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 realise that her intention had probably been to attract the mother’s attention as much as the child’s. They had also drawn a fair-sized crowd of onlookers because there weren’t many other distractions on offer in town on this end-of-season afternoon. She hoped the spectators would quickly move away.
‘It seems to have done the trick. Can I give you a hand with these?’ Mair brushed dirt off her hands and picked up the shopping, leaving the mother to scoop up her daughter and settle her across her hip with the same easy movement she had used in the bazaar.
‘Jumping lady,’ said the child in wonder, stretching a small hand to pat Mair’s face.
‘That’s right,’ her mother agreed. ‘Pretty amazing, huh?’ Her voice had a touch of the American south in it.
‘As a matter of fact it was rather shaky. I’m not quite sure what came over me. I wanted to stop your daughter crying.’
The other woman sighed. ‘You and me both. She’d set her sights on being with her dad this afternoon and ended up stuck with me instead. He’s gone to sort out guides and ponies – we’re leaving on a trek tomorrow. That’s what all this shopping’s about – what do you take in the way of supplies? Where are you heading? I’m Karen Becker, by the way. And this is Lotus.’
Lotus raised her hand and gave a queenly wave.
‘Mair Ellis. Hello, Lotus.’ Mair smiled.
The child was extraordinarily beautiful, with a broad forehead and a mouth like a cherub’s in a Renaissance painting.
‘I was on my way to get a cup of tea,’ she added.
Karen nodded across the road. ‘Great. We’re going to the salon, Lo, aren’t we? We have to get ourselves a pedicure before we trek a single step. Come with us, and we can chat. I’m sure they’ll give you tea.’
Mair was glad to escape from the staring crowd. The two women stepped over the gutter and picked their way between bullocks and auto-rickshaws to a glass-fronted shop with windows heavily draped in lace. ‘Ladies Only Beauty’, said the sign in the window.
Inside they found a cracked floor, not noticeably clean, dusty bare shelves, and a row of barber’s chairs. There was a smell of old-fashioned perming lotion mingled with incense and boiled laundry. A small flock of women in bright saris instantly surrounded Lotus, lifted her out of Karen’s arms and bore her off to the back of the shop. They started combing her white-blonde hair with trills of admiration. Lotus accepted the attention as no more than her due.
A smiling girl with a red-cheeked, perfectly round Tibetan face relieved them of the shopping. A moment later they were installed in adjacent chairs, facing their reflections in a blotchy mirror.
‘Go on. You may as well.’ Karen grinned.
Mair allowed her Tibetan attendant to unlace her Converse for her, then to steer her feet into a pink plastic foot spa. The motor thrummed under her soles and the water seethed. The whole scene was so incongruous that she couldn’t help laughing.
In the mirror Karen’s blue eyes met hers. ‘Tell me. You must be something like a capoiera dancer, right? We saw some of those street performers in Rio. Have you been there? A-mazing. I’d so love to be able to move like that. Not in a million years, though.’
Mair
