by Rosie Thomas
In a month’s time the real snows would come, and the high passes linking the Ladakhi capital with the Vale of Kashmir to the west and Himachal Pradesh to the south would be impassable until the spring thaw came. For six months the only way into Leh would be by air, as Mair had arrived yesterday, flying from Delhi into the little airport beside the Indus river. As she walked she was trying to picture what it would be like here in midwinter, when the narrow alleys of the town would be clogged with snow and the roof of each house piled high with sheaves of dried fodder for the family’s animals. But she was distracted. The imminent disappearance of tourists meant that the town’s salesmen were urgently trying to make a last few rupees. In the main street three of them cut off her progress with a practised pincer movement.
‘Hello, madam, where you from? Look at my shop, please.’
‘I have beautiful pashmina, I make you a very good price today.’
The third man pouted when she experimentally shook her head. ‘But looking is free, madam. Just looking. What is the great hurry?’
She was in no hurry, that was true. Laughing, she followed the nearest merchant up the steps into his cluttered shop and let him show off his stock. From Tibet there were trays of silver, coral and turquoise jewellery, from China painted Thermos flasks and furry nylon blankets in electric hues. There were prickly hats and waistcoats, locally knitted from goat’s hair, woven bags with tassels, and racks of T-shirts in every size and colour – mostly bearing a machine-embroidered yak on the front and the slogan ‘yak yak yak Ladakh’. Her eyes were acclimatising to the dim light of the shop’s interior. Against the walls there were ramparts of samovars and copper dishes and crewel-work rugs.
‘It’s very nice. Thank you for showing me. I’m not shopping today, though.’
The man was Kashmiri, and therefore born to sell. ‘You want pashmina.’ It wasn’t a question. At the back of the shop floor-to-ceiling shelves were stuffed with layers of folded fabric.
‘Show me.’
Immediately he began to whirl shawls off the shelves. A drift of colour built up on the tiny counter, yellows and blues and fuchsia pinks. ‘See? Feel, beautiful. Best quality. Pure pashmina.’
Mair knew a lot more about fine shawls than she had done four months ago, when the exquisite piece that was now locked in the hotel safe had first come into her possession. She understood the quality of the craftsmanship, and its likely value. ‘Pure?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, pure silk pashmina mix. Twelve hundred rupees. Look, this pink one and this lovely blue-turquoise. Christmas is coming, think of gifts for your friends. Three for three thousand.’
‘Do you have any kani woven shawls? Or embroidered pieces?’
The man looked up. ‘Ah, yes. You know the best, madam. I show you.’
He unlocked a cabinet and brought out another pile. Like a magician he shook out more coloured breadths of fabric, whisking and flourishing them in front of her. Mair picked up the nearest one and let the folds slide through her fingers. She bent her head briefly to examine the floral design in reds and violet, then wound the shawl over her shoulders.
‘So nice,’ the Kashmiri approved. ‘These colours just right for you.’
It was nothing like the other one. This fabric felt stiff, lumpy around the margins of the flowers, and it hung awkwardly, with none of the fluid drape of her shawl. When she took it off again she could almost hear the crackle of the fibres. She didn’t know for sure how the design had been woven, but from a glimpse of the reverse it looked like cheap machine work. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured.
‘Nine thousand. Good price.’ He knew she wasn’t going to buy. ‘And this one, see, embroidered. By hand, all of it.’
Royal blue, this time, with a band of white flowers sewn at either end. The flowers had certainly been done by hand, but the design was haphazardly stitched and threads trailed on the reverse. The outlines of the blocked pattern were visible beneath the stitching. It could not have been more different from the other, on which the double band of floral embroidery was worked over the woven design in the same shades and in stitches so tiny that they were invisible to the naked eye, all of it executed so perfectly that the right side and the reverse were indistinguishable. The effect of such minute and effacing work was to emboss a broad swathe of the woven pattern, giving the paisley shapes and entwined foliage an opulent three-dimensional effect.
‘It’s very nice,’ Mair repeated.
