The Kashmir Shawl

FIVE


To get across the mountains from Leh to Srinagar, Mair’s options were to take the public bus, to find a group of people who were making the trip and needed another passenger to fill their vehicle, or to hire her own car and driver for the two-day journey. The buses ran every day, but they halted briefly overnight in Kargil and left again at one in the morning. Soldiers at the army checkpoints on either side of the Zoji La closed the road at five a.m. in order to leave the hairpin bends clear for army convoys, so official civilian traffic was supposed to be up and over the pass before then. She had seen notices pinned up in some of the Internet cafés offering spare seats for shared expenses in trucks or cars, but when she made her way to a phone office and called one of the numbers, she found herself talking (she was almost certain) to one of the Israeli boys who had been on the Changthang excursion. She made a hurried excuse and rang off. The option of her own car and driver had seemed by far the best until she went into the last travel agency that was still open for business and enquired about the price. She would just have to square up to the legendary discomforts and adrenalin shocks of the bus journey. She packed her bag, ready to leave Leh the next morning, and headed out for a last dinner at the best of the Lonely Planet Guide’s recommendations.



‘Hi there,’ a voice called, out of the frosty twilight, as she turned downhill towards the bazaar. ‘We were really hoping you were still in town.’

It was Karen Becker, zipped up against the cold in a duvet jacket, her hair bundled under a fleece cap.

‘How was the trek?’ Mair asked, as they fell into step.

Karen gurgled with dismay. ‘Full on, and then some. We went up high and there was snow up to my knees. Everything in the tent froze overnight. Bruno adored every second of it, naturally.’

‘And Lotus?’

‘She was good. But Lo’s always pretty good, and she likes the snow. Look, why don’t we meet tomorrow? I’d say come over tonight but Bruno’s got some work thing to sort out, endless phone calls to make, and that’s not easy around here, as you know.’

Mair did know. All foreign mobile phones were automatically blocked and the only way to make calls other than from a phone shop was by buying a Jammu and Kashmir mobile. She hadn’t done that, and she was feeling the lack of communication with home. The power supply was too variable to make email a reliable option either.

‘I’m leaving on the bus for Srinagar in the morning.’

‘Nooo,’ Karen wailed. ‘Don’t do that. You mustn’t. I’ve heard it’s a terrible ride.’

‘Well, it’ll be an adventure.’

Karen put her arm through Mair’s. ‘I’ve got a much better idea. Stay one more day, and come to Kashmir with us. We’ve booked a car. There’s room if you don’t mind sitting in the back with Lo and me.’

Mair hesitated. ‘What about Bruno?’

Karen twitched her elegant shoulders. ‘He’ll be fine with it. He likes meeting new people just as much as I do.’

Mair’s first impression of Bruno Becker had suggested otherwise, but she didn’t say as much. ‘Well … it’s tempting. I’m not so sure about the bus, if I’m honest.’



‘Hey, then it’s a deal. We’ll pick you up at your hotel, day after tomorrow. It’ll be early, I’m warning you. Bruno’s a complete fanatic about that sort of thing.’

It seemed that the arrangement was made.

Karen danced along the edge of the dirt road, waiting for a truck to grind by. ‘How was your week, by the way?’

Mair began, ‘It was interesting. I found out some history …’

But Karen was already crossing through the cloud of exhaust fumes. She waved back at Mair. ‘Great. See you tomorrow.’ An auto-rickshaw driver had spotted her and swerved to a halt. Karen leapt aboard without negotiating the fare. Mair continued in the opposite direction towards the twinkling lights of the bazaar.



With a day to spare, she went back to the Internet café. In an email to Hattie she described the discovery of the chapel and the ruined mission building, but only in the lightest way. Even to Hattie, she wasn’t willing to admit quite how intriguing the story of the shawl had become to her. She clicked send, while the power held.

Then she checked her inbox. The messages scrolled in, arriving at a pace slower than that of a limping man carrying a cleft stick. She saw one from Dylan and opened it with delight. Her brother wasn’t a regular correspondent, but his occasional emails gave her more pleasure than anyone else’s.

This time there was only one disappointingly short paragraph, but it promised that she would be interested in the attachment.

Dylan had taken away their father’s small collection of photographs, stored over the years in a couple of old shoeboxes in Huw’s chaotic study. He had said vaguely to his sisters that he would go through them when he had an hour to spare, and would scan the good ones into an iPhoto album for them both. It was the kind of assignment he excelled at. Eirlys had replied that she was grateful for the offer, because she’d never have time to do it herself. Dylan had smiled covertly at Mair, and she had been struck then by his increasing resemblance to their father. How unwittingly you stepped into your parent’s skin, she thought. Probably by now she was more like her mother than she would ever know.

Smiling, Mair set about opening Dylan’s jpeg attachment. At first the system refused to co-operate, but she kept trying until she succeeded.

She stared. The photograph was an old black-and-white snapshot, faded and creased. Three women were grouped against a background of water partially covered with lily-pads. The upper left-hand corner of the view was cut off by a diagonal of carved woodwork, so it looked as though the three had been caught on a balcony overlooking a lake. The woman in the middle was posing with her chin up, darting a look of frank amusement straight into the camera’s eye. Her wide mouth had full lips that looked black, but must actually have been painted with dark red lipstick. Her wavy dark hair was swept up at the sides and her striking appearance was emphasised by the wide lapels and exaggerated shoulders of her chic jacket. There was a deep shadow in the V of her neckline.

The woman on her left was much more girlish in appearance. She was in three-quarters profile, smiling with her eyes turned to her companions, and she had curled pale hair and a swanlike neck.

The third woman had been captured in a burst of delighted laughter. Her head was thrown back and she looked so alive and full of merriment that it was several seconds before Mair recognised her. It was her grandmother.

Gazing with increasing fascination into the joyful faces, Mair speculated on what Grandpa Evan could have said from behind the lens to make his wife beam with such clear happiness.

Or – perhaps the photographer hadn’t been Evan Watkins at all.

Whereabouts was that stretch of dappled water? It didn’t look like Leh, that was certain.



Then an idea came to her. There were lakes in Srinagar. Mair referred back to Dylan’s message. He had written,

This was loose inside an album of Grandpa’s India photographs, mostly very boring. Chapel people standing on steps, looking solemn, etc. So it caught my eye straight away. Who can Grandma’s happy friends be?

The longer she looked at it, the more enigmatic and intriguing the photograph became. The three young women seemed so absorbed in their friendship, as well as in the immediate comedy of the moment. Their faces shone with so much life, it was hard to believe that the picture had been taken almost seventy years ago.

Mair badly wanted to find out more about them. The possibility that the picture might have been taken in Srinagar only intensified her desire to get there.

The Chinese woman who ran the Internet shop frowned at her. Over each work station was a laminated sign that read, ‘No uploding No downloding’.

Mair pointed from the picture on her screen to the antique printer perched on a bench near the door, and made an imploring gesture to connect them. It wasn’t until she took out her wallet and started peeling off notes that any response came. After that there was an interval of button pressing and cable checking and muttering, and finally a five-by-four print emerged from the slot. It was murkier than the original, and the small size reduced the sheer joyous impact, but it was good enough.

