodded politely. Mrs Parry told them she had gone to chapel as a girl to hear Parchedig Watkins preach; that was before Gwen was born. Then in the school holidays she used to push the new baby out in her pram, while Nerys was doing her housework. When her own husband died, twenty-five years ago now, she had moved down to live with her sister near Caernarfon. ‘But the old place, I still think of it as home.’

  That was how it was, Mair reflected. Holiday homes pocked the hillsides and caravan parks scurfed the coast, but if you belonged here you didn’t distinguish those as much as the fields and stone walls and valley lanes that hardly changed in a lifetime.

  When her eyes met Eirlys’s she saw that she was occupied with the same thought.

  The house was sold but they hadn’t lost their place, because they shared the root familiarity. Mair was happy that they had all made the journey back to Tal’s wedding. Eirlys had been quite right to insist they did.

  Through the open door Mair could see a slice of the dance floor. Tal led his wife into the centre of the empty space and they began the first dance together.

  ‘Tell us about Mum,’ Eirlys said.

  Dylan joined them now. The Ellis children were like fledglings with their beaks open, always eager for any new crumb of information about their mother.

  Mrs Parry nodded her white perm and the fascinator feathers bobbed. She evidently liked an audience. ‘She was a precious gift, that girl. Into his fifties, your grandfather was, by the time Gwen came along. They both worshipped her, of course. I remember seeing Mr Watkins in his black coat, coming along the road with Gwen toddling beside him holding his hand. She was all dressed up in a coat and hat too, like one of the little princesses. Talking away to each other they were, no need for another soul. You always knew they were a happy family, the Watkinses. Lovely to see, it was.’

  Eirlys stroked the knuckle of one finger across the corner of her eye. Then she s
quared her shoulders. In the next room the music was loud and the dancing was getting under way.

  Mrs Parry sipped her drink. ‘Of course, they’d seen the world together, hadn’t they? It seemed really exotic to all of us, I can tell you, Mr and Mrs Watkins having lived all that time in India. It must have been nice for them to look back on it together, while the reverend was still alive.’

  Mair thought of the photograph, her grandmother’s laughter, and the backdrop of lake water and lotus blooms. Caroline had said that Rainer Stamm took the picture, and he was the pin-up. She realised that she very much wanted to see Bruno Becker again.

  Bruno knew the Swiss side of the story, but she wasn’t sure how to ask him about that. I’m so sorry your daughter died. Now, tell me about long ago. But it wasn’t just for the information he could maybe provide that she wanted to see him: it was for himself.

  Mrs Parry leant forward and tugged the knotted fringe of Mair’s shawl. ‘It was the best time of her life, Nerys used to say. Kashmir, you know.’

  ‘Did she? Did she really?’

  ‘Mair’s just been out there for three months. Visiting the places where they worked,’ Dylan put in.

  The old lady wasn’t impressed. ‘I expect it’s all changed, like everywhere. Mind you, most of them are over here anyway, aren’t they?’

  Mrs Parry was the opposite of Caroline Bowen, Mair decided.

  Tal came into the bar. His tie was undone and he looked hot and ridiculously happy. To Mair, he said, ‘Do I get a dance, then?’

  He took her hand in his huge fist and they worked their way into the thick of the dancing. Crimson faces and sweating bodies bobbed all around them. Mair could see Annie in the middle of the mob. She had removed her veil and tiara and the sausage ringlets set in her hair were gently unravelling.

  Tal still danced the same way he always had done, with wild arm swings and pumping legs. He caught Mair’s eye and smiled like a shy boy, and she was taken straight back to her sixteenth birthday party when Tal was the nearest thing she had had to a boyfriend.

  It was quite possible that the record had been ‘Love Is All Around’ then as well as now.

  Her talk with Bruno at Lamayuru was loud in her mind and, as if to amplify it, the one-time possibility of her parallel life was humming and judging, gossiping and letting its hair down all round her. ‘We can’t jive to this, Tal,’ she shouted, and he hollered back, wiping his forehead and grinning, ‘Why not?’ His legs somehow kicked sideways, defying his knee joints.

  Mair was sixteen, and thirty, and her imagination was like a warp thread in the Kashmir shawl, holding its pattern on the way to sixty and beyond.

  All this afternoon and evening she had been sifting memories, pasting scenes and conversations on top of each other: her childhood and adolescence, the ruined mission at Leh, Dylan and Eirlys through all the years, Srinagar, Hattie, Tal, her father and mother, the Changthang plain, Nerys, chapel, mountains, her nephews and niece. Lotus.

  Giddily she steered her thoughts again. Maybe this was what getting older meant: more and more you are aware that everything that happens overlays another memory, sets up more ripples of association, until each event seems as much a resonance of something else as fresh reality. She guessed that this was what life was like for Caroline Bowen in her quiet room in Srinagar, and for Mrs Parry nodding and reminiscing in the corner of the bar.

  Mair’s feet tangled with Tal’s so that she tripped and fell into his arms. He caught her by both elbows and swept her upright again. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he shouted in her ear.

  ‘I wouldn’t have missed it. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

  ‘I’m pretty confident,’ he said. ‘We know what we like, don’t we, Annie and me?’

  Much later, sated with obscure valley gossip, warm wine and eighties disco, the Ellises made their way back to the holiday cottages.

  Jackie slipped away to bed and Eirlys, Dylan and Mair sat down together with the whisky bottle. They were taking pleasure in being together tonight precisely because they knew that modern lives would make this harder to achieve in future.

  ‘Didn’t we have a good time? I was right to make you both come, wasn’t I?’ Eirlys said.

