The Kashmir Shawl

EIGHT


Solomon and Sheba was close-moored in a line of other houseboats, in a narrow isthmus of the lake opposite the row of hideous Chinese-designed blue glass hotels that lined the Bund. Tonight this section of the city was suffering one of its regular power failures, so the drumming of dozens of generators competed with the traffic. Headlights swept rhythmically over the dim-lit frontages of shops and cafés.

Mair’s shikara slid towards the houseboat through a thick tangle of stiff lotus-flower heads that poked up like fists out of the black water. It had been a long and chilly trip up the lake from the Shalimar Garden and she pushed aside the musty blanket with relief as she prepared to disembark.

The boatman paddled to the steps at the lakeside. Solomon and Sheba listed noticeably and the timbers of the old structure were unpainted and splintery, but even so it was in a better condition than many of its neighbours. Some of them – still inhabited – had decayed to the point at which they were little more than loose bundles of planking and lopsided poles festooned with tattered curtains.

Farooq, the baroquely obstructive manager of the houseboat, appeared in the veranda doorway and helped her aboard. ‘At last, madam. I’m thinking you have left Srinagar. Dinner ready for you.’



Farooq liked to serve the evening meal early and then retire to the kitchen boat. Mair didn’t have the energy to protest that it was only six o’clock.

While she ate her curry and dhal she tried to concentrate on her book, but she found herself staring at the dingy tablecloth instead and thinking about the Beckers.

She had checked her emails at least once every day, but there was no news of Lotus. No word from Karen at all.

Farooq came to clear the table and she wandered into her bedroom. The generator only powered a single feeble overhead light, yet somehow the three young Indian couples occupying the next-door boat were managing to amplify their Bollywood film music beyond distortion point.

Images of the snow at Lamayuru filled Mair’s head, and of the little girl in her father’s arms as the army helicopter descended from the sky.

She decided that she couldn’t sit alone in the houseboat for yet another evening.

She put on a warm jacket, arranged the toffee-brown shawl from Leh to cover her hair and slipped the photograph of her grandmother with her two mysterious friends into her inside pocket. From the veranda she beckoned vigorously to one of the row of shikara men waiting opposite; he came and ferried her across the narrow neck of water. There was a business centre, little used, in one of the blue-glass hotels and at least she could order a glass of wine. There was no alcohol aboard Solomon and Sheba. It wasn’t a hedonistic retreat.

There was no message from Karen.

Mair quickly read through the handful of new emails.

Hattie had written in reply to one of hers:

You sound sad, intrepid one. If you aren’t enjoying your self any more, why not come on home? I want to see you! Try not to worry about the little girl. There’s nothing you can do, and no news is probably good news. Miss you xxxxx



Try not to worry was much easier said than done. But Mair had no intention of turning for home just because she felt momentarily displaced, and because of her fears for Bruno and his family. Tomorrow she would renew her investigation of the shawl’s history.

She wrote back cheerfully to Hattie, then went and sat in the bar, a deserted space manned by an old waiter in a maroon jacket. With her second glass of wine, she ordered a plate of chips. They came with a plastic tub of ketchup and she dipped each pallid, salty chip into the tub as she ate, studying the printout photograph of three women that she had propped against the water jug.

The laughing faces shone out at her.

Framing them was the diagonal of carved wood, and still water patched with lily-pads. It was little enough to go on but now she had seen the lake and the houseboats for herself she was convinced that this must be the backdrop.

Her grandmother had been in Srinagar.

The unknown story teased her imagination again, momentarily displacing her anxiety for the Beckers. Mair ate the last of her chips, which were now cold and greasy. She wiped her fingers and slipped the photograph back into her pocket. The envelope containing the lock of silky brown hair was there too.

Tomorrow, she thought.

The street outside was still only minimally lit and the lake beyond was a black expanse with the looming hulks of houseboats. Mair was looking towards the jetty and the handful of boatmen, one of whom crouched beside a spirit stove burning with a coronet of yellow-blue flame. She was peripherally aware of a group of armed Indian Border Security Force paramilitary troopers lounging at the tail of their parked Gipsy pickup, of the traffic having eased, and of the crowds of pedestrian passers-by being mostly men in their long grey or brown shirts topped off with woollen jerkins.

There was a flash of light and the street exploded.

In the millisecond that followed, her retinas burnt by the white blaze, Mair was conscious of silence in which debris showered through the air, the shock of the detonation that pierced her bones, and then a blast that blew her backwards against a shop wall. She was pinned there for an instant before sliding to a sitting position as her legs gave way beneath her. Grit pattered on her shawled head, and she drew up her knees and arms to protect herself.