Mair carried it back to the hotel and put it safely in the envelope that also contained the lock of dark brown hair.



The Beckers and their driver in the standard-issue white Toyota four-wheel drive drew up in front of Mair’s hotel at six thirty the following morning. Karen waved from the back of the car. ‘All set?’ she called. ‘This is going to be fun.’

Lotus was strapped into a child’s booster seat. The local driver, clearly already infatuated with the little girl, flashed gold teeth across the seat divide and patted her cheek. Bruno Becker stepped out of the front passenger seat. He looked at Mair with a glimmer of a smile that made him seem slightly more approachable.

‘This is very kind of you both,’ she said.

‘I’m glad you’re joining us. Is this everything?’ He indicated her holdall. Mair nodded. She carried her rucksack slung over her shoulder, with the shawl, the lock of hair and the photograph secure inside it.

‘You travel light. Karen could take a lesson from you.’ He swung the holdall into the luggage compartment of the Toyota on top of a sizeable pile of baggage.

‘Hey, it’s mostly Lotus’s stuff.’ Karen laughed. ‘Come on, jump in.’

Mair took her place next to Lotus. The child’s hair was a mass of pale spirals in the steely dawn light.

‘Let’s go,’ the driver said. They headed down the main street, past the prayer wheel and the long mani wall. Mair turned to catch a last glimpse of the town. Thick bars of low cloud masked the circle of mountains and the trees were iron-grey scribbles against brown rock. It was very cold, and the streets were deserted.

Karen tilted her chin to the front seats. ‘They’re worried about the weather,’ she announced across Lotus.

‘Forecast of snow,’ Bruno said briefly, without turning his head. ‘We won’t be hanging around on the way up.’

Mair settled back in her seat. At first the car ate up the miles of valley road along the bank of the Indus. Karen chatted, and Mair passed Lotus items from the inexhaustible supply of toys and books that surrounded her seat.

Heavy wagons and army trucks moved by in both directions, and as the road began to climb they passed the rough roadside camps of maintenance gangs who worked to keep the route open. Women as well as men carried stones on their backs or shovelled dirt into potholes.



‘What a tough life. Look, that woman’s got a baby on her back,’ Karen breathed. Two more tiny children sat on a rock, watching the steady grind of traffic.

To increase the general bleakness it began to rain, the swollen droplets bouncing steadily off the windscreen. The wipers hummed and the car slewed over deeper and deeper ruts. They came to a police checkpoint and the driver ferried their passports to a hut for scrutiny, while bored soldiers in camouflage swung their guns to marshal loaded trucks. Beyond the checkpoint was a sign that read, ‘Border Roads Organisation. The Enemy is Watching You.’ The highway ran close to the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, and the heavy Indian Army presence wasn’t window-dressing.

They drove on, heading steadily westwards as the road began to climb. It edged past huge precipices, the wheels of the Toyota sometimes seeming to hang over the lip as they bucked round yet another blind bend. Mair averted her eyes from the yawning drops, only to gasp as a truck howled round the corner and headed dead at them. Their driver never seemed to flinch as he steered past the oncoming metal with one inch to spare between solid rock or thin air. The road surface became so rough that the passengers had to hold on to the straps to stop their heads hitting the roof. In the midst of this, seemingly lulled by the relentless jolting, Lotus fell asleep.

‘Don’t they ever use tarmac around here?’ Karen groaned.

Bruno looked over his shoulder. ‘It wouldn’t last six weeks. This mixture of stone and compacted hardcore is the only thing that stands up to the weather and the trucks, and it takes constant maintenance to keep the road even this usable.’ That was the longest remark he had made since leaving Leh.

‘Uh-huh. Ouch.’ They all bounced in their seats. Stones sprayed from under their wheels and pinged out into space. Far below, Mair caught sight of the pewter thread of a river. She offered up a prayer of thanks that she wasn’t crammed into a forty-seater public bus with an exhausted driver at the wheel.



‘The road between Leh and Srinagar only opened to wheeled traffic in the sixties,’ Bruno said. ‘Before that it was a track, and the transport was ponies.’

‘However long did it take?’

‘It’s two hundred and fifty miles. A week would have been really good going.’

Mair added, after a moment, ‘In the eighteenth century it was impassable even on horseback. Porters carried everything on their backs, all the way from Tibet to Kashmir. Going this way the traffic was mostly wool, for the pashmina trade.’

Bruno turned to look at her. For the first time, their eyes met directly. ‘You’re interested in the history of the old trading routes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So am I,’ Karen interjected.

Her husband swivelled towards her and smiled. Mair realised that he was a noticeably attractive man, and the unease she had felt in the Beckers’ joint presence suddenly lifted. Although at first sight she had envied their intimacy she had begun to suspect that they were actually connected by mutual antagonism as much as shared adoration of their child. But now she thought she must have been mistaken. There was affection as well as amusement in Bruno’s smile.

‘I know you are,’ he said warmly.

Mair peered ahead as they swung round yet another corner and saw, through a slash in the clouds, a white wall of snow in the distance.

After an hour, Lotus woke up and began to grizzle. She pulled at her seat straps and turned her face away from the drink Karen offered her. ‘We’ll have to stop for ten minutes,’ she told the driver. ‘How far is it now to Lamayuru?’

The men shook their heads.

‘Still far,’ the driver said.

They pulled in at a roadside tea stall. Rain had turned the road to a wretched ribbon of mud, and sprays of filthy water were flung up by every vehicle that passed. The westbound stream was constant. Mair understood that every driver was under pressure to get up and over the Fotu La before dark or before the snow seriously set in, whichever came first. In the last few minutes the rain had become sleet, hitting the car’s windscreen in dismal splotches.

Their little group huddled under the canvas shelter. Lotus cheered up as soon as she saw people. Bruno put her down and she set about making new friends while Karen investigated the contents of the stallholder’s saucepans. She chose a thick stew and a ladleful of rice, and fed most of it to Lotus. More cautiously, Mair snacked on a bar of chocolate and a handful of nuts. Their driver stood in the doorway, muttering with the other drivers and surveying the weather.

As soon as they had finished, Bruno hurried them back to the car. Karen sighed. ‘What a shame not to be able to see the approach to Lamayuru. In the pictures, it’s set right up on the skyline like a fantasy castle, all spires and turrets.’

‘Karen, we really can’t stop at your monastery,’ Bruno said.

‘What?’

‘We need to get over the pass as soon as possible.’

‘Oh, come on. An hour won’t make any difference.’

The driver was sitting forwards now, his shoulders hunched close to his ears. The oncoming vehicles all had their headlights on and a long line of their little yellow cones was visible, snaking at an improbable angle upwards into the murk.

‘It will, darling.’

Karen was angry. ‘Listen, what is this? I know it doesn’t interest you much but this is the oldest gompa in Ladakh. It dates from before the tenth century. There are frescos, thangkas, like nowhere else. We’ve got to see it.’

‘Not this time.’

