Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  The goats stank – there was no other word for it. The nomad camp was also redolent of kerosene and animal dung and woodsmoke, but the dominant, throat-clogging smell was of unadulterated goat.

  A display was laid on for the tourists. Three men in rough tunics and yak-skin boots drove a handful of their animals into a stone-walled enclosure. Mair pulled the flaps of her fleece hat over her ears and shivered in the keen wind. She could almost feel the layer of ice thickening on the lake. The goats were shaggy creatures, white and brown and black, with curved horns and disturbing long-pupilled eyes. They allowed themselves to be hobbled and tipped on to their sides where they lay, stiff-legged and reeking. From the recesses of their garments, the men produced wooden implements like hair-brushes, set with fierce, incurved stiff metal prongs. With synchronised vigour, they each set to work on a goat, rasping and tugging at the wool of the throat and chest. Matted clods of hair began to yield to this treatment, coming away in chunks with the embedded dirt, dung and grease. The goats protested and the men countered with a throaty, ululating song.

  ‘They are singing to the goats, telling them to give some good pashm in return for the sweet grass they have eaten and the good water they have drunk,’ explained the guide.

  A woman gathered up the tufts of hair as the men disentangled them from the combs, taking care to retrieve every last wisp, and stuffed them into a frost-stiffened polythene sack.

  ‘Each family has between eighty and two hundred goats. The animals are combed in May and September. Each animal’s combing yields approximately two hundred grams of raw wool,’ the guide intoned, in his chipped English. At least she didn’t have to translate all this again, Mair reflected, unlike her companions.

  ‘How much money do they get?’ asked the Dutchman who hadn’t been travel-sick.

  ‘Sixteen hundred rupees for a kilo,’ the guide told him. ‘Maybe more, maybe less, depends on quality. After cleaning and processing, that kilo of raw wool will yield only three hundred grams of pure fibre ready for spinning.’

  Mair stared at the sack. It would take a lot of combings to add up to one kilo and probably a whole herd of goats’ combings to fill that one bag. And it was very hard to conceive how those filthy, greasy bundles could ever be transformed into the feathery elegance of her shawl.

  ‘So what happens next?’ asked one of the Israeli boys, although he didn’t sound all that interested.

  ‘The wool traders come out by truck from Leh. They buy the pashm, and take it back to town for processing,’

  Another of the boys had retrieved a rusty can from the detritus scattered across the Changpa camp. He set it on a rock and aimed pebbles at it.

  ‘Is that all?’ his friend wanted to know. A fusillade of stones clattered against the can until it bounced off the rock.

  The guide looked offended. ‘This is the traditional way for the people. It has happened like this for hundreds of years.’

  ‘But is this all there is to see?’

  ‘This afternoon we will visit the monastery. There are some fine paintings.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The demonstration over, the men freed their goats and chased them out of the pen. Their leader waited for a cash hand-out and the others hastened towards the nearest tent enclosure. Mair hoped they were going to spend the rest of the day sitting by a log fire, singing goat-herding ballads and drinking chang. She unbuckled her rucksack, checking yet again that the shawl was wrapped inside, and took a five-hundred-rupee note out of her wallet. The man’s blackened fist rapidly closed on it, but not so quickly that the guide didn’t see how much. He would think she was a careless Western pushover because the tip was far too generous, but she didn’t care.

  ‘Julley,’ she murmured. It was the all-purpose Ladakhi word for ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’.

  ‘Julley,’ said the man. He was already on his way over to the Dutch.

  Mair had planned to unwrap her shawl and spread it on some sun-baked rocks, with the goats browsing in the background, to take an artistic photograph of its beginnings to show Eirlys and Dylan – but she would have had to weight it with small rocks to stop it blowing away and there were pellets of windborne ice pinging against her cheeks. The whole scene was just too bleak for anything more than a mental acknowledgement that this was where the fine, light wool had originated perhaps seventy years ago. Nothing would have changed since then. And she was glad she had made the visit. She contented herself with taking a picture of the lake and the trees, with a white-wool long-haired goat glaring in front of them.

