‘I am Zahra Dasgupta.’ A hand was held out and warmly shook Mair’s.
Bruno introduced them: ‘This is Mair Ellis, Zahra. Mair has become a good friend of mine since Lotus died.’
Once he had spoken Lotus’s name he seemed to relax a little.
‘I’m so sorry about your child,’ Zahra said. ‘So very sorry. It is a terrible tragedy. How is your wife?’
‘She is in the States. We’re separated now, Zahra.’
The woman’s eyes moved from Bruno’s taut face to Mair’s, assessing them. There was a sharp brain behind the majestic exterior. Mair wanted to say, No, it’s not what you think: there are these two halves of a whole that Bruno and I hold and we’ve brought them here …
‘I am sorry for that too,’ Zahra said. She took Bruno’s arm and led him to a chair.
Farida brought the inevitable tray of tea with china cups and a brass samovar. She put out plates of cakes and embroidered napkins and Zahra rearranged them as soon as they were set down, the two of them getting in each other’s way and telling the other what to do. It was evident that they were long-term companions and friends rather than employer and servant. At last they were both satisfied and they all sat in the heavy plush armchairs with cups and plates dispersed between them.
Zahra said to Mair, ‘I knew this man when he was a small baby. A very sweet, good little baby he was. Growing up he was more like all boys, very noisy and causing disruption. He was driving his mother mad a lot of the time.’
‘Zahra, Mair doesn’t want to hear this,’ Bruno protested.
He was embarrassed because Zahra was treating Mair as if she were a girlfriend, and as soon as she realised as much, Mair felt a dull red blush colour her face and obstinately stay there.
Zahra and Farida looked at each other.
‘So you are making a holiday now in Delhi?’ Farida asked.
Zahra interrupted her, ‘No, no, no, you know that Bruno told me he had something most important to talk about.’ She sat back in her armchair, slippered feet placed side by side and hands folded across her stomach. ‘I am very curious to hear what it is.’ Her glance slid from Bruno to Mair.
The room went quiet.
Mair felt breathless as she reached into her bag. She unfolded the shawl from its wrapping and spread it over Zahra’s broad knees.
Farida instantly gave a grasshopper chirp and seized the nearest corner. Blinking, she held the soft fabric up to her cheek. ‘This is
kani
weaving. From my home in Kashmir.’
Mair slipped the photograph from a folder and laid it on the arm of Zahra’s chair. On the opposite arm she placed a little cellophane envelope containing a lock of gilt-brown hair. Farida had found the shawl’s reversed BB signature. ‘I know this work,’ she breathed. ‘From my own village.’ Her face shone.
‘What are these things?’ Zahra demanded. ‘Why do you bring them to me?’
‘It’s a long story. Mair will explain her part first,’ Bruno said.
‘Look at the picture,’ Mair suggested.
Zahra settled her spectacles on her nose and peered down. She breathed out through her nose, almost a snort. ‘Srinagar, I think.’
Mair pointed. ‘This is my grandmother, Nerys Watkins. She and her husband were Christian missionaries in Kashmir during the war.’
Farida bobbed upwards. She grabbed the picture and gazed at it. ‘Ness. This is Ness,’ she cried.
They all looked at her in amazement.
‘You
knew
my grandma?’ Mair wondered.
‘She was my best mother when I was a small girl. I remember all about her. There were songs and games. She was so kind, an angel.’
Mair held out her hand, and Farida grasped it in her tiny dry one.
Farida told her, ‘I can see now, your face. You have something like her here.’ She drew a circle round her own mouth and chin.
Mair thought, Whatever happens next, I am so grateful to have come this far.
Nerys had known this small, bright-eyed woman when Farida was a little girl. It was like holding hands with Nerys herself, across the divide of almost seventy years.
Yet again time rearranged itself, folding into new patterns.
She would almost certainly never know exactly what Zahra or Farida had meant to her grandmother, and why she had kept a lock of hair and a shawl hidden for so long, as if they were her most precious and secret possessions, but she had this human link that connected her directly to Nerys.
Bruno was smiling at her.
Mair pointed for the second time. ‘This one is a friend of my grandmother’s called Myrtle McMinn. And this is another friend of theirs, Caroline Bowen.’
