The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I see,’ Ravi said. ‘You have been very lonely.’

  Caroline nestled closer against him. ‘It doesn’t matter to me now. I’ve got you, and it’s beautiful. I’m so glad this has happened.’ She was thinking that the moment – this very second, with the crickets in the grass and the soft swish of the breeze, the sun spreading its fingers across the old floor, with womanhood, Ravi’s love and a life handed back to her – was what every day of her whole existence had been leading up to. It was perfect. She wouldn’t have changed a single detail of it.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, and she took that to mean that she was his dear.

  ‘I love you,’ Caroline whispered, with not a calculating thought in her head.

  The contours of his face hardened, just perceptibly. ‘Love? Is that what you believe in?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Even with what you have learnt since your marriage?’

  A little beat of dismay drummed in her head, but she ignored it. Caroline looked her lover straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she repeated.

  Ravi silently lifted her hand to his lips and kissed each knuckle in turn.

  In the four months since that day there had been perhaps a dozen more times. As well as their snatched secret hours together, there had been the routines of tennis parties and rides to the gardens and all the gaiety of a Srinagar season. In these long weeks Caroline had learnt a lot about what to do with a man, and she had also learnt not to blurt out I love you. She teased and pouted instead. But Ravi Singh never again favoured her with the full force of his attention the way he had done the first time. Lately, as she had become more dependent on him, he had seemed restless in her company, except for the brief times when they were naked together. Last night at the Resident’s ball, when they were dancing and she had told him that Ralph was coming home, he had scrutinised her from under his dark eyelashes.

  ‘So now you will put into practice what you have learnt, eh?’ He smiled.

  Once she had understood them the shock of his words left her rigid.

  Her lover wasn’t jealous; her lover was practically a voyeur. He could happily imagine her performing on Ralph the acts she had learnt from him. And in a single flash of perception she understood the truth she had, up till now, ignored: Ravi wasn’t biding his time before claiming her, not at all. He was just diverting himself with a married Englishwoman. Exactly as Myrtle McMinn had warned her.

  Shock was followed by a jet of boiling outrage. Caroline snapped upright, her hands against his chest, her heels clattering on the dance floor. Ravi immediately stood back and suavely bowed.

  ‘Is that it? Is that all you’re going to say?’ Her voice rose, unintentionally shrill, and the couples dancing nearby slowed to stare at them. Ravi frowned, but her anger and the rising edge of desperation were too powerful.

  She drew in a breath. ‘I hate you,’ she hissed, still too audibly. With a snapshot of Ravi’s scowl and the pairs of gaping faces at his back burning into her eyes, she had flung herself away from him, tripped over her train, and almost fallen flat. Myrtle’s friend, and then Myrtle herself, had come to her rescue.

  What Myrtle had said to her in the private salon only highlighted the truth. The once-absorbing riddle of loving Ravi Singh and being married to Ralph Bowen had in the last month become just that: a Christmas-cracker fragment of paper with a conceit cheaply printed on it that would shrivel into ash and disintegrate as soon as it touched the fire.

  Caroline had an even more urgent concern now and it was this that brought her into their bedroom, with the shameful trophy of her experience, to Ralph.

  She lowered her head, inch by inch, her cheek brushing her husband’s chest and then his belly with its sparse thatch of coppery strands. As if he were being stretched on a rack she felt him tensing, drawing apart and away, his joints minutely creaking beneath her ear. She screwed her eyes shut and lifted her head so that her own blonde hair waved over his groin. Ralph had stopped breathing. Her breath was stuck somewhere inside her ribcage. She took him in her mouth. Briefly, his thing twitched.

  Then he shouted, ‘In God’s name, what are you doing?’

  He shoved her backwards and rolled out of their bed as if it were on fire, hopping and grasping with one hand to secure the pyjama trousers that sagged below his hips.

  Caroline gaped at him. Ralph was crimson, cheeks wobbling, turkey-faced with anger and embarrassment and indignation.

  ‘That’s a whore’s trick,’ her husband bawled at her.

  ‘Please, don’t shout,’ she whispered, imagining Major and Mrs Dunkeley sitting upright in their bedroom in the bungalow next door. She rolled herself in the sheet and sat up.

  Ralph had secured his pyjamas. He stood with the bed like a barricade between them, appalled, bristling with righteousness. ‘Where did you learn a whore’s trick like that? Decent women don’t do that sort of thing.’

  One of the other skills that Caroline had learnt in the course of her love affair was how to dissemble. She widened her eyes to make pools of innocence. ‘How do you know it’s what prostitutes do? That’s not what it says in my book.’

  ‘What damned book? What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘The Young Wife’s Guide to Married Love,’ Caroline improvised. ‘I sent home for it. It arrived in a discreet package, don’t worry. I thought I needed some advice about how to encourage my husband. I do, don’t I?’

  ‘Are you mad? Hand that filth over to me immediately.’ Ralph stuck out his fist, but she was ahead of him.

  ‘I read it and burnt it. I couldn’t run the risk of letting the servants find it.’

  He stared down at her, nose in the air, like a gun dog, trying to sniff out the dimensions of her lie. She met his glare.

  ‘You are disgusting,’ he said at last, defeated.

  Caroline lifted her chin. ‘Why did you marry me, Ralph?’

  ‘Because it’s what people like us do. We marry.’

  ‘And then live like this? In sexless, meaningless, endless antipathy?’

  He turned abruptly away. ‘Yes, probably. Don’t be melodramatic.’ He gathered up his magazine, took his plaid dressing-gown off the chair beside the bed, collected his cigarette case and lighter from the box on the dressing-table and slipped them into his pocket.

