The Kashmir Shawl

She tried to describe this tiny epiphany to Karen.

‘But I understand completely,’ Karen interjected. She reached out and covered Mair’s fingers with her own. ‘There are many paths to recognition, but they are all the same road. You do know what I’m talking about. I was sure you would. I felt it in you as soon as I saw you.’

‘Even though I was turning somersaults?’

‘Because of that, as much as anything else. Why suppress what you wanted to emote? You are the complete you. I endorse that.’

Bruno wasn’t spiritual in the same sense that she was, Karen continued, but he understood where she was coming from because he related to the mountains. They were his temples, and he made his own pilgrimages among them. ‘Take Lotus, for example. I believe in letting her experience the whole world as essentially benign. I want her to grow up as far as possible without fear, without unnecessary restrictions, without petty rules, so she can become her intended self within the stream.’

Mair wondered if Lotus – quite understandably – dealt with excess benignity by having a tantrum or two.

They had finished their coffee and cake. Karen dotted up the last of the crumbs with a fingertip and licked it. She said, ‘I must go. What are your plans? We’ll be out of town for four or five days.’

‘I’ve got some stuff to look into here. I don’t know how long that’ll take.’

Karen studied her, her finger still resting against her lips. Mair noticed how the two or three other tourists in the bakery couldn’t help gazing at her companion.

‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ Karen said.

‘No, I’m not,’ Mair protested.

‘But you’ve never let on why you’re in Ladakh. You’re not just here for a sightseeing holiday, I can tell that much.’

Mair wasn’t going to try to describe the shawl to Karen, or the lock of hair, or the blanks in the family history that had colonised her imagination with such force. Awkwardly, she said, ‘My father died recently.’

At once, Karen’s face flooded with sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said warmly. ‘That’s sad for you. You were drawn to a Buddhist country for a reason. Have you heard of punabbhava? It means “becoming again”. That’s the belief we have in rebirth. It doesn’t annihilate grief or loss, and it isn’t meant to, but contemplation of it provides comfort. Sometimes it does, at least.’

Her new friend meant well, Mair realised, and the way she talked might sound alien but it was certainly sincere. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled.

Karen squeezed her hands and stood up. She paid for their tea, waving away Mair’s proffered money. ‘Where are you staying?’

Mair told her.

‘So we’ll see you when we get back.’

The next day Mair went to visit the Leh Pashmina Processing Plant. The weather was changing, as if to underline the Beckers’ absence. The gilded autumn sunshine Mair had begun to take for granted was filtered out today by low, thin grey clouds as the last leaves were chased down from the poplar trees by an insistent wind.

A small man in a baseball cap emerged from one of the plant’s grimy buildings to meet her. ‘My name is Tinley. I am assistant manager of production. This way to see the magic, ma’am,’ he joked, as he led her across the yard to a concrete shed. Mair followed, not sure what he meant.

Inside, four women squatted in a circle. They had shawls drawn over their heads and across the lower half of their faces. Between them towered a heap of fleece, thick curled clods of raw goat’s hair matted with dung, grease and twigs, looking exactly as Mair had seen it when it was stuffed into bags up on the plateau. There was no doubt that this was the untreated pashm fibre as it arrived by truck from distant Changthang. The women were teasing out the clumps by hand, removing the worst of the filth and sorting the hair into smaller heaps according to colour, from palest grey-white to dark brown. The air in the bare room seemed almost solid with the rancid odour of goat.

Tinley made a small gesture of regret. ‘This is a colour-separating process. It can only be done by the human eyes.’ Then he brightened. ‘But, as you will see, the rest of our process is modern. Highly mechanised. Come this way, please.’

A metal door slid open on runners and Mair stepped into the next section of the plant. She had been aware of the hum of machinery, but she blinked at the sheer size of what lay beyond the door. The machine must have been fifty yards long, a leviathan of rotating belts and spinning flywheels, vast rubber rollers and steaming tanks. At the end of the line was a drying chamber from which the wool emerged cleaner and softer, but still with thick coarse hairs and fragments of dirt trapped in it.

‘What now?’ she asked, as she twisted a hank between her fingers.

A second metal door opened ahead. A wave of humid air, heavy with the smell of wet wool, rolled over her.

