by Rosie Thomas
‘Did she know about her background?’
‘Oh, yes, Prita never concealed anything. Zahra knew that she was an orphan adopted from the mission in Srinagar.’
‘My grandfather’s mission,’ Mair put in.
They looked at each other across the table. The two halves of the story that they held between them fitted together as neatly as two nutshells enclosing a single kernel.
‘Prita was a widow whose own son had died at about the same age as Zahra was when they arrived in Europe. Prita herself was legally married to Rainer so, of course, as a wife and then a presumed widow once more she was able to come to Switzerland and inherit his estate. Zahra arrived with her, somehow or other, probably as the result of one of Rainer’s magical flourishes aimed at concealing an illegitimate birth. That is, if all your theories are correct. Eventually Zahra became a Swiss national too. As far as we were all concerned, all of us who knew them, they were a mother and her daughter.’
Bruno paused. He added, in a lower voice, ‘I’m quite certain that to one another they were mother and daughter too.’
Mair had the same thought. Yet she believed – no, she knew – that Zahra’s natural mother was still alive, and living in a quiet house in a suburb of Srinagar. Should she bring them together, after so long? Was it right to intervene in other people’s lives and play with their histories?
The two halves lay in her hands now, and Bruno’s.
She had no proof: only a theory, a sheaf of letters, a lock of hair and a kani shawl. And a man sitting opposite her who had lost his daughter, just as Caroline Bowen believed she had lost hers. The agony of that loss was plain to see. Sixty-odd years might have diminished it for Caroline, but she had spent perhaps as much as half of that time in a lunatic asylum.
Mair sat upright. There was no doubt in her mind that the secret wasn’t hers to keep, now that she had unravelled it. ‘I’m going to go back to India to see them both,’ she said, ‘if you will give me Zahra’s address.’
Bruno stared at the lamp flame and said nothing.
Mair waited.
Then she added softly, ‘Or perhaps you could come with me and we could visit Zahra together. That was the plan, wasn’t it?’
He did look at her now, remembering.
She saw something else in his face, a contraction of the eye muscles and tightening around his mouth, and she knew that it was fear.
Bruno was afraid to leave his shell, the safety of his cabin in the mountains, and venture out into the world again.
He shook his head. ‘I would hold you back,’ he said oddly.
‘No,’ she contradicted. ‘I don’t think so. The history isn’t all mine, is it? Half of it is yours to tell.’
‘I don’t know.’
But he did: she could see that in his face too. Outside concerns were intruding into the isolation of grief.
In silence he battled with himself as rain drummed on the cabin roof. Mair rinsed the glasses in the sink, put the bottle back on the shelf, and climbed the ladder to her bedroom while he still sat at the table. She was in bed, lying in darkness when his head and shoulders framed themselves in the doorway. ‘All right. I’ll come to India with you.’
He closed the door on her and the latch clicked.
NINETEEN
The house was in a leafy street in south Delhi, secluded behind rendered walls painted pale mustard-yellow. They waited at black metal gates as Bruno spoke into an entryphone.
They had arrived separately the night before, Mair from London and Bruno from Zürich, to meet at the anonymous hotel near the airport where they had arranged to stay. Eating dinner in the hotel’s gloomy coffee shop, they had been awkward with each other after the ease of the cabin in Switzerland. Now that they were finally in India they were unsure what their mission really was, and it seemed too late to be agreeing on what they would say to Zahra or how they might say it. They made small-talk and went straight to their rooms afterwards.
Jetlagged and unable to sleep, Mair had slid open the balcony door and stepped out into the night. There wasn’t even a shiver of movement in the scalding air, and the traffic noise from beyond the hotel garden was as loud at three a.m. as at midday. The orangey ribbons of elevated motorways snaked in all directions, glimmering with cars and trucks, and in their shelter were the awnings and refuse of colonies of destitute people. In the ten months she had been away she had forgotten the din, the surging motion and the brutal contrasts of India.
Was this all a mistake? Mair wondered. Should she have left history where it lay?
She shook herself.