Zahra shifted her weight. ‘I do not understand any of this.’ She pouted. ‘
I
found Farida, you know. My husband and I went to Srinagar when we were married and I made a visit to the school my mother told me about, a mission school, you see, where I was looked after. I was an orphan just like Farida,’ she explained to Mair. ‘There were many orphans in Kashmir. My mother Prita and father adopted me, took me away from that school to Switzerland.’
Mair couldn’t help but glance down at Caroline Bowen’s sweet English face.
‘When Dilip and I came to see the school the missionaries were gone. This happens, especially in Srinagar, which is a place very much changed for the worse. But the school was still there and Farida was helping the teachers. We talked, and she remembered me when I was two years old. Can you imagine that?’
Farida patted Zahra’s shoulder and laughed. ‘I never forgot her. I loved her so much I thought she was my own baby. But then she went away and I cried for a long time. I was so happy to see her again, a married lady. I had no husband, and my two brothers went to Pakistan many years ago.’
‘So she came here to live with me. I insisted on this,’ Zahra said, in triumph. ‘To be auntie to my boys, and sister to me.’ She rattled the cellophane envelope. ‘So. What are these other people to us, and this piece of hair?’
‘I think,’ Mair slowly said, ‘this lock of hair is yours. It was
with the shawl, and we found it put away among my mother’s things after my father died last year.’
Farida opened the envelope and tipped the contents into her hand. Zahra bent over it, pinching the hair in her fingers and holding it up to her head for Farida to compare.
There was no resemblance.
‘No,’ Zahra said.
‘It might be,’ Farida said.
They both laughed but uncertainty was kindling in their faces. They were apprehensive about what they might learn next.
Mair was glad to let Bruno take up the story.
‘As well as being my grandfather’s good friend, Rainer was a friend of these three women,’ he began.
‘It was wartime,’ Zahra remarked. ‘Many people made friends and lost them in those days.’
‘That’s true. In 1945, as you know, Rainer put his wife Prita and a child aboard a ship for England. They were met at Liverpool docks by an Englishman, a mountaineering friend of Rainer’s, who helped them with their onward journey to Switzerland. And when they arrived there, they were taken in by Victor Becker and his family.’
‘It was done for my father’s sake. My mother was always proud. He was a special man, she said to me, to have such friends as your grandfather Victor.’
Bruno smiled again. Mair saw that the ease from the cabin was coming back to him, and there was more than that – he was alive with interest in Zahra’s story.
Zahra leant forward. ‘My mother believed always that Rainer meant to return to us. He was killed in the car before he could come. But he did not abandon us.’
He nodded. ‘Zahra, Mair and I both believe that Rainer and his wife helped out a friend by taking her illegitimate baby out of India. By taking
you
away, to safety in Switzerland.’
‘My mother told me she and Rainer took me, cut my hair, dressed me as her boy until I was on the ship. There was danger,
but Prita was not sure why. Naturally Rainer would have made everything clear if he had not died.’
Mair leant forward too, touching the tip of her finger to where Caroline smiled in the picture. ‘Mrs Dasgupta, Rainer Stamm took this photograph. I think the third woman might be your mother.’
Zahra frowned. ‘
This
person, you think?’ She turned away and indicated one of the framed photographs that stood on a low table beside her. ‘Take a look, please. Here is my mother.’
In the picture Prita Stamm stood with her chin up, a small grandson hanging on to either hand.
‘I meant the woman who gave birth to you,’ Mair amended. ‘She is still alive, and she lives in Srinagar. I met her last year and I showed her these things.’
Zahra lifted her cup, very deliberately drank some tea, replaced the cup in the saucer. ‘If you know so much, then who was my father?’ Her lower lip protruded and her voice had cooled by several degrees.
Caroline’s lover must have been Kashmiri, and theirs could only have been a forbidden liaison, a wartime love affair, but she had no idea what kind of man he might have been. Not an honourable one, that seemed certain. Had Caroline loved him? Why hadn’t Ralph Bowen stood by his wife? The mysteries seemed to thicken, even though she had imagined them solved.
She could feel Bruno watching her and she wanted to turn to him, but she plunged on: ‘I don’t know that. I don’t think we will ever know, unless Caroline Bowen herself tells us.’
‘Do you have any proof of this theory?’