  Caroline watched him as he marched to the door. She tried once more, softening her voice: ‘I’m sorry. It’s your last night. Won’t you come back to bed?’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he snapped, and the door closed behind him.

  She lay back again.

  Ravi.

  You are exquisite …

  In a way. But she was not desirable enough or appropriate enough for him to want all of her. Caroline had never felt so lonely, or so afraid, in all her twenty-two years. She lay down and stared up at the ceiling. Tomorrow her husband was going away with his regiment. There was a war on.

  Maybe she would be widowed.

  Myrtle and Nerys were having breakfast out on the veranda of the Garden of Eden. The starry nights were now hollow with cold, but this morning there was still just enough warmth in the sun for them to enjoy sitting outside. A thin layer of low mist hung over the lake water, and the mooring posts were policed by brooding eagles. Boats in the distance slid soundlessly through what looked like horizontal layers of light. Myrtle was reading her letters, briskly slitting the envelopes with an ivory-handled paper knife, scanning the contents and placing them in one of three tidy piles.

  Nerys had received just one letter, from Evan. He had written about the work in Kargil, the difficulty of travel to the distant northern valleys, the privations of his daily life – his monkish enjoyment of which was heightened, Nerys was sure, by the imagined contrast with her own sybaritic existence down in the Vale. In the final sentence he announced that he was planning to stay where he was for another two weeks.

  She folded the two sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. Then she sat back and thoughtfully sipped her tea.
Majid came with a fresh jug of water, removed their empty plates and padded away silently on bare feet. Black and white kingfishers dipped at their own reflections as a shikara paddled towards the houseboat. The ripples from the prow and paddle rocked the lily-pads, leaving a crystal bead in the centre of each to flash briefly in the subdued sunlight.

  ‘Hello,’ Myrtle said, looking up.

  The boatman angled his craft to the foot of the steps. It wasn’t the flower vendor or the man who brought fresh-caught lake fish wrapped in layers of newspaper, or any other of the familiar traders who plied between the houseboats. He stepped forwards from the stern of his boat, splayed feet balanced against the rocking, and held up a package. ‘Delivery, ma’am. Special.’

  Myrtle looked at it, then said, ‘It’s for you.’

  Nerys didn’t recognise the spiky black script. She gave the boatman a coin and used Myrtle’s paper knife to slit open the wrapping. Inside, secured in a twist of paper, was her stolen brooch.

  Myrtle knew about the theft. She clapped her hands delightedly. ‘That is clever of him. Was the whole episode one of your Mr Stamm’s magic tricks, do you think? Performed to impress you?’

  ‘He’s not my Mr Stamm. No, it happened exactly as I told you. The brooch was snatched by a gang of children in the old town. I don’t see how he could have set it up without recruiting and training the whole lot of them first, and why on earth would he have bothered to do that?’

  She scanned the note that came with it. Rainer wondered, following on from their meeting at the Residency, whether Nerys might be free to visit him at home for a drink? Mrs McMinn would also be most welcome. Six o’clock that evening. He gave the address in the old town.

  Nerys handed the card to Myrtle to read.

  ‘Hmm. Rather sure of himself, isn’t he? What did the two of you talk about?’

  Nerys told her about the children from the room behind the bazaar, and her unformed desire to do something to help them.

  ‘So, are you going?’ Languidly, Myrtle waved away the smoke from her first cigarette of the day.

  ‘Yes, if you will come with me.’

  ‘It sounds, darling, as if I would be a tiny bit of a gooseberry. I saw the two of you dancing the other night. You were setting the floor on fire.’

  Nerys calmly pinned the pearl circlet in its place at the throat of her cardigan. It was the cream one she had worn to the commissioner’s party in Leh, which now had its buttons neatly sewn on. ‘I am very glad to have our brooch back. I felt so bad about having lost it, because you’d given it to me. I’d like to thank Mr Stamm in person, but there’s no more to it than that.’

  ‘If you say so. All right. We’ll dress up in our finery and toddle over to see your admirer this evening. What is Evan’s news?’

  Nerys told her.

  ‘Two more weeks? He’d better get a move on.’ Myrtle squinted across at the backdrop of mountains.

  ‘I don’t think he wants to come to Srinagar at all.’ With a wave of the hand Nerys encompassed the fanciful woodwork of the Garden of Eden, the seat cushions with hand-embroidered leaves and flowers, the lake and the Srinagar Club flags in the distance.

  Myrtle looked kindly at her. ‘How does that make you feel?’

  ‘I married a missionary. I understood what is involved.’

  ‘Yes. Do you want to know what I think?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  Myrtle picked up Rainer Stamm’s note from the tablecloth and lightly fanned the air with it. ‘I think you should have some fun. You’ve recovered your health and strength, thank God. I think you should be silly, and enjoy yourself just for a few weeks. I don’t believe you’ll regret it in the end. Trust me. I’m a wise woman.’

  Nerys understood what her friend might be including under the general heading of fun. In spite of this she found herself laughing, and she reflected at the same time on how Srinagar and Mrs McMinn were changing the missionary’s wife. ‘Yes, I know you are. But that’s not what you advised Caroline Bowen.’

  ‘Pfff. You are a grown woman. A very sensible and serious one, who might benefit from an instant’s frivolity. Caroline, on the other hand, is hardly more than a schoolgirl.’

  ‘I see. Are you telling me to look at another man?’

  Myrtle’s eyes widened. ‘I’m not advising you to do anything, Mrs Watkins. You have a very good mind of your own.’

  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.