She had no idea how long she hunched there, hearing her own rasping breath as the debris stopped falling out of the sky, and screams began to rip through the night.

She was just lifting her head as another explosion came, a sickening whump as the BSF Gipsy burst into flame. She heard rather than saw fire engulf it as people came running by, flying in both directions. There was a close-quarters rat-tat that Mair had never in her life heard outside a cinema but that she knew was real gunfire. Bullets were zipping through the gravel. She buried her head again, hearing her own whimper of abject terror as a tiny addendum to the shrieks of pain and confused shouting that now filled the street.

A police van skidded down the road in front of her. Against the blazing shell of the Gipsy she saw that all the passers-by had melted into the shelter of shops and hotels, except for two huddled shapes lying prone in the dirt and a cluster of people bent over them. One pair of bloodstained legs wore the khaki of the BSF troopers. An elderly man with a delta of blood covering his face was being helped away by two others.

She realised that the brief bout of shooting was over. Uniformed men eddied between her and the injured.

Mair looked in the other direction and saw that the door of the hotel from which she had emerged only seconds ago was held open. A uniformed bellboy jerkily beckoned to her.

She raised herself on to her hands and knees, straightened up and began running towards him. Whorls of light from the explosion’s flash still revolved in the backs of her eyes, making it hard to move in a straight line. The bellboy grasped her wrist and propelled her into the lobby. It was quiet and warm inside, with two or three people standing beside a desk, the receptionist urgently murmuring on the telephone, the same vase of gladioli that she had noticed earlier on her way from the computer terminal in the business centre.

It was hard to believe that the scene she had just witnessed lay only a few yards away.

‘Where you stay, madam?’ the bellboy asked.

Mair told him.

‘You go back soon, soon. Maybe wait here a little while.’

Obediently she crossed to a group of chairs and sat down. Her hands were shaking and the echo of gunfire still popped in her ears. After a few minutes she ordered tea, and drank it while police and army vehicles trundled past the glass door. A thin trickle of pedestrians started up again and, as if to emphasise the rapid return to business, the power came back on. Everything was illuminated, even a yellow and blue neon cola sign that flashed its reflection into the lake. The noise of generators died away, leaving only the buzz of traffic.

Mair called over a waiter and paid for her tea. She shook some of the dust and grit out of her shawl and wrapped it round her head again. Then she walked back into the night. The first person she saw, standing on the jetty, was Farooq. He had come out to look for her.

The Gipsy was now a blackened shell with smoke curling from its melted interior. The injured had been removed, leaving only a dark sticky patch in the dirt. A barrier of white tapes had been strung around the area and a trio of police, weapons clearly on show, guarded the perimeter. Apart from a row of broken windows, some shop walls blackened with smoke and a noticeable thinning of the evening traffic, there was little else to show what had just happened.

Mair crossed to Farooq’s side of the road. He waved at her with relief. ‘You are not hurt, madam, inshallah?’

‘No, I’m all right. What about the soldier, and the others? Was it a bomb?’

He folded his hands and bowed in the direction of a waiting shikara. As they were paddled away from the jetty she asked the question again.

Farooq spoke briefly to the boatman. ‘I hear it was maybe a grenade, madam. Some soldiers and some people of town were injured. It is very bad for Srinagar.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly.



In the morning, sitting on the veranda of Solomon and Sheba in the eggshell light of a crisp autumn day, she read the report in the English-language newspaper. Bollywood tunes and chatter were drifting from next door and Farooq’s white-capped head bobbed at the rear of the kitchen boat. Last evening, she read, five civilians and two BSF troopers had been injured in a grenade attack on a BSF patrol vehicle in the centre of town. The senior superintendent of police, the report continued, stated that a militant of the Hizbul Mujahideen had also been seriously wounded in the subsequent exchange of fire.

The story was told in the barest outline and occupied only the top quarter of the front page, next to the pictures of an outbreak of fire at an hotel in another part of the city. There was no further coverage inside the paper. Mair knew that outbreaks of violence between insurgents and the Indian security forces were so frequent that they caused only a temporary stir, at least for outside observers. The lack of public attention given to them by the authorities was certainly deliberate.

A shikara was working its way down the line of houseboats, most of which were empty of guests. It was the flower vendor known – from the painted-tin sign above the canopy of his boat – as Mr Marvellous. He fastened a line at the steps of Solomon and Sheba and stood up, rising out of a gaudy sea of cut flowers, his arms full of scarlet, crimson and orange blooms. His smile beamed out at full wattage. ‘Madam, for you today very good fortune. Please take all these, just three hundred rupees. Not many customers for me.’