‘Firm documentary proof? No, none. There are only the letters that my grandmother wrote to Caroline and the story that Bruno and I have pieced together between us. But when I showed Caroline this shawl, she recognised it at once. “That belongs to Zahra. It’s her dowry shawl,” was what she said.’
There was a silence.
And then Zahra observed, ‘Mine is not such an uncommon
name.’ Her face showed her disapproval. ‘And my mother Prita made sure that my marriage was a proper one, with a suitable dowry. My own theory is somewhat different.
I
believe, you see, that Rainer was my real father.’
Mair thought, Yes, that’s equally plausible. Wartime, a magician mountaineer with pin-up looks, and a girl from the Vale of Kashmir. A girl Rainer couldn’t marry – perhaps because of her father’s anger or her brothers’ defence of her honour – but whose child he vowed to protect. He found a wife, a widow who had lost her own son, married her, made a will, and took care to send the two of them away to Switzerland and safety. Only then, at the last moment, did his plans somehow go awry.
Triumph glinted in Zahra’s eyes as she handed back Mair’s photograph. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ she pronounced. ‘Are you familiar with this principle?’
Bruno laughed. He left his seat and went to Zahra, putting his arm over her ample shoulders. ‘The simplest explanation is usually the correct one?’
‘Good boy.’
Mair began to protest but Bruno warned her with a look. She was angry at this intervention. He wasn’t going to stop her pronouncing what she knew to be true, not when it had taken her so long to uncover that truth. But his gaze didn’t waver, and a different, entirely contradictory feeling swept through her.
It wasn’t sweet or honeyed or even remotely comfortable – it was sharp, and thoroughly disconcerting, because she knew at that moment without any shadow of doubt that she was in love with him.
The words, whatever they were going to be, dried in her mouth.
Bruno’s face showed a flicker of amusement. His glance said that they understood each other. She wanted to go and kiss him, but she made herself sit still and concentrate.
Zahra laced her fingers. ‘I am right, you see. But these are
old, long-ago times. Why are we discussing them? Let’s talk about young people. They are the future. Bruno, please tell me, will it be painful if I show you and your friend some pictures of my grandsons?’
‘No, I’d like to see them,’ he said. He was still looking at Mair and she felt hot in the over-furnished room, and confused. It was unthinkable that Bruno might suspect she was in pursuit of him. Might he think she had engineered this whole trip to India as a way of getting closer to him? Surely not, when she had herself only just worked out these feelings.
Zahra and Farida were replacing cups on the tray, clearing space among cushions to lay out photograph albums, telling each other all the time where to find what they wanted and how to make room for it. Farida laid the shawl aside.
Mair put her photograph in its folder and quietly replaced it with the lock of hair in her handbag.
‘See, Bruno? This is little Sanjay – he is nearly six. He is a very clever boy. Already he is good at mathematics. His father tells us he is the best in his class.’
A long interlude followed in which Bruno looked at all the pictures and asked the right questions while Mair peered over his shoulder and made supplementary noises.
And then after the Dasgupta family news it was time for reciprocal questions about the senior Beckers and their neighbours, and commiserations because Bruno’s father wasn’t showing any signs of mental recovery. Farida brought in more tea and savoury snacks. Footsteps came across the courtyard and an elderly, oval-shaped man in a business suit appeared in the doorway.
Zahra called, ‘Dilip, you are here at last. Say hello to our visitors.’
Mr Dasgupta was bald, smiling, almost as light-skinned as his wife. He was courteous to Zahra’s connections from Switzerland but it was also clear that here was a man who was ready for his dinner. With polite formulations, invitations to stay and regretful refusals, the visit began to wind itself up.
Mair had worked out what she wanted to do. ‘Mrs Dasgupta,’ she began, ‘I’d like to ask you a favour.’
With only a glint over the spectacles, she said, ‘My dear, of course.’
‘For my grandmother Nerys’s sake, please will you keep the shawl? I’d like you to have it – you and Farida, of course – and I think that’s what Nerys would have wanted too. For months I was on a quest for its history. I went to Ladakh and Srinagar, even up to what’s left of Kanihama village to see where it was woven and embroidered.
‘I feel that in the end the shawl would be closer to home here with you, closer to its own history, rather than in England with me.’