The Kashmir Shawl (24 page)

There was no message from Karen.

Mair quickly read through the handful of new emails.

Hattie had written in reply to one of hers:

You sound sad, intrepid one. If you aren’t enjoying your self any more, why not come on home? I want to see you! Try not to worry about the little girl. There’s nothing you can do, and no news is probably good news. Miss you xxxxx

Try not to worry
was much easier said than done. But Mair had no intention of turning for home just because she felt momentarily displaced, and because of her fears for Bruno and his family. Tomorrow she would renew her investigation of the shawl’s history.

She wrote back cheerfully to Hattie, then went and sat in the bar, a deserted space manned by an old waiter in a maroon jacket. With her second glass of wine, she ordered a plate of chips. They came with a plastic tub of ketchup and she dipped each pallid, salty chip into the tub as she ate, studying the printout photograph of three women that she had propped against the water jug.

The laughing faces shone out at her.

Framing them was the diagonal of carved wood, and still water patched with lily-pads. It was little enough to go on but now she had seen the lake and the houseboats for herself she was convinced that this must be the backdrop.

Her grandmother
had
been in Srinagar.

The unknown story teased her imagination again, momentarily displacing her anxiety for the Beckers. Mair ate the last of her chips, which were now cold and greasy. She wiped her fingers and slipped the photograph back into her pocket. The envelope containing the lock of silky brown hair was there too.

Tomorrow, she thought.

The street outside was still only minimally lit and the lake beyond was a black expanse with the looming hulks of houseboats. Mair was looking towards the jetty and the handful of boatmen, one of whom crouched beside a spirit stove burning with a coronet of yellow-blue flame. She was peripherally aware of a group of armed Indian Border Security Force paramilitary troopers lounging at the tail of their parked Gipsy pickup, of the traffic having eased, and of the crowds of pedestrian passers-by being mostly men in their long grey or brown shirts topped off with woollen jerkins.

There was a flash of light and the street exploded.

In the millisecond that followed, her retinas burnt by the
white blaze, Mair was conscious of silence in which debris showered through the air, the shock of the detonation that pierced her bones, and then a blast that blew her backwards against a shop wall. She was pinned there for an instant before sliding to a sitting position as her legs gave way beneath her. Grit pattered on her shawled head, and she drew up her knees and arms to protect herself.

She had no idea how long she hunched there, hearing her own rasping breath as the debris stopped falling out of the sky, and screams began to rip through the night.

She was just lifting her head as another explosion came, a sickening
whump
as the BSF Gipsy burst into flame. She heard rather than saw fire engulf it as people came running by, flying in both directions. There was a close-quarters
rat-tat
that Mair had never in her life heard outside a cinema but that she knew was real gunfire. Bullets were zipping through the gravel. She buried her head again, hearing her own whimper of abject terror as a tiny addendum to the shrieks of pain and confused shouting that now filled the street.

A police van skidded down the road in front of her. Against the blazing shell of the Gipsy she saw that all the passers-by had melted into the shelter of shops and hotels, except for two huddled shapes lying prone in the dirt and a cluster of people bent over them. One pair of bloodstained legs wore the khaki of the BSF troopers. An elderly man with a delta of blood covering his face was being helped away by two others.

She realised that the brief bout of shooting was over. Uniformed men eddied between her and the injured.

Mair looked in the other direction and saw that the door of the hotel from which she had emerged only seconds ago was held open. A uniformed bellboy jerkily beckoned to her.

She raised herself on to her hands and knees, straightened up and began running towards him. Whorls of light from the explosion’s flash still revolved in the backs of her eyes, making it hard to move in a straight line. The bellboy grasped her wrist and propelled her into the lobby. It was quiet and warm inside,
with two or three people standing beside a desk, the receptionist urgently murmuring on the telephone, the same vase of gladioli that she had noticed earlier on her way from the computer terminal in the business centre.

It was hard to believe that the scene she had just witnessed lay only a few yards away.

‘Where you stay, madam?’ the bellboy asked.

Mair told him.

‘You go back soon, soon. Maybe wait here a little while.’