  There was no way to capture the smell, but that wasn’t a matter for regret.

  As for her grandparents: now that she had been here herself it seemed implausible that even an emissary from the Welsh Presbyterian Mission to Leh would have penetrated this far. Surely Evan Watkins would have found enough preaching to do in the villages along the Indus and Zanskar rivers without pursuing the Changpa people out here. He couldn’t have reached this spot in winter, because the snows would have cut it off.

  Her companions were trudging back across the plateau towards the white speck of the Toyota. Mair took one last look at the goats and their backdrop and headed after them.

  ‘Back in the bus, guys,’ the leader of the Israeli boys shouted. The other two tramped eagerly after him.

  Chapter 2

  Back in Leh, Mair spent a day trying to find the caretaker who held the keys to the European cemetery.

  ‘This afternoon maybe he will be here,’ predicted an old man, sitting on a step with his hookah.

  But in the afternoon there was no old man, and no caretaker or keys. Mair stood in frustration on the wrong side of the fence as leaves like gold flakes rattled from the trees and drifted over the gravestones. In Ladakh, she was learning, life was lived at its own pace. She walked back into town, intending to go to a café to drink chai and make a plan.

  In the main street in front of the mosque, she caught sight of red-gold hair, blazing above the white caps and grey backs of men heading for prayers. The woman and child were fully occupied, the child in having a tantrum that screwed her face into a crimson knot and the mother in mildly remonstrating with her. There was no sign of the saturnine husband.

  ‘Non, non!’ the child cried, kicking her feet in the dirt.

  ‘That’s enough,’ the woman ordered, in American-accented English. ‘Stop it right now.’ There was amusement as well as resignation in her expression. Her arms were weighted with shopping bags, and she put down one load in order to have a hand free for the child. But the little girl had already noticed Mair watching her. She blinked her eyes, in which there were no signs of tears, only outrage. The yells changed from private fury to operatic display.

  Mair glanced round. There was open space behind and in front of her. She lifted one finger and locked eyes with the child. The tantrum abruptly faded as curiosity took over. As soon as she had the little girl’s full attention Mair drew a breath, gathered herself up and executed a standing back-flip.

  It was quite a long time since she had attempted one, and she rocked on landing, but otherwise it was fairly satisfactory. The child’s mouth fell open and her eyes made two circles of amazement. Mair clapped hands at her, and did two forwards linked hand-springs. Hattie and she had synchronised this routine as part of their act, and even now she could probably have done it in her sleep. The second somersault brought her up quite close to the mother and child. The little girl grabbed Mair’s leg and gazed up at her. A smile lit her face.

  ‘Again! Encore une fois!’

  The mother was laughing. ‘That’s pretty neat. And it’s way better than a candy bribe.’

  Mair was slightly embarrassed to realise that her intention had probably been to attract the mother’s attention as much as the child’s. They had also drawn a fair-sized crowd of onlookers because there weren’t many other distractions on offer in town on this end-of-season afternoon. She hoped the spectators would quickly move away.


  ‘It seems to have done the trick. Can I give you a hand with these?’ Mair brushed dirt off her hands and picked up the shopping, leaving the mother to scoop up her daughter and settle her across her hip with the same easy movement she had used in the bazaar.

  ‘Jumping lady,’ said the child in wonder, stretching a small hand to pat Mair’s face.

  ‘That’s right,’ her mother agreed. ‘Pretty amazing, huh?’ Her voice had a touch of the American south in it.

  ‘As a matter of fact it was rather shaky. I’m not quite sure what came over me. I wanted to stop your daughter crying.’

  The other woman sighed. ‘You and me both. She’d set her sights on being with her dad this afternoon and ended up stuck with me instead. He’s gone to sort out guides and ponies – we’re leaving on a trek tomorrow. That’s what all this shopping’s about – what do you take in the way of supplies? Where are you heading? I’m Karen Becker, by the way. And this is Lotus.’