Silence fell, and Mair could feel the silent battle of wills. The wipers smeared away a ruff of sleet that was instantly replaced by another. Lotus quietly sang to her doll.

‘It’s just a sprinkling of snow, Bruno. Why are you so cautious all of a sudden?’



The driver broke in: ‘We go straight to Fotu La. Get down to Kargil.’

That seemed to settle it. Karen’s jaw set, but she said no more.

The going got harder but the driver pushed on. Snow was falling now, piling on the heaps of stones at the edge of the road. Fewer vehicles were coming the other way. Mair focused her attention on keeping Lotus occupied, and tried to ignore the precipices that must be only a foot away. It was much more alarming, she discovered, not to be able to see the worst and to be left imagining it.

She glimpsed another quirky Border Roads sign: ‘Are you married? Divorce your speed.’

They seemed to have been climbing for a long time. The wheels skidded once, took purchase, and skidded again. Karen’s annoyance at missing the monastery had subsided. Bruno and the driver conferred in low voices. They went more slowly, in the lowest gear, following the tyre marks of the vehicle ahead, which quickly faded to nothing more than faint grey ridges in a grey expanse.

‘Snow very bad,’ the driver said abruptly.

A moment later, on a steep incline, the Toyota’s wheels spun and the car began to slither backwards. For a panicky moment Karen and Mair’s eyes locked over Lotus’s head. Disorientated, Mair tried to work out on which side of them the drop currently yawned.

Bruno was already out of the car. He kicked a rock under one of the rear wheels as the driver leapt out to join him. Karen and Mair sat tensely waiting.

‘Get out,’ Lotus chirped.

‘Not now, honey. Look how hard it’s snowing.’

The men shovelled roadside dirt under the tyres but the Toyota edged forward only a few yards before it began to slide backwards again.

‘No good,’ Bruno shouted through the snow.

‘No good,’ the driver agreed.



The doors slammed.

‘We’re not going to make it. We’ll have to go back down.’

‘Go back?’ Karen cried. ‘After all this?’

‘It’s five miles or so back to Lamayuru. We’ll stay the night there.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. It’s either that or spend the night up here in the car. So you’ll get to see your frescos after all.’

Karen scooped up a double handful of red-gold hair and fastened it back from her cheeks. She flashed a grin at Mair, perhaps realising that she had been intransigent. ‘Sorry about this. But that’s travel, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ Mair agreed.

The driver made a complicated reverse manoeuvre, slithering in the limited space between rock wall and vanishing road. They began the crawl downhill.

Mair could see nothing except falling snow. She felt a queasy pressure beneath her diaphragm, like a weight of foreboding.



The darkness seemed impenetrable. Mair groped her way along the clammy stone wall, trying to remember which way she had come and wishing she hadn’t left her head-torch in the car. She reached a corner, tripped at a shallow step and almost fell, noticing that the air was even icier here. The way to the courtyard must be close at hand.

When her outstretched fingers finally met the door she felt for the iron ring handle and twisted it. The door banged inwards, letting in a blast of wind and snow.

She stumbled outside. The woman who had led her to her room had pointed out the guesthouse kitchen, but with the thick snow now masking all the low doors that enclosed the courtyard she had lost her sense of direction. She didn’t glance upwards, aware that the monastery walls loomed so threateningly overhead that they seemed ready to topple and crush the house on its precarious ledge. They would hardly have been visible now, in any case. Gusts of wind drove the snowflakes horizontally and even upwards, half blinding her as she ploughed through the drifts. She ducked under a ledge of snow that blanketed a rough porch, and saw a light.

Another door crashed open and she fell inside, shaking off snow like a dog emerging from water. She put her shoulder to the door and managed to latch it behind her.

‘Hello, My,’ Lotus called out.

The room was dimly lit by a single kerosene lantern. There were mattresses on the floor against three walls, and in the centre a small stove with a chimney pipe that oozed smoke into the chill, grease-scented air. The woman Mair had seen earlier was stooped in front of the stove, tossing pancakes of dried dung into its cold heart. Several men, probably truck drivers also stranded by the storm, sat hunched on two of the mattresses. They had been smoking and talking in low voices but now they broke off and stared at her. The third mattress was occupied by Bruno and Lotus. The little girl was zipped up in a padded sleep-suit and swathed in a blanket so that only her rosy face was showing. The whole cocoon of her was snugly held inside her father’s coat, her head tucked under his chin.

Mair felt distinctly envious.

Any warmth would be welcome in these circumstances, she told herself hastily.

‘Do a jump,’ Lotus begged. ‘S’il vous plaît?’

‘Lotus, it doesn’t really work indoors. You have to be outside.’

‘Go out,’ the child said, and pointed, as if this was so obvious it was hardly worth saying.

‘I’ll do one for you tomorrow,’ Mair promised.

‘It’s snowing, Lo, remember?’ Bruno told her. ‘We’re all staying right here, inside, where it’s warmer.’

He moved aside and indicated a space on the mattress to Mair. She picked her way between a tower of blackened saucepans and a wicker coop containing a dispirited hen to sit down beside him. The men resumed their conversation and the woman slammed the stove door.



Bruno said, ‘Karen’s got a migraine. She took one look at the bathroom and went straight to bed.’

The bathroom was a couple of yards away, located just to the left of the door. It consisted of a metal drum with a tap, a drain-hole in the floor and a pink plastic soap-dish with a cake of grey soap. The lavatory, Mair had already discovered, was in a lean-to on the edge of the courtyard. It was a long-drop, with several hundred feet of air yawning between the foot-rests. At present, snow was bracingly blowing up through the hole.

The guesthouse attached to the monastery was packed with a large group of German tourists whose bus had failed to get over the pass. The accommodation further down in Lamayuru village also was full of earlier fugitives from the weather, and the Beckers’ driver had done well to find this place for them. When they had first arrived, battling the ankle-deep iced mud of the paths, it had looked less like a dwelling than some roughly rectangular deposits of rocks and planks. But there were two slits of rooms in the warren that led off the courtyard, chipped into the rock like hermits’ cells. The driver had ushered them into this shelter and gone off to stay with his cousin, who apparently lived nearby. Any further victims of the storm would have to bed down on the mattresses in the kitchen.

Mair asked, ‘Can I do anything for her?’

He shook his head. ‘But thanks.’

Mair added, ‘It’s not exactly luxurious but it’ll definitely be warmer than spending the night in the Toyota.’

Bruno’s arms instinctively tightened round Lotus. ‘Yes. That would have been quite difficult.’

Snow as heavy as this would have built up a drift against a stationary vehicle. Overnight the car might have been buried, and escape on foot on a road as isolated as the one they had just travelled would have been dangerous, maybe impossible.

Mair shivered. Despite her show of optimism, she didn’t like this place, not for its lack of home comforts but because of the bleakness and the air of indefinable gloom that hung about it. But it was still a safe haven tonight. She glanced at Lotus’s pink cheeks. The little girl’s thumb was in her mouth. ‘We’ll be snug as bugs, won’t we, Lo?’ She smiled.

