The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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is what I wanted to find,’ she said quietly, to her companions. After a moment she stooped and replaced the hymnal in its resting place.
The three of them retreated into the fresh air. Sonam took hold of Mair’s arm. He began to talk with great animation, words pouring out of him as he shook her elbow and peered up into her face. He had no teeth and his face was crosshatched with deep lines, but he suddenly looked much younger than his age.
‘Tell me what he’s saying?’ she begged Tsering.
‘He remembers the teacher here, when he was small boy. She was nice. She gave the children apples and they sang songs.’
Nerys Watkins, who had followed her husband to India and brought back the wedding shawl with a lock of hair hidden in its folds.
‘That might have been my grandmother. Does he remember her name? What songs did they sing?’
The shake of the old man’s head was enough of an answer, but another rush of words immediately followed. His hands measured out a chunk of the air and he grinned as he pretended to totter under the weight of it. Remembering the long-ago was a pleasure for him, she understood, just as it had become for her father. Tsering patted his uncle on the shoulder, telling him to slow down.
‘He says there was a wireless here, the first one my uncle had ever listened to. He liked the music that came out of it. The wireless was this big, and heavy. It had a battery, and it needed four men and a cart to take that battery all the way down to the river to be charged at the generator. Then the people would come in close and listen with serious faces. The children wanted to laugh, but it was not allowed. That was when there was the war in Europe, and then it came to Asia.’
Evan and Nerys, listening sombrely to the radio news in one of these low rooms, with the oil lamp throwing their shadows on the wall. She could see them so clearly now, at last: Evan in his preacher’s black, and Nerys with an apron covering her plain skirt and hand-knitted jersey.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘That was when it was.’
There was nothing more to see in the abandoned compound. Tsering was interested and he made another circuit with her, looking through every doorway, but they made no further discoveries. After his flash of recollection Sonam seemed weary, all his energy spent. Mair gently put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to have come here.’
They made their way back down the lane, Sonam walking much more slowly and with his great-nephew’s support. The twilight was deepening and lights shone out of the windows of houses nearer to the cemetery until there was a blink, then another, and the power failed. The single street lamp in the distance went out. Mair and her companions halted under the navy-blue sky as Tsering searched an inner pocket for a flashlight. The old man put out a hand to Mair to steady himself, and she took his arm. Linked together, with the thin torch-beam picking out the deep holes and collapsed walls in their path, they stepped carefully onwards to the road.
At the junction where she turned off towards her hotel, she said goodbye to the two men. The money she gave Sonam disappeared in a flash into a slit in his tunic. He grasped her by the wrist and angled his head to peer at her in the gloom. Tsering translated for the last time.
‘In those days, the old times, it was very hard to live here. There was not much, for any people. But it was good, just the same.’
The old man was telling her that Evan Watkins and his wife had not experienced undiluted hardship here in Leh. There had been happiness too.
Mair could understand that.
She shook hands with them.
Tsering grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. ‘You are looking for history from your shawl. Now you will be going to Kashmir.’
‘I will, yes.’
‘Safe journey,’ he said.
They wished her goodnight. As she watched them making slow progress down the deserted street, the power came on again. Their moving shadows slid over the old stone walls.
THREE
India, 1941
He had taken their candle behind the screen with him. It was only a hinged wooden frame with brown paper pasted across it, and the light, placed on the hidden washstand, threw his enlarged and distorted shadow on to the paper. Nerys turned to face the other way, in order not to see her husband washing himself. She studied instead the plain wooden crucifix that hung on the wall beside the bed.
The yellow glow of the candle flickered as he carried it from the washstand and placed it on the night table, so she knew it was all right to turn on to her back again. The mattress, stuffed with yak’s hair, gave out its familiar rustle as she moved. There was a whiff of carbolic soap with a lingering trace of male sweat as Evan picked up the Bible that always lay next to his pillow. He sank to his knees beside the bed. Nerys at once made a move to push back the blanket and join him in his prayers, but he told her that she should stay where she was.
‘The Lord sees everything. He won’t frown if you take a few more days’ rest, Nerys.’
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she murmured, but she lay still because she felt so tired. She listened as he read in Welsh from the Book of Job, one of his favourite resorts. ‘Amen,’ she said, when she thought he had finished. There was an interval as he prayed in silence, and she attempted the same herself. Among other things, she asked God if He could somehow make a better wife of her.
At last Evan sighed and got to his feet. He took off his thick dressing-gown and hung it on the hook, peeled back the blanket, letting a blade of cold air into the bed, and hovered for a moment in his striped flannel pyjamas, as if to lie down beside her took a positive effort of will.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He blew out the candle and got in. The mattress sank under his weight and she tensed her hip and leg muscles in order not to roll against him. Not that she didn’t long for the comfort of his arms and the warmth of his skin, because she felt so sad and empty that she craved physical reassurance without any of the pitfalls that words could lead to, but it had been a long day and she didn’t want to place even this much of a demand on him.
‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, after a moment.
‘Goodnight, Evan,’ she said quietly.
It would not be long before he fell asleep. She lay with her fingers interlaced across her breastbone and reviewed the day.
The smaller children gave her the greatest pleasure. She loved the sight of them in class, with school pinafores tied over their ragged clothes, sitting in a neat line with their shining eyes fixed on her as she wrote words and numbers on a blackboard balanced on an easel. One, two, three. Boot, hat, apple, hand. They bore this part of the day patiently, just as they did when she read them stories from the Bible, but what they really enjoyed was singing and dancing and clapping games. They chanted their own words to ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’, and she tried to copy what they sang because her efforts made them laugh so uproariously. Or with her harmonium and their drums, whistles and tambourines they pounded out made-up songs that filled the room with rhythm and needed no language at all.
The older children were less rewarding. Nerys knew they only came to school because of the mission’s free midday meal, soup and rice with a thick stew of lentils. They fidgeted and murmured among themselves as she talked, and as soon as the class finished at three o’clock they raced each other across the yard, happy to be free from her lessons even though the rest of the day would be spent working in the fields, or bent over a weaving loom. She could only hope that the food they ate and the minimal medical attention she could offer, for their racking coughs, gummy eyes and running sores, was a compensation for the two hours of mutual incomprehension they shared with her. By the age of eight or nine, most of them stopped coming altogether. They were too valuable to their parents as extra pairs of hands.
Nerys