The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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rose in thin columns from the ventilation holes at the apex. A woman with a bent back trudged up from the water’s edge carrying a full bucket.
The goats stank – there was no other word for it. The nomad camp was also redolent of kerosene and animal dung and woodsmoke, but the dominant, throat-clogging smell was of unadulterated goat.
A display was laid on for the tourists. Three men in rough tunics and yak-skin boots drove a handful of their animals into a stone-walled enclosure. Mair pulled the flaps of her fleece hat over her ears and shivered in the keen wind. She could almost feel the layer of ice thickening on the lake. The goats were shaggy creatures, white and brown and black, with curved horns and disturbing long-pupilled eyes. They allowed themselves to be hobbled and tipped on to their sides where they lay, stiff-legged and reeking. From the recesses of their garments, the men produced wooden implements like hair-brushes, set with fierce, incurved stiff metal prongs. With synchronised vigour, they each set to work on a goat, rasping and tugging at the wool of the throat and chest. Matted clods of hair began to yield to this treatment, coming away in chunks with the embedded dirt, dung and grease. The goats protested and the men countered with a throaty, ululating song.
‘They are singing to the goats, telling them to give some good pashm in return for the sweet grass they have eaten and the good water they have drunk,’ explained the guide.
A woman gathered up the tufts of hair as the men disentangled them from the combs, taking care to retrieve every last wisp, and stuffed them into a frost-stiffened polythene sack.
‘Each family has between eighty and two hundred goats. The animals are combed in May and September. Each animal’s combing yields approximately two hundred grams of raw wool,’ the guide intoned, in his chipped English. At least she didn’t have to translate all this again, Mair reflected, unlike her companions.
‘How much money do they get?’ asked the Dutchman who hadn’t been travel-sick.
‘Sixteen hundred rupees for a kilo,’ the guide told him. ‘Maybe more, maybe less, depends on quality. After cleaning and processing, that kilo of raw wool will yield only three hundred grams of pure fibre ready for spinning.’
Mair stared at the sack. It would take a lot of combings to add up to one kilo and probably a whole herd of goats’ combings to fill that one bag. And it was very hard to conceive how those filthy, greasy bundles could ever be transformed into the feathery elegance of her shawl.
‘So what happens next?’ asked one of the Israeli boys, although he didn’t sound all that interested.
‘The wool traders come out by truck from Leh. They buy the pashm, and take it back to town for processing,’
Another of the boys had retrieved a rusty can from the detritus scattered across the Changpa camp. He set it on a rock and aimed pebbles at it.
‘Is that all?’ his friend wanted to know. A fusillade of stones clattered against the can until it bounced off the rock.
The guide looked offended. ‘This is the traditional way for the people. It has happened like this for hundreds of years.’
‘But is this all there is to see?’
‘This afternoon we will visit the monastery. There are some fine paintings.’
‘Yeah.’
The demonstration over, the men freed their goats and chased them out of the pen. Their leader waited for a cash hand-out and the others hastened towards the nearest tent enclosure. Mair hoped they were going to spend the rest of the day sitting by a log fire, singing goat-herding ballads and drinking chang. She unbuckled her rucksack, checking yet again that the shawl was wrapped inside, and took a five-hundred-rupee note out of her wallet. The man’s blackened fist rapidly closed on it, but not so quickly that the guide didn’t see how much. He would think she was a careless Western pushover because the tip was far too generous, but she didn’t care.
‘Julley,’ she murmured. It was the all-purpose Ladakhi word for ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’.
‘Julley,’ said the man. He was already on his way over to the Dutch.
Mair had planned to unwrap her shawl and spread it on some sun-baked rocks, with the goats browsing in the background, to take an artistic photograph of its beginnings to show Eirlys and Dylan – but she would have had to weight it with small rocks to stop it blowing away and there were pellets of windborne ice pinging against her cheeks. The whole scene was just too bleak for anything more than a mental acknowledgement that this was where the fine, light wool had originated perhaps seventy years ago. Nothing would have changed since then. And she was glad she had made the visit. She contented herself with taking a picture of the lake and the trees, with a white-wool long-haired goat glaring in front of them.
There was no way to capture the smell, but that wasn’t a matter for regret.
As for her grandparents: now that she had been here herself it seemed implausible that even an emissary from the Welsh Presbyterian Mission to Leh would have penetrated this far. Surely Evan Watkins would have found enough preaching to do in the villages along the Indus and Zanskar rivers without pursuing the Changpa people out here. He couldn’t have reached this spot in winter, because the snows would have cut it off.
Her companions were trudging back across the plateau towards the white speck of the Toyota. Mair took one last look at the goats and their backdrop and headed after them.
‘Back in the bus, guys,’ the leader of the Israeli boys shouted. The other two tramped eagerly after him.
TWO
Back in Leh, Mair spent a day trying to find the caretaker who held the keys to the European cemetery.
‘This afternoon maybe he will be here,’ predicted an old man, sitting on a step with his hookah.
But in the afternoon there was no old man, and no caretaker or keys. Mair stood in frustration on the wrong side of the fence as leaves like gold flakes rattled from the trees and drifted over the gravestones. In Ladakh, she was learning, life was lived at its own pace. She walked back into town, intending to go to a café to drink chai and make a plan.
In the main street in front of the mosque, she caught sight of red-gold hair, blazing above the white caps and grey backs of men heading for prayers. The woman and child were fully occupied, the child in having a tantrum that screwed her face into a crimson knot and the mother in mildly remonstrating with her. There was no sign of the saturnine husband.
‘Non, non!’ the child cried, kicking her feet in the dirt.
‘That’s enough,’ the woman ordered, in American-accented English. ‘Stop it right now.’ There was amusement as well as resignation in her expression. Her arms were weighted with shopping bags, and she put down one load in order to have a hand free for the child. But the little girl had already noticed Mair watching her. She blinked her eyes, in which there were no signs of tears, only outrage. The yells changed from private fury to operatic display.
Mair glanced round. There was open space behind and in front of her. She lifted one finger and locked eyes with the child. The tantrum abruptly faded as curiosity took over. As soon as she had the little girl’s full attention Mair drew a breath, gathered herself up and executed a standing back-flip.
It was quite a long time since she had attempted one, and she rocked on landing, but otherwise it was fairly satisfactory. The child’s mouth fell open and her eyes made two circles of amazement. Mair clapped hands at her, and did two forwards linked hand-springs. Hattie and she had synchronised this routine as part of their act, and even now she could probably have done it in her sleep. The second somersault brought her up quite close to the mother and child. The little girl grabbed Mair’s leg and gazed up at her. A smile lit her face.
‘Again! Encore une fois!’
The mother was laughing. ‘That’s pretty neat. And it’s way better than a candy bribe.’
Mair was slightly embarrassed to