The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas

door of the salon opened, setting the lace curtains fluttering. A dark head and shoulders were framed in the doorway. ‘Karen?’

      Karen glanced up from her scrutiny of her toenails. ‘Hi. Did you get everything fixed up already?’

      ‘Pappy.’ Lotus dashed across and leapt into her father’s arms. He swung her off her feet. ‘Jumping lady,’ she clamoured, pointing at Mair. ‘Jumping high.’

      ‘Bruno, this is Maya,’ Karen called. ‘My new friend.’

      ‘Hello,’ the man said, nodding at her. There was a smile buried in him, Mair thought, but it wasn’t close enough to the surface to break through. She started to explain her name, which Karen hadn’t quite caught.

      Mair was Welsh for Mary. When she was young she had tried to persuade her friends to adopt this more sophisticated version, but it had never caught on. ‘Mair, Mair, pants on fire,’ the local kids used to chant. She didn’t actually utter any of this, though. Something about Bruno Becker’s level, interrogative stare silenced her.

      ‘Mair,’ she said quietly. ‘Hello.’

      The introductions were cut short because the beauty-parlour staff were shooing Bruno out of the door. Ladies Only Beauty clearly meant what it said.

      He carried Lotus with him. He indicated to his wife that they would see her back at the hotel when she was ready. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, over his shoulder, to Mair, and was gone. The introduction of a new friend of Karen’s was clearly nothing unusual.

      Karen stretched out her toes and smiled. ‘Peace. That means you and I can go and eat cakes once we’re through here. We can have a proper talk.’

      Mair felt like a pebble being tumbled along by a tsunami, but Karen Becker was too insistent – and too interesting – for her to make any real attempt at resistance. In any case, what else would she be doing?

      Once their toenail polish had dried to Karen’s satisfaction they strolled down a nearby alley to the German bakery. Over apple cake and coffee Karen confided that she had wanted to come to this part of the world for years, really ever since she had gotten interested in the Buddhist way in her early twenties. So far it had totally lived up to her expectations. These places were holy – they touched your soul directly. You hardly ever encountered that depth of spirituality in Europe, did you? And never in the US of A. Not that she had ever recognised, anyway, Karen concluded. Did Mair – was she pronouncing it right? – did she know what Karen meant?

      Mair thought of the whitewashed hilltop gompas she had visited in the last few days. The dark inner rooms with dim wall paintings and statues of the Buddha were thick with the scent of incense and wood ash, their altars heaped with offerings, often touchingly mundane ones like packets of sweet biscuits or posies of plastic flowers. The murmured chanting of monks rose through the old floors, and windows gave startling views of braided rivers and orchards far below. There was a divinity here, she reflected, but more than anything it troubled her with its elusiveness.

      At one monastery the guide had beckoned her into the kitchen where an old monk was tranquilly preparing the community’s dinner. With a wooden ladle he scooped water from a bucket into a blackened pot set on a wood-fired stove. Cold balls of rice were gathered into cloths ready for distribution. Kneeling beside him at a rough table, a boy monk of about ten chopped vegetables from the monastery garden. The old man nodded to indicate that he was satisfied with the effort as successive handfuls of carrot and onion were dropped into the pot. The two worked in silence, and it had occurred to Mair that, apart from her presence, this scene would have been exactly the same two or three hundred years ago. The monks’ quiet service to the unending routines of cooking and providing for others had touched her more eloquently than any of the religious rituals.

      She tried to describe this tiny epiphany to Karen.

      ‘But I understand completely,’ Karen interjected. She reached out and covered Mair’s fingers with her own. ‘There are many paths to recognition, but they are all the same road. You do know what I’m talking about. I was sure you would. I felt it in you as soon as I saw you.’

      ‘Even though I was turning somersaults?’

      ‘Because of that, as much as anything else. Why suppress what you wanted to emote? You are the complete you. I endorse that.’

      Bruno wasn’t spiritual in the same sense that she was, Karen continued, but he understood where she was coming from because he related to the mountains. They were his temples, and he made his own pilgrimages among them. ‘Take Lotus, for example. I believe in letting her experience the whole world as essentially benign. I want her to grow up as far as possible without fear, without unnecessary restrictions, without petty rules, so she can become her intended self within the stream.’

      Mair wondered if Lotus – quite understandably – dealt with excess benignity by having a tantrum or two.

      They had finished their coffee and cake. Karen dotted up the last of the crumbs with a fingertip and licked it. She said, ‘I must go. What are your plans? We’ll be out of town for four or five days.’

      ‘I’ve got some stuff to look into here. I don’t know how long that’ll take.’

      Karen studied her, her finger still resting against her lips. Mair noticed how the two or three other tourists in the bakery couldn’t help gazing at her companion.

      ‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ Karen said.

      ‘No, I’m not,’ Mair protested.

      ‘But you’ve never let on why you’re in Ladakh. You’re not just here for a sightseeing holiday, I can tell that much.’

      Mair wasn’t going to try to describe the shawl to Karen, or the lock of hair, or the blanks in the family history that had colonised her imagination with such force. Awkwardly, she said, ‘My father died recently.’

      At once, Karen’s face flooded with sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said warmly. ‘That’s sad for you. You were drawn to a Buddhist country for a reason. Have you heard of punabbhava? It means “becoming again”. That’s the belief we have in rebirth. It doesn’t annihilate grief or loss, and it isn’t meant to, but contemplation of it provides comfort. Sometimes it does, at least.’

      Her new friend meant well, Mair realised, and the way she talked might sound alien but it was certainly sincere. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled.

      Karen squeezed her hands and stood up. She paid for their tea, waving away Mair’s proffered money. ‘Where are you staying?’

      Mair told her.

      ‘So we’ll see you when we get back.’

      The next day Mair went to visit the Leh Pashmina Processing Plant. The weather was changing, as if to underline the Beckers’ absence. The gilded autumn sunshine Mair had begun to take for granted was filtered out today by low, thin grey clouds as the last leaves were chased down from the poplar trees by an insistent wind.

      A small man in a baseball cap emerged from one of the plant’s grimy buildings to meet her. ‘My name is Tinley. I am assistant manager of production. This way to see the magic, ma’am,’ he joked, as he led her across the yard to a concrete shed. Mair followed, not sure what he meant.

      Inside, four women squatted in a circle. They had shawls drawn over their heads and across the lower half of their faces. Between them towered a heap of fleece, thick curled clods of raw goat’s hair matted with dung, grease and twigs, looking exactly as Mair had seen it when it was stuffed into bags up on the plateau. There was no doubt that this was the untreated pashm fibre as it arrived by truck from distant Changthang. The women were teasing out the clumps by hand, removing the worst of the filth and sorting the hair into smaller heaps according to colour, from palest grey-white to dark brown. The air in the bare room seemed almost solid with the rancid odour of goat.

      Tinley made a small gesture of regret. ‘This is a colour-separating process. It can only be done by the human eyes.’ Then