Mair didn’t even try to bargain. She reached out for the double armful and buried her face in the cool, dewy petals. Marvellous paddled away before she could change her mind, and Farooq tutted at such conspicuous over-payment.

‘They are so beautiful,’ she said.

Something had happened. Until last night Srinagar and its people had seemed sealed away, unfathomable for all the showy beauty of the lakes and mountains. Then she had seen the faces in the street last night, and the way people had got up afterwards and gone on with their lives despite the violence that boiled up around them, and she had begun to interpret the place in a different way. Srinagar was battered, impoverished, decaying into its own arterial waterways, but it was proud. A seed of affection sprouted inside her, fertilised by admiration.

Farooq sidled past, armed with a rag and a tin of polish. He worked with swipes over the table. ‘Perhaps, madam, you will be going back to England now.’ He eyed her, not wanting to lose his only guest, wishing at the same time to be rid of her anomalous presence.

‘No,’ Mair said lightly. ‘Not just yet.’

Later, in the fourth shop she visited in the neighbourhood of the Bund, the middle-aged shopkeeper took her grandmother’s shawl out of her hands. He walked to the window of his shop, screwed a lens into his eye and examined the workmanship. By now, she was used to this procedure. While she waited Mair looked at the display of expensive modern pashminas in tasteful tourist-friendly colours, the highest-priced ones with pleasingly contrasted bands of hand-embroidered paisley design. She remembered the flocks of goats on the sleet-raked Changthang plain, and the processing plant in Leh. This shop on the Bund in Srinagar represented the heart of the final stage of the yarn’s journey, although sadly it lacked one essential presence.

There were no customers to purchase the lovely goods.

In each of the four shops, she had been the sole browser. She could only hope that somewhere along the links that radiated from here, in the boutiques of five-star hotels elsewhere in India or the expensive shops of Fifth Avenue and Bond Street, there would be plenty of interested women with money to spend.

At the rear of the shop a bead curtain shivered, even though there was no draught. Mair was being watched, probably by the female members of the shopkeeper’s staff or family.

The man returned to the counter. ‘Very worn condition.’ He sighed inevitably, dropping his lens into a drawer and closing it with a sharp click. He rearranged the shawl folds to expose the yellow stain, and picked at the tiny frayed ends of silk-stitched blossoms. The limpid colours of leaves and flowers revealed themselves as exactly true to nature, now that Mair had seen them in their proper setting. She smiled at the man. It was evident from the most casual glance at her heirloom, alongside the modern versions, that it was an exquisite piece of work. As if she had ever thought otherwise.

‘What can you tell me about it?’

The man shrugged. He pointed to the tiny reversed BB signature and the accompanying symbols. ‘Seventy years date. It is right in time, but this, this sign, is from very small workshop of finest quality. Finished since long ago. Kani work, yes. To stitch on top, for effect like this, I have seen only once before. Your shawl is nice, you see, but it is copied from real makers. If not, it would be for museum.’ He paused, to let his verdict sink in. ‘A pity. But I will give you fair price, if you like to sell.’

Mair smiled again. The beads at the back of the shop faintly tinkled in the incense-rich air. ‘Thank you. I will keep it.’

‘Maybe you look at new shawls. Presents for your friends, you know. Christmas comes soon.’

He was a Kashmiri salesman like every other, already spreading armfuls of merchandise over his counter.

‘Maybe next time.’

She had walked a hundred yards along the street, thinking about where she might go to drink tea and eat lunchtime yoghurt when a hand pulled at her sleeve. She whirled round, tightening her grasp on the bag that contained her shawl, to see an old woman, her face covered with a white scarf.

‘What is it? What do you want?’ Mair blurted, pointlessly in English. The only answer was a scrap of paper that was shoved into her hand before the woman turned and hurried away into the crowd. Mair unscrewed the paper and looked at what was clearly an address.



The place hadn’t been easy to find. It was buried in the alleyways of the old town and she had asked a dozen different people for directions, gesturing and signing vigorously all the way. She had walked or been led through refuse-clogged yards where hens clucked between sagging huts, past the open-fronted workshops of dyers and tanners, past windows that gave glimpses of women squatting at carpet looms, and the shanty-shops that sold rice and dried beans from rows of open-mouthed sacks. At every corner there was a thread of waterway, viscid black or blanketed with green weed. But now she was at her destination. A toothless old man sitting in a broken plastic chair in the middle of an alley waved her to an open doorway.

Mair tapped on the doorpost as she peered into a dim passageway. ‘Hello?’ she called. And then repeated, louder, ‘Hello?’

A pair of tracksuited legs appeared at the top of a flight of stairs. A voice asked, ‘Excuse me? What do you look for?’