‘Why is it so hot? And so damp?’ she choked out.

‘It is a humidified chamber,’ Tinley said proudly. ‘It makes the wool easier to work. This is the dehairing section, see?’

They peered into the machinery. At each stage the remaining wool emerged whiter and softer, as the pure fleece – the goat’s innermost insulation against the Himalayan cold – was separated out.

At the end of the line, after another drying chamber, the belt turned back on itself. One man sat in reverent attendance as the cleansed and blow-dried end product billowed from the jaws of the machinery.

Mair couldn’t help herself. She stepped forward and plunged her arms up to the elbows into pure pashm. It was like handling a cloud, weightless and pure, and exactly the same colour. She remembered that one kilo of the greasy, reeking wool she had seen at the beginning of the line produced a mere three hundred grams of this airy fleece. ‘It is a kind of magic,’ she agreed.

Tinley’s eyes glinted. ‘Come with me.’ He settled his baseball cap squarely on his head and led the way out of the processing plant.

The back lanes were too narrow for two to walk abreast, and were overhung with washing lines, the branches of knotty old trees and the projecting balconies of houses. Tinley walked so fast that Mair had to concentrate on keeping up. At a collapsing set of gates in a whitewashed wall he suddenly stopped and nodded her through. Hens scratched in refuse and the call of the muezzin rose over the housetops.

‘Julley,’ Tinley called, to a man leaning on a broom.

Up four stone steps and through a narrow door, they came into a roomful of women seated at wooden looms. There was a steady creak of floor treadles and the flash of shuttles as they worked. They were weaving plain pashmina lengths, in soft shades of grey and brown. These workers, Tinley told her, were producing shawls for sale through the state-sponsored craft-industry outlets in Leh. ‘Very traditional methods preserved, nice work for women here. They can work what hours they can, make some money, and also take care of families.’

‘That’s good,’ Mair acknowledged. But she was puzzled by how different these pieces were from her own.

They passed through the weavers’ studio and the women looked up at her and smiled as she passed. The front of the building, to Mair’s surprise, opened out on to a view she recognised – the main street, with the minarets of the central mosque rising against the hill crowned with the old palace. Via the backstreet labyrinth they had come into a shawl showroom, lined with the now-familiar shelves. A salesman grinned a flash of gold incisor at her as he began to slide his wares out of their plastic bags.

Leh could sometimes seem like one large wool-based retail opportunity.

There was no question of withholding her custom, though, after Tinley had patiently taken her through the manufacturing processes. Mair obediently picked out three shawls: a pearl-grey one for Eirlys, a toffee-brown one for herself, and a cream one for Hattie, which would suit her friend’s dark colouring. She paid twelve thousand rupees in all, and reminded herself that it was not such a great deal of money for all the work that had gone into producing the pashmina fibre.

The salesman took her purchases away to wrap, and on a sudden impulse Mair opened her rucksack and pulled the folded pouch from the innermost recess. Tinley watched curiously as she unfolded her grandmother’s shawl and gently spread it on the shop’s plain wooden counter. The colours of water and blossom made a pool of brilliance in the subdued light of the shop. The goods on the shelves appeared suddenly drab and coarse in comparison. Tinley gave a sharp sniff as he bent over to examine the shawl more closely, and the salesman swung round to take a look.

‘Can you tell me anything about this?’ Mair asked.

Tinley picked up a small hand lens from behind the counter and minutely examined the weave, running his fingers over the embroidery before flipping the fabric to examine the reverse. He traced the outlines of the paisley shapes and peered even more closely through his lens at one corner of the piece.

‘This is Kashmiri work,’ he said. ‘Kani weaving. We don’t do this here in Ladakh.’

The salesman said something to him.

‘You are selling it?’ Tinley casually enquired.

‘No. Definitely, no. It belonged to my grandmother. I am … just trying to find out something about the shawl’s history, and maybe through that a little about my grandmother. I never knew her, you see.’

Tinley put aside his lens and straightened up. ‘Then you must go over the mountains to the Vale of Kashmir,’ he said.

‘I think my grandparents were here in Leh, though. During the 1940s. My grandfather was a Christian missionary.’

‘A Catholic? Moravians?’