A voice like the buzz of a grasshopper floated out of the entryphone grille and the left-hand gate swung open. They walked along a path between oleander bushes with the patter of a water sprinkler close at hand. A door opened at the top of some shallow steps and a small elderly woman stood there. She was light-skinned and she had Kashmiri features, but this was not Zahra. ‘Mrs Dasgupta says please to come in.’
They followed her into a wide hallway, the polished floor laid with Kashmir rugs.
‘I am Farida,’ the woman said. ‘Come this way.’
A set of doors led to a room full of dark carved furniture, kept cool and dim by lowered blinds. A stately figure came to greet them, her arms outstretched to envelop Bruno. She had styled hair that was more grey than dark, she was plump, dressed in a loose silk shirt and wide trousers, and spectacles hung from a cord round her neck.
‘You are here,’ she cried. ‘Come, let me look at you.’
Mair stood aside as they hugged each other and spoke rapidly in Swiss-German. Bruno handed over the flowers and gifts they had brought with them, and Zahra exclaimed and remonstrated. Mair looked at the pierced china baskets filled with sweets, the coloured glass ornaments, teapots, and numerous framed photographs of boys and young men in variations of uniform, teamsports clothing or academic dress. She smiled to herself. This was a family home. Zahra’s family home.
‘I am Zahra Dasgupta.’ A hand was held out and warmly shook Mair’s.
Bruno introduced them: ‘This is Mair Ellis, Zahra. Mair has become a good friend of mine since Lotus died.’
Once he had spoken Lotus’s name he seemed to relax a little.
‘I’m so sorry about your child,’ Zahra said. ‘So very sorry. It is a terrible tragedy. How is your wife?’
‘She is in the States. We’re separated now, Zahra.’
The woman’s eyes moved from Bruno’s taut face to Mair’s, assessing them. There was a sharp brain behind the majestic exterior. Mair wanted to say, No, it’s not what you think: there are these two halves of a whole that Bruno and I hold and we’ve brought them here …
‘I am sorry for that too,’ Zahra said. She took Bruno’s arm and led him to a chair.
Farida brought the inevitable tray of tea with china cups and a brass samovar. She put out plates of cakes and embroidered napkins and Zahra rearranged them as soon as they were set down, the two of them getting in each other’s way and telling the other what to do. It was evident that they were long-term companions and friends rather than employer and servant. At last they were both satisfied and they all sat in the heavy plush armchairs with cups and plates dispersed between them.
Zahra said to Mair, ‘I knew this man when he was a small baby. A very sweet, good little baby he was. Growing up he was more like all boys, very noisy and causing disruption. He was driving his mother mad a lot of the time.’
‘Zahra, Mair doesn’t want to hear this,’ Bruno protested.
He was embarrassed because Zahra was treating Mair as if she were a girlfriend, and as soon as she realised as much, Mair felt a dull red blush colour her face and obstinately stay there.
Zahra and Farida looked at each other.
‘So you are making a holiday now in Delhi?’ Farida asked.
Zahra interrupted her, ‘No, no, no, you know that Bruno told me he had something most important to talk about.’ She sat back in her armchair, slippered feet
placed side by side and hands folded across her stomach. ‘I am very curious to hear what it is.’ Her glance slid from Bruno to Mair.
The room went quiet.
Mair felt breathless as she reached into her bag. She unfolded the shawl from its wrapping and spread it over Zahra’s broad knees.
Farida instantly gave a grasshopper chirp and seized the nearest corner. Blinking, she held the soft fabric up to her cheek. ‘This is kani weaving. From my home in Kashmir.’
Mair slipped the photograph from a folder and laid it on the arm of Zahra’s chair. On the opposite arm she placed a little cellophane envelope containing a lock of gilt-brown hair. Farida had found the shawl’s reversed BB signature. ‘I know this work,’ she breathed. ‘From my own village.’ Her face shone.
‘What are these things?’ Zahra demanded. ‘Why do you bring them to me?’
‘It’s a long story. Mair will explain her part first,’ Bruno said.
‘Look at the picture,’ Mair suggested.
