The Kashmir Shawl (6 page)

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.