A square of sacking that masked an inner door was pulled aside and another woman emerged. She was carrying a saucepan with a feeble wisp of steam rising from the contents.

Bruno took the pan and thanked her. He sat upright and said gently, ‘Lotus, look, here’s your supper.’

He began to feed her spoonfuls of warmed-up baked beans alternating with chunks of flatbread. She wriggled half out of her blanket cocoon and ate with relish, smearing her chin with orangey sauce.

Over her head Bruno said, ‘We always carry a couple of cans of beans with us. Lotus will eat them day or night, whatever else goes awry.’ He dropped his voice. ‘We may find ourselves envying her later.’

A blackened cauldron had been lowered on to the stove. The two women squatted on the earth floor and began to slice onions, tossing them into the pot and exchanging remarks with the group of truck drivers.

‘It’s only one night.’ Mair laughed.

But Bruno didn’t laugh with her. ‘I hope you’re right.’

She thought how forbidding he could look, with his dark face and the black eyebrows drawn together in a thick line. He and Karen seemed so markedly different that she could only conclude theirs was one of those partnerships of opposites.

Lotus finished all the baked beans and caught at the pan to make sure that there wasn’t another spoonful in the bottom. Soot coated her hands and Bruno patiently cleaned them with his handkerchief, telling her that she couldn’t get into bed with Mummy and leave black handprints all over her, could she? He took an apple from his pocket, peeled and quartered it and fed that to Lotus as well. By the time she was on the fourth slow chunk, her eyelids were drooping.

‘Time for bed,’ Bruno whispered. He rearranged the child’s coverings so that only her eyes and nose were visible, before hoisting her in his arms. Then he slid a glance at the food preparations. ‘May I join you later for dinner?’ he asked Mair formally, but at the same time his black eyebrows rose in amusement.

‘Of course. I’d like some company,’ Mair answered.

While he was gone she sat propped against the wall and watched the cooks at work. The stove was heating up and the smell of boiling vegetables hung in the air. Condensation dribbled down the tiny window panes, but the kitchen didn’t seem to have got any warmer. She was thinking that she could easily have ended up here with the Israeli boys for company rather than the Beckers, and offered a quick thanks to the gods of Lamayuru for the lucky escape.

Fifteen minutes passed before Bruno returned. After brushing off the snow he took his place beside her on the mattress, watched by the drivers. He waited until they lost interest, then, from his well-stocked pocket, produced a flask. He rummaged again and brought out a pair of collapsible metal beakers, and waved a finger over them. ‘Cognac?’ he murmured, and poured.

They clinked their beakers. Bruno took a long gulp from his. Mair followed suit and the alcohol instantly glowed through her chilled bones.

‘Aaah. How’s Karen?’

‘She’s lying in bed reading one of her Buddhist texts. I put Lotus in beside her – she instantly fell asleep.’ He added, after a moment, ‘She has great reserves of power and determination, my wife, so she suffers when we have a situation like tonight, when there is nothing even she can do to alter the circumstances. In fact, Karen’s brand of Buddhism seems to involve a great deal of determination overall. You might even call it a need for control. I’m not quite sure how that aligns with the teachings. Technically speaking.’

Their eyes met. Bruno’s manner was extremely dry but there was a strong reverberation of humour in him. He was Swiss but also quite un-Swiss. That made him interesting as well as attractive, Mair thought. ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.

He shook his head decisively. ‘No. You?’

‘Not at all. But my grandfather was a missionary. He and my grandmother were out here in the 1940s, with the Welsh Presbyterian mission outreach to Leh.’

‘That’s why you’re here now?’

‘My father died recently. His parents were part of our lives because they lived nearby, but we never knew my maternal grandpa and grandma. My mother died when I was in my early teens so that part of the story was lost. I want to try to uncover some of it.’

Mair rarely talked about her mother, even to Hattie. Her instinct was to protect the bruise that had been left by her death. So it was startling to find herself confiding to Bruno Becker this intimate detail, and to realise that since their first encounter and her explanation of the somersaults she hadn’t told Karen one thing about herself.

She had begun to, she remembered, but something else had always intervened.

But Karen was a bright flame, and everyone was drawn to her. It was only the strange circumstances, the snowstorm and their temporary captivity under the shadow of the monastery, that were making Mair talk so unguardedly to Karen’s husband.

She took another hasty mouthful of cognac. Her hand was unsteady and the metal rim of the beaker rattled faintly against her teeth.

‘Go on,’ Bruno murmured.

She told him about the shawl, and her discoveries in Changthang and Leh. He listened attentively, his black head tipped against the stone wall and his eyes on her face. The cook measured some scant handfuls of rice into another pan of water as the scent of mutton swirled through the kitchen.

Bruno enjoyed the story of Tsering’s great-uncle, and the old man’s early memory of listening in amazement to the mission’s wireless set. ‘And now you’re following the shawl thread onwards to Srinagar,’ he said at length.



‘Yes. Who knows what I’ll find there?’ I will find out about the photograph, she thought.

He unscrewed the cap of the flask and poured them both another drink. She sipped hers, stretching out her legs and letting her shoulders drop. The long day of bouncing over potholes had left her muscles aching.

Bruno rotated his beaker, thoughtfully examining the reflections in the polished surface. ‘I am lucky in that both my parents are still alive. They divorced long ago and my mother remarried. She lives near us in Geneva now – she adores Lotus. My father is still physically strong but his memory has almost gone. My sister and I agreed that he would be safer and happier in a special hospital, which is not nearly as bad as it sounds, by the way.

‘When I went to see him just before we came out here, we were sitting on his balcony looking at the mountains and I was talking – I have to talk a lot on these visits. He likes to hear about the rest of the world and everyone’s lives, although I’m not sure how much of it he remembers. I was telling him about all the places we’d be visiting, and he seemed to be listening, nodding, the way he does.

‘Then he reminded me that an Indian friend of our family was originally from Kashmir. Memory is a strange commodity. He remembered the minute circumstances of the friend and her mother coming to Switzerland after the war, yet sometimes he can’t even quite recall who I am. He made me promise that I’d look up the daughter when we get to Delhi.’

Mair nodded, recalling how her father in his last weeks had travelled further and further into the past.

‘The mother would have been the same generation as your grandparents. She was a Christian, a Roman Catholic. Perhaps they knew each other.’

‘Is that likely? It’s a long way from Leh to Srinagar.’

Bruno sighed. ‘And that’s in good weather. Tonight Srinagar might as well be located in South America.’

‘I don’t actually know if my grandparents would ever have come this far west. But it’s not impossible.’ She thought of the photograph again.

‘It would do no harm to ask our friend. If we’re in Delhi at the same time, perhaps you could come with me to visit her.’

Their eyes met again.

‘I’d like that,’ Mair said.

They sat back, relaxed by brandy and conversation.

The languid cooking of dinner continued and a small girl made a circuit of the mattress seats, dishing out metal plates and spoons. Bruno got up once and went to look out at the weather, coming back with a grave face. ‘Getting out of here is going to be difficult,’ he said.

Deep snow would by now be blocking the mountain roads in either direction. Mair could envisage the scale of the work that would be involved in clearing it.

