The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  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 terr
ible 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.’