the kashmir shawl
Post on 28-Apr-2015
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The Kashmir Shawl By Rosie Thomas
Excerpt They ducked through some narrow lanes to yet another in an old wood and brick
façade. Tall windows were designed to admit the maximum amount of daylight for the
workers within. Almost all of the space in the small, silent room was taken up by three
wooden looms, primitive-looking affairs of beams and knotted string. Three young men
sat at the loom benches, intent on what they were doing, but when Mehraan spoke to the
nearest he sat back and allowed them to see his work by unpinning the black cloth that
protected the shawl length. Laid out in a tidy row across the breadth of it were hundreds
of kani bobbins, each one wound with a different shade of the hair-fine weft yarn. For
each row of the pattern, an intricate design of flowers on a black ground, Mair understood
that every one of the bobbins would have to be taken up in order and passed between the
warp threads. Each time, the exact number of threads had to be counted before one colour
gave way to the next. The pattern-maker’s instruc- tions were written out on a rough grid
pinned up in front of the weaver, a tumble of scribbled digits that looked like the
mathematical calculations of an early astronomer. Next to this was a sketch of the
finished design.
Mair let out the breath she had been holding.
It must take fifteen minutes of concentration, she calculated, to weave just one
single row of the shawl.
Mehraan asked another question, and the weaver indicated the amount of completed
design. It measured less than half a metre.
‘Three months,’ Mehraan translated.
To keep the finished price down, these designs consisted of two broad bands of
kani weaving on a plain ground. For an all-over design like hers, Mair could hardly
conceive of the amount of work involved. She found that her eyes were stinging, partly in
sympathy with the young men who strained over this exacting work all day, every day of
their lives, and partly in awe of the legacy that had somehow come into her possession.
She felt more than ever determined to pursue the shawl’s history and discover how it had
come to be in her family.
Rosie Thomas is the author of numerous critically acclaimed, bestselling novels.
She has won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice, for her novels Iris & Ruby and Sunrise. Born in a small village in northern Wales, Thomas discovered a love of
traveling and mountaineering when her children were grown. In the years since, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked
in the footsteps of Shackleton on South Georgia Island, and spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica. To research The Kashmir Shawl, she traveled to
Ladakh and Kashmir. Her website is www.rosiethomasauthor.com.
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