One of the drivers looked across at Bruno. He gave a shrug and an expressive flutter of one hand. ‘Very bad. Very early,’ he called.

Bruno nodded. ‘Very bad,’ he agreed. He folded himself on to the mattress again, telling Mair, ‘We’d have trouble dealing with a sudden huge snowfall like this in Switzerland, let alone here.’

Remembering what Karen had told her, she asked, ‘Are you from Geneva originally?’

Immediately his angular face lost some shadows and he leant closer, almost confidingly. Unwittingly Mair had touched something in him.

‘I have to live in horizontal Switzerland, these days, because that’s where my work is. I’m an engineer. But my home and my roots are in vertical Switzerland, in the mountains. I come originally from the Bernese Oberland, near Grindelwald. Do you know it?’

‘No.’ The claustrophobic room, the knowledge that they were all temporarily captive, made Mair long to be transported by a story. In her mind’s eye she saw a Heidi-picture of sunlit Alpine meadows and dark fir trees. ‘Tell me about it.’



‘My people were farmers,’ he began. ‘In summer they took the cows up to the Alps to pasture. In winter there was snow.’

She listened contentedly. She was warm at last, and Bruno’s description of home was familiar, not so much in the precise details but in the way he talked about the rhythms of farming and the small doings of rural valleys. She also clearly heard what he was not saying, in as many words, about his deep-rooted affection for the place and – she was certain – his longing for it. It made her think of her own home. She wasn’t homesick, as she had been in Leh, but rather sharply alive to the memories of a place that was lost.

Bruno was telling her how the Swiss mountain farmers in the first half of the nineteenth century had known the hidden ways across the high passes connecting remote valleys. They were poor people, and when the first tourists had begun to arrive in the Alps, the Beckers and their neighbours had discovered they could earn good money by guiding visitors. Until then, he said, no one had ever explored the peaks and glaciers just for pleasure. To travel to the neighbouring valleys to find work or to sell their cheeses or even to make a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine, perhaps, but not for the mere satisfaction of it, or even for the sake of some obscure scientific observation. But then the gentlemen mountaineers and amateur scientists had arrived, and ventured up in the tracks of the local men, and after they had conquered their peaks, they rushed home to describe their triumphs and catalogue their discoveries.

The news spread, and more and more of them flocked to the Alps. Soon the wealthy messieurs were arriving in their hundreds from all over Europe, and the Beckers were among the first to offer themselves for hire as professional mountain guides.

‘My great-grandfather, for example, he was Edward Whymper’s guide,’ Bruno said.

Mair had never heard of Whymper, and admitted as much. Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘He was British. He made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, with his Zermatt guides. There was a tragedy on the way down and four men died, but Whymper himself survived. He came regularly to climb in the Oberland and he often took Christian Becker as his guide. In the next generation – that was in the twenties and thirties, my grandfather Victor and another client made an early attempt on the Eiger’s north face, only just escaping with their lives from a terrible storm. Victor saved the client’s life.’

‘You must be proud of that.’

He gave a quick nod. ‘We are.’

‘I don’t know any mountaineers.’ But now another memory came to her. ‘I saw a memorial in Leh, in the European cemetery. Nanga Parbat.’ She could bring to mind the name of the mountain, but not that of the dead man.

Bruno supplied it for her. ‘Matthew Forbes. He was a mathematician from Cambridge University, a brilliant young man.’

‘You saw the memorial too?’

‘I visited it, yes. That Nanga Parbat expedition was led by a Swiss named Rainer Stamm, and he was the man whose life was saved on the Eiger by my grandfather. The two of them were close friends from that day on.’

So she and Bruno both had their reasons for visiting the cemetery. The link between them seemed significantly strengthened by this association of history. What with this and the snow, and the altitude-enhanced effects of the cognac, she could almost imagine how she might let her head tip sideways, gently and slowly, until it came to rest on Bruno Becker’s shoulder.

And when she glanced at him she realised, with a faint shock of pleasure as well as a clutch of utter dismay, that he was imagining the same thing.

She levered herself upright and pressed her spine into the cold stone. Bruno shifted his position too.

They were further distracted by the presentation of a vat of mutton stew, the ladle held invitingly above it. Mair hunted for her tin plate and accepted a spoonful, and Bruno did the same. They took a simultaneous taste and Bruno pressed his lips together.

‘You were right.’ Mair giggled.

The rice that accompanied the stew and a pot of dark brown dhal were slightly closer to being edible.

‘We may as well finish this off,’ Bruno remarked, unscrewing the cap of the flask once more. ‘I’ve told you more than enough about my people. Now it’s your turn.’

By now, it seemed easy to do. She began at the first point that came into her head. ‘After my father died, my sister and brother and I decided to sell the old house, the one we grew up in. It was hard to do, but in a way it would have been harder to keep it on. Empty most of the time, just a holiday home, accumulating dust and cobwebs and melancholy. But I can still feel the thread connecting me to the place. It’s taut tonight.’

‘I understand that,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘Go on.’

Mair began to tell him about her last morning at the house. She hadn’t tried to relate this to anyone else: if she had been asked she’d have said there was nothing to tell, not really.



Eirlys and Dylan had both left early. Eirlys went first, her car loaded to the roof and her clipboard and master-list of lists placed next to her on the passenger seat. Dylan held the yard gate open and he and Mair waved to her as she drove away, leaving the home of her childhood as if she had been crossing off another item on her daily to-do list.

When Dylan was ready, he and Mair stood in the yard. She noticed that a thrush’s nest was held in the twigs of the white lilac tree. Dylan took her hand. ‘Don’t be too sad,’ he said.

‘It’s a positive sort of sad,’ she replied. ‘It was a happy place, wasn’t it?’

‘Childhood?’

As they stood there, the yard and the front garden seemed crowded with earlier versions of themselves.

Mair answered her own question: ‘Yes, it was. I didn’t realise it at the time, though.’



This made them both laugh. As a girl Mair had been blind to the charms of rural life.

Dylan kissed her forehead, then he drove away too.

She was glad to have a last hour alone. She walked through the empty rooms, closing the doors behind her. In the kitchen she rescued a trapped bumble bee, scooping it out to safety in her cupped hands. She followed it outside and leant on the stone wall of the garden. She took in the grey shape of the house, the blots of yellow lichen on the slate roof, the way the windows seemed punched into the thick walls and the whole structure hunkered down against the curve of the hill, so long settled into the ground that it had become as immutable as an outcrop of rock.

There was just one more thing to do.

She scrambled over the wall, using the same footholds she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to follow Dylan out into the fields to play. She walked on a diagonal through the soaking grass, away from the hill crest and the lambless grazing flock, and entered a little wood. The bluebells grew here and in that May week they were at their best, all the ground under the leaf canopy hazed with soft colour. Mair picked a small bunch, the stalks giving a familiar milky snap between her fingers and the scent rising around her. She wrapped the cool stems in a tissue from her pocket.