  Lotus raised her hand and gave a queenly wave.

  ‘Mair Ellis. Hello, Lotus.’ Mair smiled.

  The child was extraordinarily beautiful, with a broad forehead and a mouth like a cherub’s in a Renaissance painting.

  ‘I was on my way to get a cup of tea,’ she added.

  Karen nodded across the road. ‘Great. We’re going to the salon, Lo, aren’t we? We have to get ourselves a pedicure before we trek a single step. Come with us, and we can chat. I’m sure they’ll give you tea.’

  Mair was glad to escape from the staring crowd. The two women stepped over the gutter and picked their way between bullocks and auto-rickshaws to a glass-fronted shop with windows heavily draped in lace. ‘Ladies Only Beauty’, said the sign in the window.

  Inside they found a cracked floor, not noticeably clean, dusty bare shelves, and a row of barber’s chairs. There was a smell of old-fashioned perming lotion mingled with incense and boiled laundry. A small flock of women in bright saris instantly surrounded Lotus, lifted her out of Karen’s arms and bore her off to the back of the shop. They started combing her white-blonde hair with trills of admiration. Lotus accepted the attention as no more than her due.

  A smiling girl with a red-cheeked, perfectly round Tibetan face relieved them of the shopping. A moment later they were installed in adjacent chairs, facing their reflections in a blotchy mirror.

  ‘Go on. You may as well.’ Karen grinned.

  Mair allowed her Tibetan attendant to unlace her Converse for her, then to steer her feet into a pink plastic foot spa. The motor thrummed under her soles and the water seethed. The whole scene was so incongruous that she couldn’t help laughing.

  In the mirror Karen’s blue eyes met hers. ‘Tell me. You must be something like a capoeira dancer, right? We saw some of those street performers in Rio. Have you been there? A-mazing. I’d so love to be able to move like that. Not in a million years, though.’

  Mair laughed again. ‘What? No, I’m not any kind of dancer. I worked in a circus years and years ago.’

  ‘In a circus? Do you come from a circus family? Go on, your dad was the lion tamer, wasn’t he, and your mom was the lady in spangles who did pirouettes on the elephant’s back? You were born in a showman’s caravan, and as soon as you could walk you were dressed up in a tiny costume for the parade. Don’t tell any of this to Lotus, please – it’ll only give her ideas.’

  Karen had plenty of imagination herself, evidently. Mair was fascinated by her spectacular looks and her vivacity, but she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. ‘Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. My father was a farm-supplies salesman and my mother was a primary-school teacher in North Wales.’

  ‘So, how come?’

  Mair might have deflected these questions, but she was the one who had been guilty of exhibitionism and she thought the least she could do was give a straight answer. ‘I was a rebellious child, and I’d been threatening for so many years to run away and join a circus that when the time actually came it would have been a loss of face not to do it. Ours was quite a right-on show. No lions. In fact, no animals at all, because that would have been cruel. My friend and I had a trapeze act, and in the kids’ show we were the clowns as well. We did that for about four years, and then it was time to grow up.’

  ‘I see.’ Karen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do I believe all this? Or is it one of those versions of oneself that one does for passing encounters with strangers? If it is, I’ll find out, I’m warning you. We’re going to be friends. I’m always right about these things.’

  A young girl arrived balancing a tin tray of tea glasses. Mair took one and sipped. The tea was milky and thick with sugar, but it was welcome. Her attendant lifted one of her feet out of the bath and dried it in her lap. Then she set to work slathering on handfuls of some gritty potion.

  Karen chatted on: ‘How could I pass up the chance of making friends with someone who turns somersaults in the air before she’s even spoken?’

  Across the room, Lotus had a dozen ribbon bows in her hair. Her tiny fingernails were being dabbed with glitter polish.

  Mair decided it was time to seize the conversational initiative. ‘What are you doing in Leh?’ she asked.