Mair didn’t wait for an invitation. Walking in and starting up the stairs, she saw a young man in a Nike hooded top. He would have passed unnoticed in the high street back at home, even with his black beard and skullcap. ‘I’m not sure. I was given this address, and I wanted to show this to somebody …’ She extricated the shawl from her bag as she spoke and held it up like a backstage pass. The young man didn’t exactly bar her way, but he didn’t stand aside either. ‘I was led to believe that someone here might recognise my shawl,’ she said, raising her voice.

From the room at the top of the stairs a voice called something and the hoodie youth answered over his shoulder. Mair reached his side and slid past him, smiling politely as she did so. She looked into a room that was empty of furniture but full of men, seated cross-legged against the four walls. It was cold in there with the tall windows on two sides standing wide open.

Everyone looked up at her. There were ripples of soft wool covering every lap. They had all been sewing. ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured.

‘May I help you?’ At the far end of the room, a man stood up. He seemed a little older than most of the others, maybe in his mid-twenties. ‘Are you here to buy shawl?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ She explained that she had been sent here, and named the fourth shop in the Bund. The old woman who had given her the address must have been watching and listening from behind the bead curtain. Most of the men bent their heads to their stitching again. One wasn’t sewing, she noticed, but his cupped palm was thickly blackened with dye. The only sound was a rhythmic slapping of flesh as he pumped a block into the dye and worked the black print border design on a delicate pink pashmina length.

‘Would you like to come with me?’ the foreman softly asked.

Mair followed him into a windowless office backing the workshop. There was a neon overhead strip, harsh after the natural light suffusing the other room. The only furniture was a cheap laminate desk and two chairs.

‘I am the karkhanadar,’ he said, in the same soft voice. The workshop chief. ‘My name is Mehraan.’

‘How do you do?’ By this time, Mair knew better than to offer her hand to a Muslim male. She spread out the shawl instead, covering the desk top with glory.

Mehraan had no lens. He took up a fold of fabric and gently stroked it. A minute passed in silence, then another. At last he looked at her. ‘I recognise the work.’ His English was good.

‘Please tell me about it,’ she begged.

The man’s liquid stare was intelligent, curious, and without a hint of prejudice or hostility. Mair was suddenly convinced that here at last was someone she could talk to. She said, ‘I don’t want to sell it, or find out what it’s worth, nothing like that. But I’ve come all the way to Srinagar to trace its history. It belonged to my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and I think she was here in the city maybe seventy years ago. That’s all I know.’

Mehraan nodded. It was obviously his way to consider his words before he spoke. ‘It is a beautiful thing. The maker was in the same village as my grandfather.’

Mair’s face broke into a wide smile. Through the open windows came the first cry of the muezzin, taken up across the old town.

‘Excuse me. I have to go to pray,’ he said.

‘Wait. Please, you can help me. The shawl meant a lot to my grandmother, I know that. I’ve followed the story from Changthang to Leh, and on to here. I’m sure you can tell me more.’

Mehraan hesitated. ‘You can wait here if you wish. I will not be long.’

He turned and followed the troop of karkhana workers down the stairs. They slid their bare feet into the row of plastic flip-flops and muddy trainers ranged by the door. Mair sat listening to the muffled sounds of hooting and dung-heap cocks crowing. Once she got up and looked into the workroom. The shawls lay on the matting in pools of colour, the tiny leaves and petals taking shape in minute stitches of silk.

Within half an hour, the men filed back. The youngest of them couldn’t have been fifteen. He ought to be out playing football, she thought. He shot a look at Mair before he bowed his head once more, and she noticed that his eyes were sore and reddened from the close work.

‘Come,’ Mehraan said to her. ‘We will drink tea for ten minutes.’

He led the way to a corner dhaba, a workers’ place with plastic tables and chairs that was steamy with hot food and crowded after prayers. He exchanged greetings with half a dozen other young men as he passed to the back of the room, and sat down at a table next to the wall. A picture of the Hajj, its shiny surface rippled with heat, hung above them. A waiter brought cups and poured tea from a metal pot.

‘Where are you from?’

‘England.’

He regarded her over the rim of his cup. ‘Why are you in Srinagar?’

‘As I said, to follow my grandmother. She was married to a missionary, and they worked here in Kashmir during the Second World War. I never knew her, though. She died before I was born. Is your grandfather still alive?’

‘No, nor my father. I have my mother and two younger sisters in my family, that is all.’

‘That’s a lot of responsibility for you.’

Mehraan acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Tell me, you make this journey just to see some goats and a workshop for embroidery? It is unusual.’

‘Is it?’