Obediently she crossed to a group of chairs and sat down. Her hands were shaking and the echo of gunfire still popped in her ears. After a few minutes she ordered tea, and drank it while police and army vehicles trundled past the glass door. A thin trickle of pedestrians started up again and, as if to emphasise the rapid return to business, the power came back on. Everything was illuminated, even a yellow and blue neon cola sign that flashed its reflection into the lake. The noise of generators died away, leaving only the buzz of traffic.

Mair called over a waiter and paid for her tea. She shook some of the dust and grit out of her shawl and wrapped it round her head again. Then she walked back into the night. The first person she saw, standing on the jetty, was Farooq. He had come out to look for her.

The Gipsy was now a blackened shell with smoke curling from its melted interior. The injured had been removed, leaving only a dark sticky patch in the dirt. A barrier of white tapes had been strung around the area and a trio of police, weapons clearly on show, guarded the perimeter. Apart from a row of broken windows, some shop walls blackened with smoke and a noticeable thinning of the evening traffic, there was little else to show what had just happened.

Mair crossed to Farooq’s side of the road. He waved at her with relief. ‘You are not hurt, madam,
inshallah
?’

‘No, I’m all right. What about the soldier, and the others? Was it a bomb?’

He folded his hands and bowed in the direction of a waiting
shikara
. As they were paddled away from the jetty she asked the question again.

Farooq spoke briefly to the boatman. ‘I hear it was maybe a grenade, madam. Some soldiers and some people of town were injured. It is very bad for Srinagar.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly.

In the morning, sitting on the veranda of
Solomon and Sheba
in the eggshell light of a crisp autumn day, she read the report in the English-language newspaper. Bollywood tunes and chatter were drifting from next door and Farooq’s white-capped head bobbed at the rear of the kitchen boat. Last evening, she read, five civilians and two BSF troopers had been injured in a grenade attack on a BSF patrol vehicle in the centre of town. The senior superintendent of police, the report continued, stated that a militant of the Hizbul Mujahideen had also been seriously wounded in the subsequent exchange of fire.

The story was told in the barest outline and occupied only the top quarter of the front page, next to the pictures of an outbreak of fire at an hotel in another part of the city. There was no further coverage inside the paper. Mair knew that outbreaks of violence between insurgents and the Indian security forces were so frequent that they caused only a temporary stir, at least for outside observers. The lack of public attention given to them by the authorities was certainly deliberate.

A
shikara
was working its way down the line of houseboats, most of which were empty of guests. It was the flower vendor known – from the painted-tin sign above the canopy of his boat – as Mr Marvellous. He fastened a line at the steps of
Solomon and Sheba
and stood up, rising out of a gaudy sea of cut flowers, his arms full of scarlet, crimson and orange blooms. His smile beamed out at full wattage. ‘Madam, for you today very good fortune. Please take all these, just three hundred rupees. Not many customers for me.’

Mair didn’t even try to bargain. She reached out for the double armful and buried her face in the cool, dewy petals.
Marvellous paddled away before she could change her mind, and Farooq tutted at such conspicuous over-payment.

‘They are so beautiful,’ she said.

Something had happened. Until last night Srinagar and its people had seemed sealed away, unfathomable for all the showy beauty of the lakes and mountains. Then she had seen the faces in the street last night, and the way people had got up afterwards and gone on with their lives despite the violence that boiled up around them, and she had begun to interpret the place in a different way. Srinagar was battered, impoverished, decaying into its own arterial waterways, but it was proud. A seed of affection sprouted inside her, fertilised by admiration.

Farooq sidled past, armed with a rag and a tin of polish. He worked with swipes over the table. ‘Perhaps, madam, you will be going back to England now.’ He eyed her, not wanting to lose his only guest, wishing at the same time to be rid of her anomalous presence.

‘No,’ Mair said lightly. ‘Not just yet.’

