The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ on the reverse. The outlines of the blocked pattern were visible beneath the stitching. It could not have been more different from the other, on which the double band of floral embroidery was worked over the woven design in the same shades and in stitches so tiny that they were invisible to the naked eye, all of it executed so perfectly that the right side and the reverse were indistinguishable. The effect of such minute and effacing work was to emboss a broad swathe of the woven pattern, giving the paisley shapes and entwined foliage an opulent three-dimensional effect.

      ‘It’s very nice,’ Mair repeated.

      The man looked offended. She wanted to get out of the shop now, back into the sunshine. She picked out a pair of coral earrings from the display stand next to the door, paid for them quickly and made her escape.

      ‘Come back soon,’ the merchant called after her.

      The other two salesmen reattached themselves to her side, but half-heartedly. She was able to sidestep them and make her way on down the sunny, dusty street past a row of women sitting at the kerbside with baskets of cauliflowers and apples for sale. Shoeshine men with their brushes and tins of polish set out on squares of sacking tried to attract her attention, even though her scuffed Converse were clearly visible. Scooters and rickshaws jolted over the potholes in the road. The noise of traffic was deafening. Mair peered up the shadowed alleyways leading off the street and chose one at random to explore. A mangy dog loped by, its distended teats swinging.

      It was cooler in the shade and she pressed deeper, past barbers’ shops and butchers’ stalls where goats’ heads oozed on wooden slabs. A black, buzzing object nailed to a beam revealed itself as an animal’s severed tongue, presumably fixed there to draw flies away from the rest of the meat. Mair glanced at it, swallowed, and groped in her bag for her bottle of water. She took a determined swig and pushed on. Canvas tarpaulins were laced overhead now, and the alley grew dimmer and narrower. Overripe vegetable remains and less identifiable waste squished underfoot. Women in saris brushed past, and others in burqas hurried in the opposite direction. Stallholders called out and children vaulted over the gutters. It was a busy, cheerful scene and every aspect of its unfamiliarity served to highlight her alien status.

      The alley opened into a square and she squinted as the sunlight struck her face. To one side a small brown bullock grazed with apparent relish on a pile of smouldering refuse. To the other, a crimson and gold prayer wheel was mounted beneath a painted canopy. As she stood there an ancient monk in saffron and burgundy robes wandered out of the crowd and set it turning clockwise. He stepped with it as it rotated, murmuring and counting the beads on his rosary. Mair took a photograph of him, then wondered if she had been intrusive.

      She moved off down an alley, which ran in yet another direction, into the heart of the bazaar. Down here the stalls were heaped with white trainers and brown plastic sandals. Overhead, backpacks and holdalls swayed in their hundreds like misshapen fruit. Girls’ dresses made of glitter and tinsel hung in electric tiers.

      And it was here, framed against the blue smoke rising from a food stall, that she first caught sight of the Becker family. The trio would have presented a striking picture anywhere, but in the chaotic market they made a tableau so unearthly that it had an almost religious quality to it.

      They were the only Westerners she had noticed since leaving the main street. The woman was tall, slender and ethereally pale-skinned. She had a mass of red-gold hair that sprang over her shoulders. She was wearing a loose white shirt over a tiered blue linen skirt and a pair of mud-encrusted boots. She was talking, pointing and laughing all at the same time. The man with her was looking in the other direction. He was even taller than his wife and suntanned, with coal-black hair and eyebrows and a half-grown beard. Between them was an angelic child, a little girl of about two. She had the same curling mass of hair as her mother, but the colour was white-blonde. Her head rotated as she looked from one parent to the other. Then she stuck her tiny arms into the air and yelled, ‘Carry.’

      The woman was still laughing and gesturing. She stooped and, with the other arm, swept the child off her feet. She settled the little girl astride her hip and strode across to the food vendor. The air shimmered above a vat of boiling oil. The child pulled out a coil of her mother’s amazing hair and peered down through it, as if it were a veil, at the heads passing beneath her.

      The man turned to see what his wife was pointing at. The vendor fished in the boiling vat with a ladle and brought up some shiny toffee-brown squiggles. He tipped them into a paper cone and handed this over in exchange for some rupees. The woman dipped in her fingers and extracted a deep-fried squiggle. She blew casually on it, then handed it to the child. The little girl bit into whatever it was with relish.

      The woman tilted her head back and dropped some of the food into her own mouth. She chewed eagerly and laughed, wiping the grease from her chin. Health and satisfaction seemed to shine out of her. Her free hand floated lightly to her husband’s hip and rested there. It was a gesture of possession and affection, as intimate as it was casual. She steered him away from the vendor, and from Mair’s scrutiny, even though none of the three had so much as glanced in her direction. They strolled deeper into the maze of stalls. She followed them with her eyes, the red-gold and black heads, with the child’s pale one bouncing between them, until they turned a corner and passed out of her sight.

      She stayed rooted where she was, despite her urge to run after the family. The food vendor shovelled another scoop of his mysterious wares into the cauldron; the oil sizzled and spat.

      In the hubbub of the market Mair’s loneliness intensified.

      She had plenty of friends, and had had the usual series of relationships, but there had been no one she could imagine spending the rest of her life with, not the way her sister Eirlys had undertaken to do with her Graeme, or Dylan with his Jackie.

      She made herself take a deep breath of bazaar smells, and noted the ambling cows, the hens scratching on a hill of rubbish, the Buddhist monk returning from his trip to the prayer wheel, and the steady surge of people going about their business. Colours and scents and fresh impressions flooded her head, and her spirits floated again. She turned and retraced her steps, deliberately heading in the opposite direction to the glorious strangers.

      The drive out to Changthang, eastwards from Leh, almost to what had once been the border with Tibet – and was now China – took the best part of a day. The other members of the sightseeing tour in a small Toyota bus were two portly, middle-aged Dutch couples and three Israeli boys, who managed to be rowdy yet noticeably unfriendly. They sprawled in the back, guffawing over the separate accompaniments of their MP3s. Curled up in her seat and braced against the jolting, Mair had plenty of opportunity on the long drive to reflect, and remember.

      Before leaving for India she had done as much research as she could into her grandparents’ history. Three months ago, in the on-line edition of a book called Hope and the Glory of God, subtitled With the Welsh Missionaries in India, she had read the entry for Parchedig Evan William Watkins (1899–1960).

      Evan Watkins had been educated at the University College of North Wales, and the College of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. After his ordination he had heard the call to work in India, and in 1929 he had travelled out to Shillong in what was then Assam. Subsequently he served as district missionary to Shangpung.

      Since reading his clerical biography, she had regularly tried to conjure images of Evan Watkins, in his black coat and dog collar, as he gamely preached Nonconformism to the people of remote Indian hill villages. Had he thundered from his makeshift chapel pulpit on a steaming day with the monsoon rains drumming on the tin roof?

      Since her arrival in the Indian Himalaya she had tried harder still to picture him, but the clash of cultures was too brutal to generate any kind of image.

      According СКАЧАТЬ