‘Most people are concerned with today, and with wishing for better tomorrow.’

At first sight Mair had recognised in Mehraan someone she could talk to. There was no point in making a connection like this and then not talking. So she told him about her father’s death and the uncovering of the shawl on the last night in the old house. She explained that her sister and brother were married and had young families, but she was single and free to make the journey. ‘On behalf of all of us,’ she concluded, as if to legitimise what he might consider a self-indulgent as well as an eccentric undertaking.

‘I see,’ he said. He placed his empty cup neatly on the table.

Mair knew that he didn’t completely accept her explanation. She said, ‘I needed a quest. All the obvious signposts in my life were pointing down roads leading to places where I didn’t particularly want to go, so I chose a footpath. If I’ve learnt anything from following it, in the last month, it’s how much I love the place where I grew up. And how much I value my family. I never did while I was there.’

Now Mehraan smiled. It was the first time he had done so. ‘That is good. You are here in Kashmir alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are not a journalist?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And you are unfortunately also not wholesale buyer of fine Kashmir pashmina to stock your shop in London?’

‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘That is a shame for me.’

They both laughed. He looked at the clock on the wall above the Hajj picture. ‘I must go back.’

The bag with her shawl in it lay in Mair’s lap. ‘When will you tell me about your grandfather?’

‘I can meet you tomorrow. I take a few minutes to eat, before afternoon prayers.’

‘Here?’

‘Of course.’ He stood up to go.

She asked, ‘Do those young men I saw enjoy their work?’

‘It is work at least. But do you not think they would rather be teachers, or doctors, or even work in a bank? Today there is nothing for them in Kashmir. Nothing.’

Thoughtfully, Mair watched his retreating back.



The next day, she was sitting in the same seat when he reappeared.

‘Have you eaten some food?’ he asked. A tin plate of chopped onion and sliced limes was placed between them, sprinkled with green chillies.

‘Not yet. If you order for both of us, I would like to pay for it.’

He looked as if he might object to this, but he ordered rapidly from one of the men who raced up and down between the tables with steaming plates. ‘And so, what would you like to know?’



Many things, Mair had realised overnight. She wanted to know about his life, as much as his grandfather’s. She had read in the newspapers about the stone-throwers, groups of militant young men who believed in free Kashmir. They collected rocks and gathered in mobs to pelt the security forces. When the police and army retaliated, sometimes a boy was killed. Riots in protest at a death had led to curfews, increased police and military pressure, a period of uneasy calm, and then the cycle would begin again. How did a man like Mehraan interpret the violence?

Mair began carefully, ‘Why is there nothing for your embroidery workers in Kashmir?’

‘No money, no jobs, no investment, no prospect. That is nothing.’

‘Do you support azadi?’ Freedom, independence.

This time Mehraan’s laugh was bitter. ‘Freedom, for a poor man, is an idea only. But, no, I do not myself believe that Kashmir can be independent. It is a matter of economics.’

‘Or joined to Pakistan, then?’

‘Maybe, after Partition, that could have been a solution. The maharajah, Nehru, your Viceroy of India, they made a different decision. But now, today …’ Mehraan shrugged and blew out his lips. ‘Pakistan has problems enough. Why do you wish to talk about our troubles?’

‘Because I’m here. I was out on the Bund the night before last and I saw the grenade attack. Or perhaps I should just be taking photographs of the lakes and shopping for carpets.’

‘That would be to be a tourist, yes. A person like you, ma’am …’

‘Mair.’

‘Yes. Naturally you wish to look further than shops. But the difficulties of Kashmir are here for a long time, and they are not easy to understand. I am not even sure myself what I believe. Except in God, and his Prophet, peace be upon him. Of course it is not right to throw stones or worse things at police and soldiers, but young men are angry, and to be without power in our own country makes more anger. On the whole, what you are already doing is wise – I mean, that is to concentrate your attention on your own history. And on shawls.’

Mair looked at her plate. There was a hot, fragrant naan glistening with melted butter and chopped fresh herbs, a dome of rice and a metal pan of vegetable curry. Mehraan wadded a chunk of bread in his right hand and deftly scooped up the thick sauce. She knew that, like Farooq, he was advising her to be careful for her own sake.

‘History, then,’ she repeated. ‘And your grandfather. Tell me about him.’

Mehraan’s sombre face brightened. His teeth looked very white within his dense black beard. ‘In those days, before Partition, Kashmir was a different country. In Srinagar, out in the villages also, we were Muslims, Sikhs, Hindu, Buddhist, all together. There was of course trouble sometimes, neighbours and disputes, but not so to tear apart a country. My grandfather lived in a village called Kanihama, on the way to Sonamarg. Hama means a settlement place, and kani you know is shawl-making. There was clear, fresh water there, gardens for vegetables and grazing for animals. Like me he was karkhanadar and in his workshop the finest shawls were made, a whole year or more to make one such as yours, in our tradition.’