  Dylan snorted over his glass and wiped his chin with the end of his tie. ‘You’re always right, snowdrop. And we love you.’ He tilted what was left in his glass. ‘Here’s to us, my sisters.’

  A year went by, and it was at the beginning of another Kashmir spring that Myrtle and Archie finally came back to the Garden of Eden. The pieces of Archie’s body had been put back together by the doctors in the military hospital. ‘But, unfortunately, not in exactly the same order,’ he joked.

  Artificial limbs might have been fitted eventually, to replace his crushed lower legs, but the spinal injuries that had resulted from being buried under a toppled railway freight car during the bombing raid were too serious ever to mend.

  His wheelchair was carried on to the houseboat by Majid and half a dozen other helpers. The passage inside was just wide enough to allow them to roll him out on to the veranda where he could sit all day with a rug draped over his shoulders to watch the changing light on the water and the mountains.

  Myrtle confided to Nerys that it was this one objective, getting her husband back to the tonic air and the loveliness of Srinagar, that had kept her going through all the weeks and months in the hospital. Wounded men had arrived in their hundreds and had either died or recovered sufficiently to be moved to recuperation centres, only to be replaced by new casualties in the seemingly endless tide of bloodied bodies, but Archie had stayed. His injuries were so serious that for weeks he was not expected to survive, yet he clung on and, in the end, almost imperceptibly, he began to improve.

  Myrtle lived by his bed. She talked to him, read to him from his favourite books, or simply held his hand. ‘He never gave up. He was braver than any human being should ever have to be,’ she told Nerys.

  Archie said, in one of the few moments when Myrtle was not within earshot, ‘Without her I would have closed my eyes and given up. It would have been much easier. But somehow she convinced me that we’d come back here one day.’

  He lifted a hand and pointed at the glimmering water and the reflections of passing boats. The flower-seller’s shikara glided towards them, loaded with buckets of spring blooms; Nerys leant down and bought an armful of splashy peonies. Archie buried his gaunt face in their damp furled petals. ‘I would never have come home without Myrtle. I’d never have left that hospital. I owe her this view, these flowers, every day that we have together now. I can’t feel sorry for myself, can I, when so many poor fellows died? And while so many more, like Ralph Bowen, are in the Jap camps?’

  She smiled at him. Mounted on the wall behind his head were the magnificent antlers that he had brought back from his shoot in Ladakh. Archie would never walk again, let alone ride or shoot or play cricket or any of the sports he loved. Within her smile, Nerys was biting the insides of her cheeks to suppress her tears.

  Myrtle came back with Majid and the samovar. She put a cup of tea into Archie’s hand and spread a napkin over his chest in case he spilt it.

  She was thin, with bony pockets showing at the base of her throat and deep, dark circles under her eyes. She didn’t drink cocktails any more. ‘What if he needed me in the night and I was pie-eyed?’ She had shrugged. She smoked instead, snapping her gold lighter to a new cigarette as soon as she had stubbed out the old one. Now that she had achieved her objective of getting Archie home, their problems were multiplying.

  He was almost completely confined to the Garden of Eden because it took so many pairs of hands to lift him on and off the boat. They had tried once to carry him into a shikara, but the craft had rocked so much that he had almost fallen into the lake. The path along the bank was narrow and bumpy and when it rained it became clogged with heavy mud. In their old life, as the McMinns hopped to and fro, the mud had been no more than an inconvenience. Even on the houseboat the floor
s were uneven and the panelled bathroom was unsuitable for a man who couldn’t walk. Once the summer was over it would be far too cold for him. The English doctor came regularly to visit Archie, but he had explained to Myrtle that if her husband were to develop any serious lung or circulatory complication Srinagar’s little military hospital would not be the best place to treat him.

  ‘I don’t know what to do for the best,’ Myrtle finally confessed to Nerys. All her energy, the formidable power that Nerys had once worried about because it had no direction, was taken up with looking after her husband. But not even Myrtle could solve everything.

  ‘I think maybe you’ll have to move,’ Nerys said gently. ‘Perhaps you could rent a bungalow in the new town. You can have a garden, grow flowers, even some vegetables.’

  ‘The doctor thinks I should take him to Delhi. But the heat.’

  ‘Couldn’t you go just for the winter?’

  The lighter snapped and its little flame doubled in Myrtle’s eyes. She blew out a column of smoke. ‘This winter, yes. After that, I don’t know. Money is the problem. Our Delhi house belongs to the company so we can’t keep it for ever. We’ll have Archie’s disability pension, but that won’t run to keeping two places. I don’t know what the old Garden might fetch nowadays. Who would buy her?’

  They didn’t talk about it because they didn’t need to, but Srinagar was changing. The evidence of it was everywhere, visible in the way that Hindus and Muslims moved past each other in the narrow alleys of the bazaar without exchanging a greeting, audible in the outbreaks of violence under the cover of darkness, embodied in a mysterious fire that consumed an ancient Hindu temple on the Jhelum bank. Conflict flared in the gardens and under the chinar trees. Some of the Pandits, Hindus who had been teachers and government officials, were quietly leaving Kashmir. Professor Pran, the cricketer whose batting had won the Christmas match on the ice, mentioned that he might move south because it would be better for his wife and daughters even though it would break all their hearts to leave Kashmir. The old British echelons were disintegrating too. The Quit India movement gathered force on all sides against the Raj, and as the conflict intensified Nerys remembered what Rainer used to say. ‘Hindu against Muslim. Divide and rule, that’s the motto of you British.’