‘No. He was Welsh, a Presbyterian.’

Tinley shook his head, shrugging. This clearly meant nothing to him. ‘The Europeans came, not many stayed. They opened some clinics and founded schools for children and for that we owe them a debt.’ The unspoken rider was that for other things the missionaries had attempted, presumably the work of religious conversion, less gratitude was due.

Mair said, ‘I wanted to take a look at the European graveyard here, but the gates are always locked and I can’t find out who has the key.’

Tinley grinned, showing good teeth, and pushed his cap to an angle. He spoke rapidly to the storekeeper and they both laughed.

‘That’s easy. Tsering, my friend here, his uncle is the caretaker.’

The two men exchanged more information and Tinley told Mair that if she came back to the shop tomorrow, perhaps at three o’clock, the uncle would bring the key and take her to visit the graveyard.

She thanked them both and promised she would be there promptly. She began to fold the shawl again, but Tinley touched her wrist. ‘You have seen this?’ he asked, pointing to one corner of it. He put the lens into her hand, and she leant over to see what she hadn’t noticed before. There was a tiny embroidered symbol, like a stylised butterfly or perhaps the initials BB, with the first letter reversed, and next to it another indecipherable mark. ‘What is it?’

‘It is the maker’s signature, and the numbers “42”, which is perhaps the date of completion. It is a fine piece, and it would have taken many months, even years, for the craftsman to weave and then embroider. Probably it was made for a bride, as a wedding shawl for her to take with her to her husband’s home.’

For Grandmother Nerys Watkins, as a gift from her husband the Welsh Presbyterian missionary? Mair thought the shawl was far too opulent for that. Nothing she had learnt about her grandparents’ circumstances or their restrained faith matched its rarity and value. The mystery seemed only to deepen.

She put the new shawls into her bag with the precious old one, thanked the shopkeeper, and repeated that she would be back at three the next day.

Tinley smiled broadly. ‘You must be wearing your new pashmina. The cold weather is coming. Winter is early for us this year.’

As she walked through the old town the next afternoon, she saw how the place was turning in on itself under a bitter wind scything down off the mountain ice fields. She could smell snow in the air, as Tinley had predicted, and she was glad of the warmth of her muted brown shawl round her throat. Most of the house windows were now protected by old wooden shutters, and almost every roof towered with bundles of wood and stored animal fodder. There were fewer people about in the bazaar and she passed only one or two Westerners. In another week or two the last of the cafés and guesthouses would be closed, the summer migrant workers would head down to the beaches and hotels of Goa for the winter season, and Leh would sink into its winter isolation as the snow piled up on the passes. She thought of the Beckers, and wondered how they were coping in their tent in this cold weather.

At the showroom there was, of course, no sign of the uncle with the elusive key. Tsering the shopkeeper waved his hand at her impatience. He wanted to show her a new consignment of shawls, just arrived from the finisher. They drank masala chai and nibbled almonds and dried apricots as Mair admired the wares. She was learning that the ritualised exchanges of buyer and seller must take place even though they both knew that money and shawl were not going to change hands today.

After a pleasant half-hour, the door that led to the weavers’ studio clicked open. A tiny, ancient man in a fur cap and felt boots bound with strips of leather tottered on the threshold.

‘My uncle Sonam.’ Tsering beamed, putting a heavy arm over his shoulder. ‘My grandmother brother.’

Mair shook hands with the venerable figure, thinking that it was hardly surprising he didn’t spend much time caretaking. He looked too old to do anything except sit and doze in an armchair.

‘Good afternoon, Sonam-le,’ she said, giving him what she had learnt was the polite honorific. The old man darted a bright-eyed appraising look at her. He spoke in an undertone to Tsering and jerked his thumb towards the shop door.

With alacrity Tsering pulled on his Adidas jacket. ‘We’ll go,’ he said.

‘You’re going to leave the shop?’

‘My uncle does not speak English. Anyway,’ he shrugged and spread his hands, his face creasing, ‘I do not see any customer.’