Zahra settled her spectacles on her nose and peered down. She breathed out through her nose, almost a snort. ‘Srinagar, I think.’
Mair pointed. ‘This is my grandmother, Nerys Watkins. She and her husband were Christian missionaries in Kashmir during the war.’
Farida bobbed upwards. She grabbed the picture and gazed at it. ‘Ness. This is Ness,’ she cried.
They all looked at her in amazement.
‘You knew my grandma?’ Mair wondered.
‘She was my best mother when I was a small girl. I remember all about her. There were songs and games. She was so kind, an angel.’
Mair held out her hand, and Farida grasped it in her tiny dry one.
Farida told her, ‘I can see now, your face. You have something like her here.’ She drew a circle round her own mouth and chin.
Mair thought, Whatever happens next, I am so grateful to have come this far.
Nerys had known this small, bright-eyed woman when Farida was a little girl. It was like holding hands with Nerys herself, across the divide of almost seventy years.
Yet again time rearranged itself, folding into new patterns.
She would almost certainly never know exactly what Zahra or Farida had meant to her grandmother, and why she had kept a lock of hair and a shawl hidden for so long, as if they were her most precious and secret possessions, but she had this human link that connected her directly to Nerys.
Bruno was smiling at her.
Mair pointed for the second time. ‘This one is a friend of my grandmother’s called Myrtle McMinn. And this is another friend of theirs, Caroline Bowen.’
Zahra shifted her weight. ‘I do not understand any of this.’ She pouted. ‘I found Farida, you know. My husband and I went to Srinagar when we were married and I made a visit to the school my mother told me about, a mission school, you see, where I was looked after. I was an orphan just like Farida,’ she explained to Mair. ‘There were many orphans in Kashmir. My mother Prita and father adopted me, took me away from that school to Switzerland.’
Mair couldn’t help but glance down at Caroline Bowen’s sweet English face.
‘When Dilip and I came to see the school the missionaries were gone. This happens, especially in Srinagar, which is a place very much changed for the worse. But the school was still there and Farida was helping the teachers. We talked, and she remembered me when I was two years old. Can you imagine that?’
Farida patted Zahra’s shoulder and laughed. ‘I never forgot her. I loved her so much I thought she was my own baby. But then she went away and I cried for a long time. I was so happy to see her again, a married lady. I had no husband, and my two brothers went to Pakistan many years ago.’
‘So she came here to live with me. I insisted on this,’ Zahra said, in triumph. ‘To be auntie to my boys, and sister to me.’ She rattled the cellophane envelope. ‘So. What are these other people to us, and this piece of hair?’
‘I think,’ Mair slowly said, ‘this lock of hair is yours. It was with the shawl, and we found it put away among my mother’s things after my father died last year.’
Farida opened the envelope and tipped the contents into her hand. Zahra bent over it, pinching the hair in her fingers and holding it up to her head for Farida to compare.
There was no resemblance.
‘No,’ Zahra said.
‘It might be,’ Farida said.
They both laughed but uncertainty was kindling in their faces. They were apprehensive about what they might learn next.
Mair was glad to let Bruno take up the story.
‘As well as being my grandfather’s good friend, Rainer was a friend of these three women,’ he began.
‘It was wartime,’ Zahra remarked. ‘Many people made friends and lost them in those days.’
‘That’s true. In 1945, as you know, Rainer put his wife Prita and a child aboard a ship for England. They were met at Liverpool docks by an Englishman, a mountaineering friend of Rainer’s, who helped them with their onward journey to Switzerland. And when they arrived there, they were taken in by Victor Becker and his family.’
‘It was done for my father’s sake. My mother was always proud. He was a special man, she said to me, to have such friends as your grandfather Victor.’
Bruno smiled again. Mair saw that the ease from the cabin was coming back to him, and there was more than that – he was alive with interest in Zahra’s story.
Zahra leant forward. ‘My mother believed always that Rainer meant to return to us. He was killed in the car before he could come. But he did not abandon us.’