The man looked offended. She wanted to get out of the shop now, back into the sunshine. She picked out a pair of coral earrings from the display stand next to the door, paid for them quickly and made her escape.
‘Come back soon,’ the merchant called after her.
The other two salesmen reattached themselves to her side, but half-heartedly. She was able to sidestep them and make her way on down the sunny, dusty street past a row of women sitting at the kerbside with baskets of cauliflowers and apples for sale. Shoeshine men with their brushes and tins of polish set out on squares of sacking tried to attract her attention, even though her scuffed Converse were clearly visible. Scooters and rickshaws jolted over the potholes in the road. The noise of traffic was deafening. Mair peered up the shadowed alleyways leading off the street and chose one at random to explore. A mangy dog loped by, its distended teats swinging.
It was cooler in the shade and she pressed deeper, past barbers’ shops and butchers’ stalls where goats’ heads oozed on wooden slabs. A black, buzzing object nailed to a beam revealed itself as an animal’s severed tongue, presumably fixed there to draw flies away from the rest of the meat. Mair glanced at it, swallowed, and groped in her bag for her bottle of water. She took a determined swig and pushed on. Canvas tarpaulins were laced overhead now, and the alley grew dimmer and narrower. Overripe vegetable remains and less identifiable waste squished underfoot. Women in saris brushed past, and others in burqas hurried in the opposite direction. Stallholders called out and children vaulted over the gutters. It was a busy, cheerful scene and every aspect of its unfamiliarity served to highlight her alien status.
The alley opened into a square and she squinted as the sunlight struck her face. To one side a small brown bullock grazed with apparent relish on a pile of smouldering refuse. To the other, a crimson and gold prayer wheel was mounted beneath a painted canopy. As she stood there an ancient monk in saffron and burgundy robes wandered out of the crowd and set it turning clockwise. He stepped with it as it rotated, murmuring and counting the beads on his rosary. Mair took a photograph of him, then wondered if she had been intrusive.
She moved off down an alley, which ran in yet another direction, into the heart of the bazaar. Down here the stalls were heaped with white trainers and brown plastic sandals. Overhead, backpacks and holdalls swayed in their hundreds like misshapen fruit. Girls’ dresses made of glitter and tinsel hung in electric tiers.
And it was here, framed against the blue smoke rising from a food stall, that she first caught sight of the Becker family. The trio would have presented a striking picture anywhere, but in the chaotic market they made a tableau so unearthly that it had an almost religious quality to it.
They were the only Westerners she had noticed since leaving the main street. The woman was tall, slender and ethereally pale-skinned. She had a mass of red-gold hair that sprang over her shoulders. She was wearing a loose white shirt over a tiered blue linen skirt and a pair of mud-encrusted boots. She was talking, pointing and laughing all at the same time. The man with her was looking in the other direction. He was even taller than his wife and suntanned, with coal-black hair and eyebrows and a half-grown beard. Between them was an angelic child, a little girl of about two. She had the same curling mass of hair as her mother, but the colour was white-blonde. Her head rotated as she looked from one parent to the other. Then she stuck her tiny arms into the air and yelled, ‘Carry.’
The woman was still laughing and gesturing. She stooped and, with the other arm, swept the child off her feet. She
settled the little girl astride her hip and strode across to the food vendor. The air shimmered above a vat of boiling oil. The child pulled out a coil of her mother’s amazing hair and peered down through it, as if it were a veil, at the heads passing beneath her.
The man turned to see what his wife was pointing at. The vendor fished in the boiling vat with a ladle and brought up some shiny toffee-brown squiggles. He tipped them into a paper cone and handed this over in exchange for some rupees. The woman dipped in her fingers and extracted a deep-fried squiggle. She blew casually on it, then handed it to the child. The little girl bit into whatever it was with relish.
The woman tilted her head back and dropped some of the food into her own mouth. She chewed eagerly and laughed, wiping the grease from her chin. Health and satisfaction seemed to shine out of her. Her free hand floated lightly to her husband’s hip and rested there. It was a gesture of possession and affection, as intimate as it was casual. She steered him away from the vendor, and from Mair’s scrutiny, even though none of the three had so much as glanced in her direction. They strolled deeper into the maze of stalls. She followed them with her eyes, the red-gold and black heads, with the child’s pale one bouncing between them, until they turned a corner and passed out of her sight.