He locked the door behind them and the three of them set off, Sonam’s long, belted tunic swishing around his ankles and his fur cap bobbing as they crossed the bazaar. He could move surprisingly fast. Within minutes they had reached the familiar locked gates of the European cemetery. Sonam reached inside his layers of clothing, rummaged for a moment, and withdrew a huge key. The gates at last swung open and Mair passed through, under the gaunt trees and between the crosses and headstones. The ground was covered with fallen leaves, their buttery gold already brown and lifeless. The cold stung her cheeks.

‘What are you looking for?’ Tsering asked.

Mair tried to interpret the German inscription on the nearest stone. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed.

To her relief, the two men retreated to a small green lean-to placed against a sheltered wall. She wandered along the haphazard rows. There were several tiny graves, one with a stone that read simply ‘Josephine, aged 7 months’. She tried to imagine how European women so far from home had struggled to look after their children in this remote place, and how they must often have prayed in vain.

She came to one small group of headstones bearing Welsh names, the Williamses and Thomases and Joneses of her own home valley, who could only have belonged to the Presbyterian mission. She took out her notebook and copied down the names and dates to look up in Hope and the Glory of God next time she had access to the Internet. She recognised one line of Welsh that was utterly familiar because she had seen it most recently in the graveyard at home, engraved on a stone just a few feet from her mother and father’s. Hedd perffaith hedd. Peace, perfect peace.

Homesickness closed on her, unexpected but as tight as a clenched fist. She experienced a moment’s confused longing to be back in the valley. She could see her father at the kitchen table, his head bent over his newspaper and the inevitable cup of tea at his elbow.

She steadied herself by looking towards the white battlements of the Himalayas and the clouds that mounted above them. Evan and Nerys Watkins might well have stood in this same spot and gazed at the same view. Nerys must sometimes have been painfully homesick too, and it would have been further to travel then, and much harder for her to communicate with the people she had left behind. For the first time since she had come to India, Mair felt emotionally connected to her grandmother.

She walked slowly on until she had completed a circuit of the enclosure. It was disappointing, but there was nothing except the three or four Welsh names on gravestones. She was about to cross to the hut, where Tsering and his uncle were huddled out of the wind smoking bidis, when she noticed a plaque set into a wall.

She read:

In Memoriam

Matthew Alexander Forbes, St John’s College, Cambridge Lost on Nanga Parbat, August 1938, aged 22

Mair wasn’t sure what or where Nanga Parbat was, but she guessed it was a mountain. Twenty-two was very young.

‘How are you, ma’am?’ Tsering was calling to her. ‘Did you find something?’

She shook her head. ‘From the names there are some Welsh buried here, but there’s nothing to connect them to my family.’

Sonam turned his head and studied her. He looked so old, but he was as alert as his great-nephew. He muttered a question and Tsering shrugged and translated for her: ‘He says, why not say first that you are interested in the Welsh people?’

Mair blinked.

Sonam stood up and gestured over the wall. She nodded agreement and he led the way out of the cemetery and down a lane that meandered behind it, with Mair and Tsering doing their best to keep up. She hadn’t explored this quarter of the old town, and she looked with sad interest at crumbling stone walls and gaping potholes. The old buildings were mostly sinking into dereliction. A woman carrying a bundle of kindling on her head greeted Sonam as he sped by.

The lane petered out at a blank wall flanked by two abandoned buildings. One was of plain stone with tall windows veiled in layers of ancient dust, and it struck Mair at once that in its absolute lack of pretension it resembled a Welsh chapel. The one opposite was no more than a wall with a collapsing door in it, but at Sonam’s nod Tsering pushed open the door. It gave on to a little paved courtyard surrounded by single-storey buildings. Weeds and saplings tilted the old paving stones, and all the glass in the small-paned windows had gone. A pair of starved dogs appeared in a dark doorway and gave them a yellow-eyed glare.

Tsering and Sonam consulted.

‘This is old mission, with school and medical clinic, my uncle remembers well. Across there, that was Welsh church. Then it became Hindu temple, but now there is new one built by them. These days, nothing here.’ He gave a shrug without a glimmer of optimism in it. Mair had noticed a similar gesture too often during her conversations in Leh.

Sonam was nodding harder, waving at her to indicate that she should feel free to explore this desolate place.