Mair listened, entranced.

Mehraan painted a picture of a simple life in the idyllic valley, of families working co-operatively as they had done for centuries. The finest items were made in the hope that the completed shawl would find a wealthy buyer, perhaps to be worn for a wedding, or laid in as part of a bride’s dowry. In Kashmiri families, he said, shawls of all grades represented the women’s security. They could be cut up, sold in pieces to buy food or pay debts, retrieved and pieced together again, stored away in folded linen scattered with bitter herbs to deter moth, and brought out for the great family occasions. Shawls were given as gifts, hoarded as treasure, passed on from mother to daughter. This was still the case, Mehraan said, but the finest examples, the kani pieces, like Mair’s grandmother’s, these were hardly made nowadays and the techniques were all but lost. They were too costly, and the weavers couldn’t any longer afford to spend months bent over a loom in the hope of their shawl fetching a good price when it was finally completed. There were copies, of course, machine-woven, but they were nothing.

‘Have you seen this work as it is done?’ Mehraan asked. The plates of food were empty, although Mair had been so absorbed in his story that she had hardly been aware of clearing hers.

She shook her head.

‘If you are interested, there is one place, not far – the karkhanadar is one of my friends. He has a buyer for kani in Delhi, but that man is a hard, hard bargainer. There is not much profit to make.’

‘I would love to see it.’

‘I will find out. Come again tomorrow.’

‘I will,’ she promised. ‘Do you have any idea, Mehraan, how my Welsh grandmother might have come to own such a costly piece?’

They walked out into the sunlight. The afternoon was fresh and cool after the steamy dhaba.

‘She was a Western woman so she would have been rich enough to pay my grandfather for it. Perhaps a gift from her husband.’

What other explanation? But Mair was sure that the Reverend Evan and Mrs Watkins had not been rich, not even well off, and she still couldn’t imagine Nerys, the minister’s wife, draping the radiant shawl over her modest shoulders.

‘Same time tomorrow.’ She smiled.



But when she met Mehraan the next afternoon he was in a hurry.

‘I do not eat my meal today. I have to go to see a buyer. If you can be quick, we will visit the workroom now.’

They ducked through some narrow lanes to yet another doorway in an old wood and brick façade. Tall windows were designed to admit the maximum amount of daylight for the workers within. Almost all of the space in the small, silent room was taken up by three wooden looms, primitive-looking affairs of beams and knotted string. Three young men sat at the loom benches, intent on what they were doing, but when Mehraan spoke to the nearest he sat back and allowed them to see his work by unpinning the black cloth that protected the shawl length. Laid out in a tidy row across the breadth of it were hundreds of kani bobbins, each one wound with a different shade of the hair-fine weft yarn. For each row of the pattern, an intricate design of flowers on a black ground, Mair understood that every one of the bobbins would have to be taken up in order and passed between the warp threads. Each time, the exact number of threads had to be counted before one colour gave way to the next. The pattern-maker’s instructions were written out on a rough grid pinned up in front of the weaver, a tumble of scribbled digits that looked like the mathematical calculations of an early astronomer. Next to this was a sketch of the finished design.

Mair let out the breath she had been holding.

It must take fifteen minutes of concentration, she calculated, to weave just one single row of the shawl.

Mehraan asked another question, and the weaver indicated the amount of completed design. It measured less than half a metre.

‘Three months,’ Mehraan translated.

To keep the finished price down, these designs consisted of two broad bands of kani weaving on a plain ground. For an all-over design like hers, Mair could hardly conceive of the amount of work involved. She found that her eyes were stinging, partly in sympathy with the young men who strained over this exacting work all day, every day of their lives, and partly in awe of the legacy that had somehow come into her possession. She felt more than ever determined to pursue the shawl’s history and discover how it had come to be in her family.



‘Thank you,’ she said.

The weaver, who had never once looked directly at her, resumed his counting.

No wonder there was no music in here, no talking, no distractions at all. A single wrong thread would set the pattern awry.

Out in the street, Mehraan said, ‘You see?’

‘I do see.’ She didn’t know what else she could say. In a rush, she asked, ‘I’d like to visit Kanihama. Would you come with me?’

She thought perhaps he could show her what had once been the workshop, and the houses in which the shawl-makers had worked and lived back in the time when British India still existed.

Mehraan compressed his lips. ‘No, I could not do that.’