She stayed rooted where she was, despite her urge to run after the family. The food vendor shovelled another scoop of his mysterious wares into the cauldron; the oil sizzled and spat.
In the hubbub of the market Mair’s loneliness intensified.
She had plenty of friends, and had had the usual series of relationships, but there had been no one she could imagine spending the rest of her life with, not the way her sister Eirlys had undertaken to do with her Graeme, or Dylan with his Jackie.
She made herself take a deep breath of bazaar smells, and noted the ambling cows, the hens scratching on a hill of rubbish, the Buddhist monk returning from his trip to the prayer wheel, and the steady surge of people going about their business. Colours and scents and fresh impressions flooded her head, and her spirits floated again. She turned and retraced her steps, deliberately heading in the opposite direction to the glorious strangers.
The drive out to Changthang, eastwards from Leh, almost to what had once been the border with Tibet – and was now China – took the best part of a day. The other members of the sightseeing tour in a small Toyota bus were two portly, middle-aged Dutch couples and three Israeli boys, who managed to be rowdy yet noticeably unfriendly. They sprawled in the back, guffawing over the separate accompaniments of their MP3s. Curled up in her seat and braced against the jolting, Mair had plenty of opportunity on the long drive to reflect, and remember.
Before leaving for India she had done as much research as she could into her grandparents’ history. Three months ago, in the on-line edition of a book called Hope and the Glory of God, subtitled With the Welsh Missionaries in India, she had read the entry for Parchedig Evan William Watkins (1899–1960).
Evan Watkins had been educated at the University College of North Wales, and the College of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. After his ordination he had heard the call to work in India, and in 1929 he had travelled out to Shillong in what was then Assam. Subsequently he served as district missionary to Shangpung.
Since reading his clerical biography, she had regularly tried to conjure images of Evan Watkins, in his black coat and dog collar, as he gamely preached Nonconformism to the people of remote Indian hill villages. Had he thundered from his makeshift chapel pulpit on a steaming day with the monsoon rains drumming on the tin roof?
Since her arrival in the Indian Himalaya she had tried harder still to picture him, but the clash of cultures was too brutal to generate any kind of image.
According to his entry in the book, Parchedig Watkins had returned to Wales in 1938, where he had met and married Nerys Evelyn Roberts, born in 1909. In 1939 the couple had sailed from Liverpool, bound for Bombay, aboard SS Prospect.
That was easier to picture. Mair saw the sunset over the Suez Canal, and heard a band playing for the dancers in the second-class saloon. Probably the minister wouldn’t have had much time for the foxtrot, but she wondered if the young Mrs Watkins had been of the same mind, or whether she had sipped her lemonade and watched the laughing couples with a touch of wistfulness.
The Reverend Evan and Mrs Watkins were subsequently called to give service to the new mission of Leh, far up in Ladakh, where the minister became responsible for the work of missionary outreach throughout the region. Many roads in his territory were impassable for seven months of the year, the biographer noted, and electricity was almost unknown.
Mair looked out of the bus window at the stark landscape, and the purple-grey mountains rearing into the empty blue sky. The unmade road ahead zigzagged towards a distant pass in a series of pale hairpins scratched out of the rock and dust. Along this road giant trucks with painted fronts like fairground rides hooted and skidded. The small figures of the Welsh preacher and his wife still refused to take shape in her imagination, here or anywhere else in the Himalaya.
The rest of the entry was brief. After the war, the clergy-man’s poor health had forced him to return to Wales. Evan Watkins retained a strong interest in the work of the missionary services, but his health never recovered from the rigours of the Indian climate and he had died in 1960, leaving his widow and one daughter, born in 1950.
That daughter had been Mair’s mother, Gwen Ellis, née Watkins.