Avoiding the dogs, she peered into the tiny rooms. The first two were empty, except for weeds poking up through the floors, scattered refuse and torn sacks, but in the third lay some rotten sticks of furniture. One piece was just recognisable as a schoolroom chair, with a small shelf on the back for books. There had been chairs quite similar to this one in the infants’ class at her own school. Mair bent and tried to set it upright but the shelf came away in her hands. At her feet lay the remains of a book, a sad remnant with swollen covers that had been half protected from the damp and cold by the shelf. She picked it up and looked at the ruined pages, and out of the pulpy grey mass two or three words were just distinguishable.

It was a Welsh hymnal.

Mair lifted her head. She had half thought that the two men might have been trying to please her with a visit to a compound that could have belonged to any of the various missions to Ladakh, or might not have had any missionary connection at all. But now she knew for sure.

Seventy years ago Evan Watkins would have preached in the chapel across the lane, and his wife must have tried to teach the children, perhaps in this very room. She tilted her head to listen, as if she could catch the sound of their voices, but all she could hear was dogs barking and the screech and hoot of distant traffic.

‘This is what I wanted to find,’ she said quietly, to her companions. After a moment she stooped and replaced the hymnal in its resting place.

The three of them retreated into the fresh air. Sonam took hold of Mair’s arm. He began to talk with great animation, words pouring out of him as he shook her elbow and peered up into her face. He had no teeth and his face was crosshatched with deep lines, but he suddenly looked much younger than his age.

‘Tell me what he’s saying?’ she begged Tsering.

‘He remembers the teacher here, when he was small boy. She was nice. She gave the children apples and they sang songs.’

Nerys Watkins, who had followed her husband to India and brought back the wedding shawl with a lock of hair hidden in its folds.

‘That might have been my grandmother. Does he remember her name? What songs did they sing?’

The shake of the old man’s head was enough of an answer, but another rush of words immediately followed. His hands measured out a chunk of the air and he grinned as he pretended to totter under the weight of it. Remembering the long-ago was a pleasure for him, she understood, just as it had become for her father. Tsering patted his uncle on the shoulder, telling him to slow down.

‘He says there was a wireless here, the first one my uncle had ever listened to. He liked the music that came out of it. The wireless was this big, and heavy. It had a battery, and it needed four men and a cart to take that battery all the way down to the river to be charged at the generator. Then the people would come in close and listen with serious faces. The children wanted to laugh, but it was not allowed. That was when there was the war in Europe, and then it came to Asia.’

Evan and Nerys, listening sombrely to the radio news in one of these low rooms, with the oil lamp throwing their shadows on the wall. She could see them so clearly now, at last: Evan in his preacher’s black, and Nerys with an apron covering her plain skirt and hand-knitted jersey.

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘That was when it was.’

There was nothing more to see in the abandoned compound. Tsering was interested and he made another circuit with her, looking through every doorway, but they made no further discoveries. After his flash of recollection Sonam seemed weary, all his energy spent. Mair gently put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to have come here.’

They made their way back down the lane, Sonam walking much more slowly and with his great-nephew’s support. The twilight was deepening and lights shone out of the windows of houses nearer to the cemetery until there was a blink, then another, and the power failed. The single street lamp in the distance went out. Mair and her companions halted under the navy-blue sky as Tsering searched an inner pocket for a flashlight. The old man put out a hand to Mair to steady himself, and she took his arm. Linked together, with the thin torch-beam picking out the deep holes and collapsed walls in their path, they stepped carefully onwards to the road.

At the junction where she turned off towards her hotel, she said goodbye to the two men. The money she gave Sonam disappeared in a flash into a slit in his tunic. He grasped her by the wrist and angled his head to peer at her in the gloom. Tsering translated for the last time.

‘In those days, the old times, it was very hard to live here. There was not much, for any people. But it was good, just the same.’

The old man was telling her that Evan Watkins and his wife had not experienced undiluted hardship here in Leh. There had been happiness too.

Mair could understand that.

She shook hands with them.

Tsering grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. ‘You are looking for history from your shawl. Now you will be going to Kashmir.’

‘I will, yes.’

‘Safe journey,’ he said.

They wished her goodnight. As she watched them making slow progress down the deserted street, the power came on again. Their moving shadows slid over the old stone walls.