Evidently she had made an improper suggestion, a single woman to an unmarried young man. ‘I see. I’m sorry.’ There were tourist guides in Srinagar. She would have to take a Toyota tour to Kanihama instead.

Now Mehraan looked awkward. ‘Perhaps … perhaps you would like to take some tea tomorrow with my mother and sisters? They speak no English, but I can talk between you.’

‘Yes, please. I would like that very much indeed.’



It was a tiny house in a quarter of the city that none of Kashmir’s tourists – the few that there were – would have reason to visit. A maze of rambling dirt lanes ran together and branched under the patchy shade of walnut and apricot trees. Open gutters trickled with black water. Between the single-storey houses were rough fences and scrubby patches of garden, barns and carpet workshops, and oily yards where mechanics serviced battered trucks. The lanes were busy with people, while old men looked on from open shops and little boys chalked cricket stumps on concrete walls.

Shadows of dogs prowled the rubbish heaps. Mair looked away whenever she caught sight of one.



Behind their blue-painted front door, separated from the lane by a tiny strip of vegetable garden, Mehraan’s mother and sisters were waiting for their visitor. They presented her with a bunch of marigolds and cosmos tied into a posy with a strip of ribbon, and Mair gave them the sweet cakes and chocolates she had bought from a shop on the Bund.

Tea was a ceremony. She took her place on cushions, facing Mehraan’s mother across a square of carpet, and the sisters brought in a tall samovar and a tray of china cups. They laid out fresh afternoon breads and honey in the comb, with the sweet cakes arranged on what was clearly the best plate. Mair asked polite questions, and Mehraan dutifully translated. The sisters were fourteen and sixteen, and their mother said it would soon be time to think of finding suitable husbands for them. She gave an expressive shrug. Their marriages were clearly a matter of concern, but the girls just giggled.

Mehraan was only twenty. Mair was surprised to discover he was so much younger than he looked. He had learnt his good English at school; he had been the best student at that. He offered her this last piece of information reluctantly, heavily prompted by his mother. Then he had studied commerce at college in the city, thanks to the generosity of his mother’s brother who had a carpet wholesale business. It was Mehraan’s job now at the shawl workshop to sell the finished pieces to retailers at prices that would support his workers, and leave a margin for himself and his family to live on.

His father had done the same job. He had been killed twelve years before, caught in the crossfire of a battle between insurgents and the military.

Merhaan relayed all this matter-of-factly, against a background of interjections from his mother and bursts of smothered laughter from his sisters. The older woman’s lined face spoke of a hard life. Her bare feet were calloused and her toenails thick and cracked. The two girls were pretty, bareheaded indoors, their sleek hair parted in the centre and worn in a single thick braid that hung down to their narrow waists.



Straining to hear what was not said, Mair guessed that the boy’s education had been a way for his uncle to provide for the fatherless family. Mehraan’s responsibilities meant that he wouldn’t be able to marry until his sisters were settled in their husbands’ family homes. Then he would bring home a suitable wife, the family’s choice as much as his own, who would eventually care for her mother-in-law in this house.

In turn, Mair answered their questions about England.

It rained a lot, yes. They did not grow rice. Education and medical care were free, although taxes were high. Families didn’t all live under one roof, and were often scattered in many different places.

Daringly, between giggles, one of the sisters ventured a question of her own. Mair answered that she was not married, no. Her advanced age was tactfully not remarked upon; obviously she was past the point of being able to hope for a husband, even an apology for one.

The tea was drunk, the bread and cake consumed.

Mair explained why she was visiting Kashmir. When she unwrapped the shawl and shook it out at the mother’s feet there was a cry of surprised delight, the afternoon’s first expression of spontaneity. It was picked up, held to the light, the maker’s mark examined and exclaimed over.

‘She says, “My husband’s father’s workshop,”’ Mehraan translated. ‘She would know it anywhere.’

There was a spinning wheel in the corner of the room and now the sisters lifted it into place and the mother took out her basket of cloudy raw wool. Her bare foot worked the treadle, the wheel whirred, and she began to spin yarn as fine as a cobweb. Mehraan explained that she sold by the kilo to the dyers and weavers, who then supplied his workshop with plain pashmina lengths.

‘I was beginning to think that only men worked in the shawl trade.’

‘Spinning is most of the time work for women. Will you tell them how you got this shawl?’



The mother continued her work and the two girls wound finished yarn into hanks. All three listened as Mehraan patiently translated. At the end, Mair reached into her pocket. She took out the envelope and shook the lock of hair into the palm of her hand, and the three women stopped to examine it. The copper lights that glinted in it were quite different from the jet-black Kashmiri heads.

She showed them the photograph too, and they studied that.