Gwen had died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage when her youngest child was barely into her teens. It was one of Mair’s greatest regrets now that, as an averagely self-absorbed and dismissive thirteen-year-old, she had never asked her mother to tell her a single thing about Evan and Nerys’s exotic years as missionaries in India.
The bus pulled in at a roadside stall selling tea and snacks. The Israeli youths leapt up at once and barged their way past Mair and the Dutch couples. Before climbing out to ease her cramped legs, Mair picked up the rucksack from the seat beside her and slipped the strap of it over one shoulder. She kept it pinned to her side with the pressure of her elbow.
‘Where are you from?’ one of the Dutch wives asked her, as they sipped heavily sweetened tea from the vendor’s Thermos. A column of Indian Army trucks ground slowly past, part of the border defence forces. Young soldiers with guns at the ready peered at them over the tailgates.
Instead of saying ‘England,’ and naming the pleasant south-coast market town where she lived within easy reach of Hattie and several other friends, and where her most recent job had been located, Mair surprised herself by answering, ‘North Wales.’ Her childhood home was now occupied by a businessman from Manchester and his young family, so there were no ties left, except her brother and sister and their memories. But even so, or perhaps because of this, the valley and the years of her childhood lived within its limits were much in her mind. She missed home, now it had been sold and she could never go back. She clung to the thought of her grandparents and their lives in this strange place.
‘And you?’ Mair returned quickly.
‘Utrecht. Are you on holiday?’
‘Ye-es. Just travelling.’
The rucksack lay against her hip. The shawl was folded in a pouch inside it.
The woman sighed. ‘We are not finding it so easy on these roads. My husband is unwell.’
From behind the bus came the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up. Between themselves, the Israeli youths found this uproariously funny.
The bus ground over one more high pass and a huge vista opened ahead. Their destination was a high, flat, remote place north of the mountains. Geographically, it was part of the Tibetan plateau although still within India.
Changthang was where the nomad peoples of eastern Ladakh traditionally herded and grazed their flocks of goats. Up here, the climate was so cold and harsh that the animals produced the densest, lightest fleece to insulate themselves. The nomads moved the flocks throughout the year in search of the sparse gra
zing. The goats’ fodder and the water they drank were unpolluted, and their wool was the purest it could have been.
From her reading, Mair knew that this was where the finest pashm came from, the raw material for Kashmir shawls, so it was from here that her precious, mysterious shawl had almost certainly begun its journey as the wool of a pashmina goat.
When she was finally alone in her tent at the tourist camp, she took the pouch out of her rucksack and examined the shawl once more by the light of her head-torch. The faint spicy scent caught in the soft folds, she now knew, was the scent of India itself. The central motif of the shawl’s woven design was a peacock’s tail fan. A deep double border enclosed the centre panel, with lush paisley shapes filling the angles, and there were broad bands of exuberant foliage at either end. The bands, which were partly embroidered, gave an almost brocaded effect. For all its beauty, though, the shawl was battered and worn. There were lines of fading that showed where it had lain for decades in the same folds; the intricate embroidery was unravelling in places, and in others it was rubbed away altogether. There were blotches of ink in one corner, an irregular yellow stain in another. Mair drew it over her knees, absently tracing the arabesques of embroidery and smoothing the knotted fringes, trying to read the shawl’s history as if it were a map.
Early in the morning their guide rounded up Mair, the Dutch and the Israelis while it was still barely light, and drove them up a track that was no more than a slightly less rocky channel between the grey boulders littering the plain. They reached the shores of a vast lake, where the water was filmed with ice and the ground was powdered with snow. At the lake’s edge stood a handful of single-storey houses, little more than huts, set between a line of bare poplars. Yaks, with their long hair almost brushing the snow, moved ponderously between the rocks. In preparation for winter the Changpa nomad families were bringing down their herds from the more remote pastures. There were circles of low stone walls close to the lake, and the early arrivals had flung goat-hair tarpaulins over these to make shelters for themselves and their animals. Smoke rose in thin columns from the ventilation holes at the apex. A woman with a bent back trudged up from the water’s edge carrying a full bucket.