  Karen’s eyes widened. Her face in the mirror became a pale, intent oval. ‘We arrived here from Tibet. I’m a Buddhist, you see. It’s been a pilgrimage for me.’ She began to talk about the monasteries she had visited, and the devotions she had made. She had been blessed by the senior lama after the annual unveiling of a spectacular thangka painting, which had been one of the most spiritual experiences of her life. Did Mair practise? Really not? Had she never felt the call to do so? Did she know that one of His Holiness’s summer residences was actually here in Leh? Had she seen the huge golden Maitreya out at Thikse Gompa?

  ‘Yes,’ Mair managed to say to the latter. Brisk massaging of her foot and ankle was showering the floor with dead skin and caked foot cream.

  Karen’s leg was undergoing the same treatment. She paused in her monologue and turned her glancing attention to the young girl, who had come back with a small selection of polishes on the tea tray. ‘Pink or red, do you think?’

  ‘Red,’ Mair replied automatically.

  ‘Hmm. Yeah, but I’m going to go for the pink. Don’t want to frighten the ponies, do I? Lotus, what colour are your toes?’ she called.

  ‘Pink, shiny,’ Lotus chirped.

  ‘How pretty. Daddy will love them.’

  ‘And now you’re going trekking.’

  Karen waved a languid hand. ‘That’s my husband’s partiality. It’s a reasonable trade-off, I guess. My monasteries for his mountains. Although we met in New York, we’re based in Geneva right now because Bruno is Swiss. These days, he gets to go skiing and mountain climbing pretty regularly from home, but we agreed that this holiday shouldn’t be all Buddhist. Lotus would protest about that too, although she’s generally pretty easy-going. Not that she looked that way when you saw her this afternoon, I admit, but she doesn’t often freak out like that.’

  ‘You’ll take her on the trek with you?’

  Karen looked surprised, then shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not? Bruno carries her in a backpack most of the way. Everywhere we go, Lotus comes along. That way you get a balanced, open-minded kid.’

  The child wriggled away from her admirers and came to show off her manicure, spreading her small hands on Mair’s knees and beaming up at her. The ribbons fluttered in her ringlets. There was logic in Karen’s theory, Mair thought. She remembered her first glimpse of the little family in the bazaar and the intimacy that had impressed her then. Lotus was certainly the most confident two-year-old she had ever met.

  ‘You look lovely,’ Mair told her. ‘Just like a picture.’

  ‘Oui – comme Maman,’ Lotus agreed, admiring herself in the mirrors.

  The door of the salon opened, setting the lace curtains fluttering. A dark head and shoulders were framed in the doorway. ‘Karen?’

  Karen glanced up from her scrutiny of her toenails. ‘Hi. Did you get ever
ything fixed up already?’

  ‘Pappy.’ Lotus dashed across and leapt into her father’s arms. He swung her off her feet. ‘Jumping lady,’ she clamoured, pointing at Mair. ‘Jumping high.’

  ‘Bruno, this is Maya,’ Karen called. ‘My new friend.’

  ‘Hello,’ the man said, nodding at her. There was a smile buried in him, Mair thought, but it wasn’t close enough to the surface to break through. She started to explain her name, which Karen hadn’t quite caught.

  Mair was Welsh for Mary. When she was young she had tried to persuade her friends to adopt this more sophisticated version, but it had never caught on. ‘Mair, Mair, pants on fire,’ the local kids used to chant. She didn’t actually utter any of this, though. Something about Bruno Becker’s level, interrogative stare silenced her.

  ‘Mair,’ she said quietly. ‘Hello.’

  The introductions were cut short because the beauty-parlour staff were shooing Bruno out of the door. Ladies Only Beauty clearly meant what it said.

  He carried Lotus with him. He indicated to his wife that they would see her back at the hotel when she was ready. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, over his shoulder, to Mair, and was gone. The introduction of a new friend of Karen’s was clearly nothing unusual.

  Karen stretched out her toes and smiled. ‘Peace. That means you and I can go and eat cakes once we’re through here. We can have a proper talk.’