The mother tapped her fingernail on the water. ‘Srinagar,’ she said decisively. She placed the shawl in Mair’s hands after one last glance at the maker’s mark. Then she sat back and resumed her spinning.

There was nothing they could tell her. Mair had hardly expected that there would be, but she still felt a pang of disappointment. The steady working of the wheel was the only sound. She put the lock of hair away, and the photograph. Then, because the Beckers were always in the back of her mind, a tangential thought slipped suddenly into her head. Bruno had mentioned a family friend he was going to look up in Delhi, a Christian convert whose family had originally come from Srinagar.

Perhaps there were still people living in this city who remembered the war years, and even the missionaries of the day.

‘Would you ask your mother one more question? Does she know any old people who might remember the war? The Christian missionaries who were here then, perhaps.’

Mehraan did so, but the only answer was a slow shake of the head. ‘No, she knows no one like this. A person would have to be ninety years old.’

‘Yes, about that age.’

‘Very old,’ Mehraan said, with respect.

It was time to leave. Mair thanked the family for their hospitality, and the girls shyly took her hand and smiled at her from beneath their eyelashes. The mother pulled her scarf over her hair and mouth and came to the gate to say goodbye. She pressed Mair’s hands between hers and bowed, restrained as she had been throughout the visit, but Mair understood that she had made a friend because of the provenance of her shawl.

Mair and Mehraan were on the other side of the wooden gate before he was beckoned back and his mother murmured something to him. As they walked on again, Mehraan explained that his mother had a good friend who was a nurse who looked after the old people at the European hospital. This nurse might know such an old person.

‘Please ask your mother if she could find out,’ Mair said, without holding out much hope.

They walked on towards a busy road, where Mehraan summoned a taxi for her.



When it came, the email message was very short.

Mair read it once, then again, staring until the words on the screen blurred but still refused to deny their terrible weight.

Our beloved daughter Lotus died yesterday.

Bruno Becker

She wrote an answer, the hardest few sentences she had ever composed, then made her way back to Solomon and Sheba.

Farooq intercepted her. ‘Madam, are you ill?’

‘No, Farooq. Not ill. I have had some bad news.’

She went into the bedroom and lay down. The lapping of water and birdsong were all around her, but she could see only Lamayuru, the white snow and the shadow of the dog, and Lotus in her father’s arms.



‘I have some news to tell you,’ Mehraan said.

Mair had met him at the dhaba once again, and this time he introduced her to two of his friends. They talked in English about independence and political protest, in a fierce but abstract way, glancing at Mair from time to time to check her response. Then the friends left and Mehraan drained his glass of tea.

‘What news is that?’ she asked. Five more days had trickled by, and she was beginning to think that it was time to leave Srinagar. Nothing else was going to reveal itself, and the shadow of Lotus’s death darkened the perspectives of lake and mountains.

‘My mother’s friend, you remember. The nurse? She told us she knows an English lady. Her eyesight is very bad. She fell over at her house and needed to be bandaged. She is of the age you say, and she was here in Srinagar many years ago, before the time of Partition.’



There was another single-storey house in the suburbs, this one half hidden in an overgrown garden. Mair stooped to push at the low gate and passed under a tangle of branches. Her knock on the door was answered by an elderly Indian woman, her faded mint-green kameez stretched tight over her plump middle. A pair of heavy spectacles was pushed up over her forehead.

‘Are you from Dr Ram?’ the woman demanded.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Then where?’

Mair had prepared her answer. ‘I’ve come to call. I’m looking up a friend of an old family friend. I’m from England.’

The woman looked surprised. ‘Are you? You can come in for ten minutes. She is tired today.’

The room at the back of the house was pleasantly sunny. There was a rug on the floor, a large old-fashioned music centre on the table against the wall, and a fireplace with a jug of sunflowers in the grate. In an armchair drawn into a pool of sunlight sat an old woman, white-haired and straight-backed. Her heavily bandaged leg rested on a stool, and a walking-stick was placed against the chair. She turned her head towards Mair. ‘Aruna? Are you there? Who is this?’

‘I don’t know. She says from England.’

Mair moved closer. ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ she said.

The old woman’s head tilted, giving her the look of an inquisitive bird. Her skin was sallow, deeply lined, the eyes anxiously peering. ‘You are English. How jolly to hear your voice. Come right over here, my sight’s not so good. That’s better. Do we know each other? Aruna, can we have some tea? Or would you rather a gin?’

‘Actually, we haven’t met before. My name is Mair Ellis.’

‘Well, how do you do?’ She held out her tiny knotted hand for Mair to shake. ‘I am Caroline Bowen. What brings you to Srinagar?’