Later, in the fourth shop she visited in the neighbourhood of the Bund, the middle-aged shopkeeper took her grandmother’s shawl out of her hands. He walked to the window of his shop, screwed a lens into his eye and examined the workmanship. By now, she was used to this procedure. While she waited Mair looked at the display of expensive modern pashminas in tasteful tourist-friendly colours, the highest-priced ones with pleasingly contrasted bands of hand-embroidered paisley design. She remembered the flocks of goats on the sleet-raked Changthang plain, and the processing plant in Leh. This shop on the Bund in Srinagar represented the heart of the final stage of the yarn’s journey, although sadly it lacked one essential presence.

There were no customers to purchase the lovely goods.

In each of the four shops, she had been the sole browser. She could only hope that somewhere along the links that radiated from here, in the boutiques of five-star hotels elsewhere in India or the expensive shops of Fifth Avenue and Bond Street,
there would be plenty of interested women with money to spend.

At the rear of the shop a bead curtain shivered, even though there was no draught. Mair was being watched, probably by the female members of the shopkeeper’s staff or family.

The man returned to the counter. ‘Very worn condition.’ He sighed inevitably, dropping his lens into a drawer and closing it with a sharp click. He rearranged the shawl folds to expose the yellow stain, and picked at the tiny frayed ends of silk-stitched blossoms. The limpid colours of leaves and flowers revealed themselves as exactly true to nature, now that Mair had seen them in their proper setting. She smiled at the man. It was evident from the most casual glance at her heirloom, alongside the modern versions, that it was an exquisite piece of work. As if she had ever thought otherwise.

‘What can you tell me about it?’

The man shrugged. He pointed to the tiny reversed BB signature and the accompanying symbols. ‘Seventy years date. It is right in time, but this, this sign, is from very small workshop of finest quality. Finished since long ago.
Kani
work, yes. To stitch on top, for effect like this, I have seen only once before. Your shawl is nice, you see, but it is copied from real makers. If not, it would be for museum.’ He paused, to let his verdict sink in. ‘A pity. But I will give you fair price, if you like to sell.’

Mair smiled again. The beads at the back of the shop faintly tinkled in the incense-rich air. ‘Thank you. I will keep it.’

‘Maybe you look at new shawls. Presents for your friends, you know. Christmas comes soon.’

He was a Kashmiri salesman like every other, already spreading armfuls of merchandise over his counter.

‘Maybe next time.’

She had walked a hundred yards along the street, thinking about where she might go to drink tea and eat lunchtime yoghurt when a hand pulled at her sleeve. She whirled round, tightening her grasp on the bag that contained her shawl, to
see an old woman, her face covered with a white scarf.

‘What is it? What do you want?’ Mair blurted, pointlessly in English. The only answer was a scrap of paper that was shoved into her hand before the woman turned and hurried away into the crowd. Mair unscrewed the paper and looked at what was clearly an address.

The place hadn’t been easy to find. It was buried in the alleyways of the old town and she had asked a dozen different people for directions, gesturing and signing vigorously all the way. She had walked or been led through refuse-clogged yards where hens clucked between sagging huts, past the open-fronted workshops of dyers and tanners, past windows that gave glimpses of women squatting at carpet looms, and the shanty-shops that sold rice and dried beans from rows of open-mouthed sacks. At every corner there was a thread of waterway, viscid black or blanketed with green weed. But now she was at her destination. A toothless old man sitting in a broken plastic chair in the middle of an alley waved her to an open doorway.

Mair tapped on the doorpost as she peered into a dim passageway. ‘Hello?’ she called. And then repeated, louder, ‘Hello?’

A pair of tracksuited legs appeared at the top of a flight of stairs. A voice asked, ‘Excuse me? What do you look for?’

Mair didn’t wait for an invitation. Walking in and starting up the stairs, she saw a young man in a Nike hooded top. He would have passed unnoticed in the high street back at home, even with his black beard and skullcap. ‘I’m not sure. I was given this address, and I wanted to show this to somebody …’ She extricated the shawl from her bag as she spoke and held it up like a backstage pass. The young man didn’t exactly bar her way, but he didn’t stand aside either. ‘I was led to believe that someone here might recognise my shawl,’ she said, raising her voice.