The bunch of bluebells was the last thing she put into her car, placing it on the passenger seat where Eirlys had stationed her clipboard. She sat for a few moments, looking at the house and the hill behind it. Then she drove away, following her sister and brother down the lane.

When she reached the village she stopped at the gate of the graveyard. On the other side of the street Tal Williams was coming out of the newsagent’s. It was his family that had farmed the hills behind the old house for more than a hundred years. He waved his folded paper awkwardly at her, his windburnt face turning redder. Twenty years ago Tal had been Mair’s first kiss.



She waved back, but he didn’t come across the street. He had been at Huw’s funeral, scrubbed up in a black suit and a stiff white shirt, and he would guess what her errand must be today.

She went on through the gate and walked along the path past a yew tree. Beside a tap in the wall she found a glass jam-jar and splayed the bluebells in it. Carefully, so as not to spill any of the water, she carried it across and put it on the mound of her parents’ grave.

Then she sat on a sunny bench, reading the inscriptions on the nearby headstones although she knew them all by heart.



Bruno was a good listener. When she stopped he ducked his head in a quick gesture of appreciation. By this time they had finished as much of their food as they could manage, and their fellow diners were swaddling themselves in ragged quilts and rolling over, ready to sleep.

He said, ‘You could have stayed at home, never left that place – is that what you’re thinking? Perhaps you could have married your farmer and lived happily ever after.’

Mair was amused. ‘No, I could not. He’s not mine and I never wanted him to be. He’s getting married to his long-time girlfriend this year. But still there’s a yearning for what might have been in all of us, don’t you think? There must be times when you think that you could have stayed in the mountains, and taken the cows up to pasture every spring.’ And married Heidi, maybe, instead of being drawn to Karen’s bright flame.

Bruno’s eyes glinted with amusement too. Mair wondered how she had ever thought he was forbidding. ‘I do think that – you’re right. And, like you, I knew I didn’t really want to stay. It wouldn’t have suited me. We like the lives we’ve got, don’t we?’

Mair said yes, because it was true.

‘Anyway, these days, instead of cows, my family’s pastures support several chair lifts and a high-speed gondola. Winter skiing, summer hiking,’ he added casually.



Mair understood that the Beckers were therefore not too concerned about money. ‘Does Karen have a might-have-been home in her heart too?’

Bruno said, ‘Ah, Karen’s a free spirit.’

The men across the room had collapsed into a silent jumble of shrouded heads and crooked knees. It was time to brave the cold before trying to sleep. Bruno upended the flask to check that it really was empty, and Mair clambered to her feet.

The floor tilted unexpectedly and she put out her hand to steady herself. Bruno caught it in his. With his free hand he clicked on his head-torch.

‘Oh dear.’ Mair laughed. ‘Good cognac.’

‘And good company,’ he added.

The force of the blizzard hit them full in the face. The snow in the courtyard had drifted above knee-height and Bruno told her to follow in his footsteps as they battled their way to the opposite corner. The faint yellow cone of torchlight seemed solid with whirling flakes. The door leading to the cell rooms had blown open and a bank of snow was now piled in the freezing stone corridor. Bruno found a shovel in the angle behind the door and he dug furiously to clear a path while Mair directed the light. Working together they managed to force the door shut, and latched it securely with a wooden beam between two iron brackets. Their shadows wobbled on the stone walls.

‘Do you have a torch?’ he asked.

‘In the car,’ she confessed.

‘Take mine for now. We’ll retrieve yours in the morning.’

‘But …’ She stopped. It was obvious that they would be going nowhere tomorrow. She also realised that she didn’t mind all that much. Be careful, she warned herself. Don’t even begin to imagine.

It was the drink affecting her, and the altitude, and the cold, nothing more. Tomorrow she wouldn’t even remember these inappropriate yearnings. She wasn’t a daydreaming schoolgirl, after all.



‘Get some sleep. I hope you won’t be too cold.’

‘Goodnight,’ Mair said firmly.

The torch-beam glimmered on the damp stone wall beside her mattress. She took off the top layer of her clothes but kept everything else on, adding a fleece hat and mittens and a second pair of socks. She crawled under the covers, switched off the torch and closed her eyes, shivering. Immediately an image presented itself, of Karen and Bruno lying together with Lotus between them, the vivid threads of their hair all tangled. She pressed her mittens against her face, obliterating everything except cartwheels of torchlight imprinted in her retinas. She listened to the howling of the wind and eventually, intermittently, she dozed.

She woke to early daylight the colour of lead. All she could see through the tiny window was a patch of featureless grey. Her bones were stiff and her feet and fingers numb. When she tried to move she realised also that she was parched with thirst, and a jagged bolt of pain shot through her head. She stretched out her arm, using extreme care, and found her water-bottle. The contents were frozen solid.

It didn’t take long to dress. The courtyard was furrowed with paths dug through the night’s snowdrifts. The wind had dropped and in its place there was a blanketing fog, out of which spiralled a few lazy snowflakes. Still moving carefully, Mair plodded through the muffled chill. The kitchen seemed crowded but the figures hunched on the mattresses resolved themselves into the Beckers and last night’s drivers, restored once more to sitting positions. Bruno was talking to their own driver, who was gesticulating with his purple mobile phone. Decals glinted all over it. Everyone was grim-faced, except Lotus and Karen, who beamed identically at her.

‘Hi, I’m real sorry about last night. I was just laid out. I guess Bruno looked after you,’ Karen called. She was pale, but otherwise her usual self.

Mair nodded. All she could think of was finding some water to drink. There was a plastic jug standing on a crate next to the bathroom, and even though she knew this was only filtered, not boiled, she jettisoned all her careful hygiene principles and swallowed two full mugs, straight off.

Lotus was turning the pages of a picture book and telling herself the story in a low voice. Ringlets of pale hair spilt from under her hat and whenever the two indifferent cooks looked her way they smiled at her in spite of themselves.

Mair was hunched over a bowl of warm rice porridge by the time Bruno finished his conference with the driver. He included her in his terse relaying of the latest news.

‘Gulam has just spoken to a friend of his down in Kargil. The roads are blocked but the army and the Border Roads crews are working to clear the route in both directions.’

‘So what does that actually mean?’ Karen sighed.

‘It means we wait it out. At least we’re safe here, and sheltered. There are some trucks and cars stranded, Gulam says. They’ll want to find those people.’

‘Have some porridge, honey.’ Karen passed Bruno a tin bowl.

‘I just wish I’d bought a Jammu and Kashmir mobile,’ he fretted. ‘Or a satphone.’ He turned his BlackBerry over and frowned at the sleek, dead screen. Mair understood his anxiety. The absolute isolation of this place struck her afresh. They were dependent on Gulam’s mobile for as long as its battery lasted, unless there was any power supply in Lamayuru with which to charge it. And without that fragile link, they were entirely cut off from the outside world.

‘How long does Gulam think it will take to clear the roads?’ Karen persisted.

‘Unless there’s a freak heatwave, it could be several days.’

‘Really? That long?’ Karen turned to Mair, collecting up her mass of hair as she did so and twisting it into a knot. ‘I hope you’ve got a good book to read,’ she said. ‘Or you could come with me up to the monastery. The wall paintings are magnificent.’