He nodded. ‘Zahra, Mair and I both believe that Rainer and his wife helped out a friend by taking her illegitimate baby out of India. By taking you away, to safety in Switzerland.’
‘My mother told me she and Rainer took me, cut my hair, dressed me as her boy until I was on the ship. There was danger, but Prita was not sure why. Naturally Rainer would have made everything clear if he had not died.’
Mair leant forward too, touching the tip of her finger to where Caroline smiled in the picture. ‘Mrs Dasgupta, Rainer Stamm took this photograph. I think the third woman might be your mother.’
Zahra frowned. ‘This person, you think?’ She turned away and indicated one of the framed photographs that stood on a low table beside her. ‘Take a look, please. Here is my mother.’
In the picture Prita Stamm stood with her chin up, a small grandson hanging on to either hand.
‘I meant the woman who gave birth to you,’ Mair amended. ‘She is still alive, and she lives in Srinagar. I met her last year and I showed her these things.’
Zahra lifted her cup, very deliberately drank some tea, replaced the cup in the saucer. ‘If you know so much, then who was my father?’ Her lower lip protruded and her voice had cooled by several degrees.
Caroline’s lover must have been Kashmiri, and theirs could only have been a forbidden liaison, a wartime love affair, but she had no idea what kind of man he might have been. Not an honourable one, that seemed certain. Had Caroline loved him? Why hadn’t Ralph Bowen stood by his wife? The mysteries seemed to thicken, even though she had imagined them solved.
She could feel Bruno watching her and she wanted to turn to him, but she plunged on: ‘I don’t know that. I don’t think we will ever know, unless Caroline Bowen herself tells us.’
‘Do you have any proof of this theory?’
‘Firm documentary proof? No, none. There are only the letters that my grandmother wrote to Caroline and the story that Bruno and I have pieced together between us. But when I showed Caroline this shawl, she recognised it at once. “That belongs to Zahra. It’s her dowry shawl,” was what she said.’
There was a silence.
And then Zahra observed, ‘Mine is not such an uncommon name.’ Her face showed her disapproval. ‘And my mother Prita made sure that my marriage was a proper one, with a suitable dowry. My own theory is somewhat different. I believe, you see, that Rainer was my real father.’
>
Mair thought, Yes, that’s equally plausible. Wartime, a magician mountaineer with pin-up looks, and a girl from the Vale of Kashmir. A girl Rainer couldn’t marry – perhaps because of her father’s anger or her brothers’ defence of her honour – but whose child he vowed to protect. He found a wife, a widow who had lost her own son, married her, made a will, and took care to send the two of them away to Switzerland and safety. Only then, at the last moment, did his plans somehow go awry.
Triumph glinted in Zahra’s eyes as she handed back Mair’s photograph. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ she pronounced. ‘Are you familiar with this principle?’
Bruno laughed. He left his seat and went to Zahra, putting his arm over her ample shoulders. ‘The simplest explanation is usually the correct one?’
‘Good boy.’
Mair began to protest but Bruno warned her with a look. She was angry at this intervention. He wasn’t going to stop her pronouncing what she knew to be true, not when it had taken her so long to uncover that truth. But his gaze didn’t waver, and a different, entirely contradictory feeling swept through her.
It wasn’t sweet or honeyed or even remotely comfortable – it was sharp, and thoroughly disconcerting, because she knew at that moment without any shadow of doubt that she was in love with him.
The words, whatever they were going to be, dried in her mouth.
Bruno’s face showed a flicker of amusement. His glance said that they understood each other. She wanted to go and kiss him, but she made herself sit still and concentrate.
Zahra laced her fingers. ‘I am right, you see. But these are old, long-ago times. Why are we discussing them? Let’s talk about young people. They are the future. Bruno, please tell me, will it be painful if I show you and your friend some pictures of my grandsons?’
‘No, I’d like to see them,’ he said. He was still looking at Mair and she felt hot in the over-furnished room, and confused. It was unthinkable that Bruno might suspect she was in pursuit of him. Might he think she had engineered this whole trip to India as a way of getting closer to him? Surely not, when she had herself only just worked out these feelings.