of saying ‘England,’ and naming the pleasant south-coast market town where she lived within easy reach of Hattie and several other friends, and where her most recent job had been located, Mair surprised herself by answering, ‘North Wales.’ Her childhood home was now occupied by a businessman from Manchester and his young family, so there were no ties left, except her brother and sister and their memories. But even so, or perhaps because of this, the valley and the years of her childhood lived within its limits were much in her mind. She missed home, now it had been sold and she could never go back. She clung to the thought of her grandparents and their lives in this strange place.
‘And you?’ Mair returned quickly.
‘Utrecht. Are you on holiday?’
‘Ye-es. Just travelling.’
The rucksack lay against her hip. The shawl was folded in a pouch inside it.
The woman sighed. ‘We are not finding it so easy on these roads. My husband is unwell.’
From behind the bus came the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up. Between themselves, the Israeli youths found this uproariously funny.
The bus ground over one more high pass and a huge vista opened ahead. Their destination was a high, flat, remote place north of the mountains. Geographically, it was part of the Tibetan plateau although still within India.
Changthang was where the nomad peoples of eastern Ladakh traditionally herded and grazed their flocks of goats. Up here, the climate was so cold and harsh that the animals produced the densest, lightest fleece to insulate themselves. The nomads moved the flocks throughout the year in search of the sparse grazing. The goats’ fodder and the water they drank were unpolluted, and their wool was the purest it could have been.
From her reading, Mair knew that this was where the finest pashm came from, the raw material for Kashmir shawls, so it was from here that her precious, mysterious shawl had almost certainly begun its journey as the wool of a pashmina goat.
When she was finally alone in her tent at the tourist camp, she took the pouch out of her rucksack and examined the shawl once more by the light of her head-torch. The faint spicy scent caught in the soft folds, she now knew, was the scent of India itself. The central motif of the shawl’s woven design was a peacock’s tail fan. A deep double border enclosed the centre panel, with lush paisley shapes filling the angles, and there were broad bands of exuberant foliage at either end. The bands, which were partly embroidered, gave an almost brocaded effect. For all its beauty, though, the shawl was battered and worn. There were lines of fading that showed where it had lain for decades in the same folds; the intricate embroidery was unravelling in places, and in others it was rubbed away altogether. There were blotches of ink in one corner, an irregular yellow stain in another. Mair drew it over her knees, absently tracing the arabesques of embroidery and smoothing the knotted fringes, trying to read the shawl’s history as if it were a map.
Early in the morning their guide rounded up Mair, the Dutch and the Israelis while it was still barely light, and drove them up a track that was no more than a slightly less rocky channel between the grey boulders littering the plain. They reached the shores of a vast lake, where the water was filmed with ice and the ground was powdered with snow. At the lake’s edge stood a handful of single-storey houses, little more than huts, set between a line of bare poplars. Yaks, with their long hair almost brushing the snow, moved ponderously between the rocks. In preparation for winter the Changpa nomad families were bringing down their herds from the more remote pastures. There were circles of low stone walls close to the lake, and the early arrivals had flung goat-hair tarpaulins over these to make shelters for themselves and their animals. Smoke 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
