The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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into dereliction. A woman carrying a bundle of kindling on her head greeted Sonam as he sped by.
The lane petered out at a blank wall flanked by two abandoned buildings. One was of plain stone with tall windows veiled in layers of ancient dust, and it struck Mair at once that in its absolute lack of pretension it resembled a Welsh chapel. The one opposite was no more than a wall with a collapsing door in it, but at Sonam’s nod Tsering pushed open the door. It gave on to a little paved courtyard surrounded by single-storey buildings. Weeds and saplings tilted the old paving stones, and all the glass in the small-paned windows had gone. A pair of starved dogs appeared in a dark doorway and gave them a yellow-eyed glare.
Tsering and Sonam consulted.
‘This is old mission, with school and medical clinic, my uncle remembers well. Across there, that was Welsh church. Then it became Hindu temple, but now there is new one built by them. These days, nothing here.’ He gave a shrug without a glimmer of optimism in it. Mair had noticed a similar gesture too often during her conversations in Leh.
Sonam was nodding harder, waving at her to indicate that she should feel free to explore this desolate place.
Avoiding the dogs, she peered into the tiny rooms. The first two were empty, except for weeds poking up through the floors, scattered refuse and torn sacks, but in the third lay some rotten sticks of furniture. One piece was just recognisable as a schoolroom chair, with a small shelf on the back for books. There had been chairs quite similar to this one in the infants’ class at her own school. Mair bent and tried to set it upright but the shelf came away in her hands. At her feet lay the remains of a book, a sad remnant with swollen covers that had been half protected from the damp and cold by the shelf. She picked it up and looked at the ruined pages, and out of the pulpy grey mass two or three words were just distinguishable.
It was a Welsh hymnal.
Mair lifted her head. She had half thought that the two men might have been trying to please her with a visit to a compound that could have belonged to any of the various missions to Ladakh, or might not have had any missionary connection at all. But now she knew for sure.
Seventy years ago Evan Watkins would have preached in the chapel across the lane, and his wife must have tried to teach the children, perhaps in this very room. She tilted her head to listen, as if she could catch the sound of their voices, but all she could hear was dogs barking and the screech and hoot of distant traffic.
‘This 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