A silence fell. Lotus found her doll among the damp clothing strewn on the mattress. She began crooning to her in French, her small voice rising into the cold air.



Bruno said that he would go with Gulam and retrieve the rest of their luggage from the Toyota. It would mean digging the car out of the snow, he warned them, so it might take some time. Karen immediately jumped to her feet and Lotus scrambled up too.

‘We’ll come. We can have a walk in the snow.’

‘Make a snowman,’ Lotus gurgled. ‘Oui, Pappy?’

Bruno said shortly that this wasn’t the park in Geneva.

‘Hey, don’t be so crabby,’ Karen rebuked him.

She wasn’t going to be dissuaded. She wanted fresh air and exercise, she insisted – in fact, they all needed some if they were to be cooped up in this place for the rest of the day. She swung round to Mair. ‘You’ll come too, won’t you?’

Mair reckoned that a blast of cold fresh air might help her hangover.

In the end, Bruno agreed that they would all go. Armed with shovels borrowed from the guesthouse they set out into the cavernous mist. Gulam led the way and each step forwards took him deeper into the murk.

The cold was raw and insistent. Keeping close to the wall, they sidestepped in a series of footprints that descended from the ledge. Lotus grasped her mother’s hand. She slipped once, her feet skidding from under her, but Karen swung her upright.

‘Again,’ Lotus chirped, launching herself off the next step. Her pink face shone and she seemed enviably unaffected by the cold.

It was a long descent. A monk came climbing past them, his top half wrapped in an anorak and the hem of his robe soaked and dragging. His shaved head was covered with a bobble hat. An old woman followed, bent under a bundle of firewood almost as big as herself.

Life at Lamayuru would go on, as it always had done, in conditions much worse than today’s.

They came to the foot of the steps and reached a steep section of road that curled round the hill. Mair recognised none of this, but Gulam knew the way even in the disorientating mist. Gingerly they edged their way downwards to a point where the road widened and flattened. With every contour gentled by snow and the mist, a line of tumbledown sheds and a broken cart loomed with the eerie beauty of a winter still-life. Animal pawprints tracked the whiteness here and there. They rounded another corner, and in front of them appeared the mounds of several abandoned vehicles. The snow had been heavily trampled all round them and soiled heaps clogged the road margins where some of the cars had already been partly excavated. Beside the rear door of one were more animal prints and a dismembered bag of rubbish. Shreds of plastic and gnawed vegetable peelings stuck out of the dug-over snow.

The Toyota was the furthest along the line of cars, still a pristine humped dome. Bruno and Gulam swung their shovels at it.

Mair stopped to catch her breath. Something made her glance upwards just as a single gust of wind tore a hole in the mist. Far above, so high up that she had to tilt her head backwards to see them, a cluster of a dozen squat white domes topped with fantastic spirals of black and gold appeared to float in the sky. Ragged flags danced between the pinnacles before vanishing into streams of vapour. It was like a glimpse of another world, and even as she stared at it the mist closed everything out again.

The clink of shovels carried to her, and she could hear voices shouting directions from somewhere below. A generator started up, coughed, and settled into a steady thrum. She stamped her feet and swung her arms to get the blood circulating, but a sense of detachment persisted. She felt that she was standing apart, watching the day unravelling and winding out of her grasp.

The next moments would remain in her memory for ever.

Karen seized a double handful of sticky snow. She compacted it with slaps of her mittened hands, then rolled it on the ground to make the beginnings of a snowman. Lotus scrambled in the churned snow at her mother’s feet, and behind them Bruno twisted and stretched with a loaded shovel. Mair’s visual memory of him was as a black query-shape printed on blankness. Lotus was darting towards her now, a shining grin showing her small teeth, her button nose runny and her hands lifted in the air.

‘Make a jump, My,’ she called. ‘Jump!’

Mair glanced over her left shoulder. There was enough space, and the snow had been trampled in a rough circle. She gathered her muscles in readiness and took in a breath.

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed an oncoming shadow. It slid from beneath one of the cars and flattened itself among the rubbish. But she was already in the air, the cars and the snow and the blank sky and the shadow itself revolving round her as she executed her back flip. She landed, and heard Lotus’s cry of delight.

As she regained her balance the shadow swept in front of her.

It sprang from the ground, straight at Lotus.

The child’s cry mutated from delight to a scream of terror, and then there was abrupt silence as she fell to the ground.

The brindled dog straddled the small body, jaws wide to bite, its body shivering and jerking.

Karen screamed and plunged forwards, but it was Bruno who reached the fallen child first. He kicked the dog in the head with such force that it was flung backwards into the air, a rope of saliva twisting from its jaw. Even before it landed Gulam was smashing at its skull with his shovel. The creature snarled and made to attack again, but one more shovel blow sent it skidding through the debris before it vanished into the mist.

Bruno snatched Lotus up and held her in his arms.

Her face was ice-blue and white, her mouth was stretched open but no sound emerged from it and her eyes made huge shocked circles. In the middle of one cheek was the dog’s bite. From the margins of torn skin the blood was beginning to spring, pinpricks of shocking crimson in the colourless world. Her hat had come off and her hair fell in pale threads over her father’s shoulder.

Doors opened and people emerged. Where there had been emptiness there were faces and pointing fingers and a clamour of voices.

Bruno was already running. His legs pumped as he raced through the snow, past the staring people, plunging up the steps the way they had come. Karen flung herself after him. Mair snatched up Lotus’s fallen hat and clenched her fist on the ball of soft wool. She ran too, hearing Gulam panting beside her and – a long way ahead now – the shiver of Lotus’s voice rising in the first thin wail of shock and pain.

Bruno had reached the steps and instantly the mist swallowed him up. Mair had never seen anyone move so fast. She ploughed in his wake, her heart thumping and her breath coming in irregular gulps. Over the rushing of blood in her ears she could hear Lotus’s faint cries. At last she came to the top of the steps and the snow-shrouded guesthouse took shape just ten yards away. On collapsing legs she raced across the courtyard with Karen and Gulam at her heels.

In the kitchen a circle of faces gazed down. Bruno had laid Lotus on the nearest mattress. He knelt beside her and battled to keep her still as she writhed and screamed. He poured a trickle of water into the bite, trying to bathe it clean.

Over his shoulder he ordered them, ‘Get more water. Soapy water.’

Karen frantically grabbed the arm of one of the cooks. Mair caught sight of Gulam’s face as he rattled off a sequence of commands. He looked terrified.

Lotus moaned, ‘Mama,’ as Karen knelt beside her husband. She reached out her hand and stroked back Lotus’s wet hair, murmuring softly, ‘It’s okay, baby. You’ll be all right, everything is all right, Mama’s here.’

A basin of water was fumbled through the circle of spectators, and a hand held out the bathroom cake of soap.

‘A clean cloth,’ Bruno demanded. Karen stared wildly round the kitchen. There wasn’t a shred of anything clean in this house, and their bags were still in the Toyota. Mair quickly peeled off her coat and her fleece. One of her intermediate layers was a fine cotton shirt, put on in Leh yesterday morning. Only yesterday? She stripped it off and, with a strength that surprised her, tore it into rags. Bruno soaked the first, lathered it and went on washing the bite while Karen held the child. Mair prepared another strip of cloth with soap and water.

Bruno raised his head to glance at his wife. ‘She hasn’t had any shots,’ he said.

Karen’s body stiffened. ‘What shots?’

He whispered, out of a mouth that was distorted with anguish, ‘You know what shots I mean.’

Mair knew, but she had tried to stop herself thinking it. When she dared to look at her again Karen had aged, and her beauty had tipped into gauntness. Clumsily she wagged her head from side to side, trying to hold back the tide of horrified recognition.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘No, that can’t happen.’

‘Will you take over?’ Bruno said to Mair. He gave her the cloth and indicated the bowl of water. ‘Keep on rinsing. Just keep at it.’

Silently she took his place. Lotus’s shock seemed to be subsiding. She cried more normally now, as rage and pain flooded up in its place, clenching her fists and drumming her feet on the mattress.

Bruno gripped Gulam by the shoulder. His knuckles showed white. ‘I need your mobile,’ he said.



After that, Mair’s memories spooled away into darkness.

She remembered hours of Bruno talking, shouting, or abjectly pleading into the borrowed phone. His face was etched with deep lines and there were navy-blue shadows under his eyes.

When the battery went flat, she left Bruno and Karen with the child and scrambled in Gulam’s wake, through the mist-thickened lanes, to locate the generator she had heard earlier. It had gone off for lack of fuel, but with their growing retinue of interested villagers they were directed upwards to the monastery. A monk met them, listened to what they wanted, nodded with an impassive face. Freighted with sick desperation, minutes crawled into hours. Another phone was found. Frustration burnt like acid in Mair. She could see too clearly what Bruno and Karen were suffering.

The phone connections were fragile. Bruno would get through to someone, a doctor or a consular official, or an officer at an Indian Army medical base, and then the signal would break up and he would have to start all over again.

The information was meagre, and it changed with every call. There was rabies vaccine in Kargil. Or else it was available in Srinagar. Or there was none in the entire state, only in Delhi, and the doses Lotus needed would have to be flown up. There was a break coming in the weather. An army helicopter could fly to collect the Beckers, maybe tomorrow. The mist was going to cling for at least a week: no flights could take off. The roads would definitely open again soon; they would stay closed until the spring.

After each reversal Bruno pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, as if this might obliterate what he dreaded seeing, then grimly resumed the pursuit. Once they had been alerted, his family and Karen’s began doing everything they could from Europe and America, but they couldn’t relay even what they were able to orchestrate from so far away.

With Lotus in her lap, Karen watched the negotiations out of clouded eyes. Her thin body was tense as a wire.

They all waited in the kitchen, the squalor of it rancidly familiar.

At the end of that first terrible day, there was a clamour in the courtyard. Gulam summoned Bruno outside to see. The dog had been found, and the villagers had circled it and then stoned it to death. Its body was tied up in a sack and deposited in an outhouse. If a way of escaping from Lamayuru ever came, a sample of the dog’s brain tissue would be taken for veterinary analysis. In a low voice Gulam told Mair that he didn’t doubt what would be found. He had seen this before. A nun had died of rabies here last year. When she sickened she had begged to be taken to hospital, but there was nowhere within reach.

‘Many wild dogs now.’ He shook his head and then sadly shrugged. ‘We try to kill, but …’

Mair remembered reading somewhere that the modern veterinary drugs given to livestock poisoned the vultures that had always cleaned up the carcasses of dead animals. With the near-extinction of vulture species, and the abundance of carrion, there had been an explosion in the numbers of feral dogs. And with the dogs came disease. This was what happened.

Acceptance of circumstances and the belief that what would ensue was inevitable was Buddhist, she supposed. Her own response was the opposite. Whatever could be done must be done, and everything beyond that should be attempted. But she fought to suppress all her own urgencies, even a flicker of feeling, beyond what would be immediately helpful to Karen Becker.

Performing grotesque contortions, time alternately crawled and galloped into the second day.

And then the third.

‘When?’ Bruno pleaded yet again into the phone. ‘How long?’

Lotus wore a bright white square of antiseptic dressing taped to her face, but otherwise seemed herself again. She was bored by the enforced confinement, and all three of them did their best to distract and amuse her. Mair saw the separate tenderness that her parents poured on their child, but with each other Bruno and Karen were minutely considerate, and distant. Every exchange about what was to be done, what might happen in the next hour or the following day, was too freighted with importance for them to admit their dread. The fluid intimacy she had envied, long ago in the bazaar in Leh, had solidified into a sheet of clear glass. The two of them moved alongside each other, but not together. Mair couldn’t even imagine what their nights must be like.



On the third day of imprisonment, Karen wanted to take Lotus up to the monastery to be blessed by the lama.

‘No,’ Bruno said. His weary face tightened.

‘I want to.’

Bruno turned his head. ‘Mair, would you take Lotus outside for a minute?’

She grasped the child’s hand and they went out into the courtyard. Filaments of mist twisted over the rough roofs. The sky was nowhere; the world was thick and grey. Lotus was fretful and hung off Mair’s hand, refusing to walk another step. Karen came out to join them. Her white face was tinged with grey.

‘C’mon, Lo, back to Pappy. Wait for me, Mair?’

When she emerged once more, she begged Mair to come up to the monastery with her.

‘My husband,’ she began precisely, ‘won’t let our child be blessed. He calls what I believe in mumbo-jumbo.’

Mair remembered the praying.

Inside the inner door of the prayer room, Karen fell to her knees. In smoky lamplight, the rows of monks sat cross-legged in front of their bound texts. Their mumbled chanting was without beginning or end, rising and falling, under the ancient dim wall paintings of pot-bellied gods and beasts and the blank eyes of golden statues. The beams of this hall, at the heart of the monastery, were hung with dozens of mask-faces but all were swathed in blackened muslin because they were too terrible to behold.

Staring straight ahead of her, Karen was weeping. Tears ran down her face and she mouthed a prayer.

Mair cried too, out of impotence.



On the fifth day, the mist broke up. A filmy layer obscured the sky for another hour, and then a tentative blueness appeared.

Bruno rasped hoarsely into the mobile phone and at last he lifted his head. ‘A helicopter’s coming. We’ve got to get her down closer to the river where they can land it.’



Lotus was hastily bundled up and her father lifted her in his arms. A procession wound down the steps from Lamayuru village to the appointed place. At last, against the hazy blue, a black dot appeared. Mair pressed a scrap of paper with her email address scribbled on it into Karen’s fist. ‘Please. Let me know.’

‘I will.’

Bruno’s eyes were fixed on the sky. The Indian Army helicopter briefly landed, the Beckers ran beneath the rotors, the doors closed on them and they were lifted away.

Mair waited in Lamayuru for another four days, until the Kargil road was cleared for traffic. Then she and Gulam made the long day’s drive over the pass, through Kargil and onwards to Srinagar.