He described himself as a businessman but he had a poetic side to him. She asked him about his work and undammed a torrent of speech. When he told her about the handicrafts he bought and sold his voice was full of feeling. He spoke about the origins of the craft of numdah rug making in Central Asia, in Yarkand and Sinkiang, in the days of the old Silk Route, and the words Samarkand and Tashkent made his eyes shine with ancient glory, even though Tashkent and Samarkand, these days, were faded, down-at-heel dumps. Papier-mâché, too, had come to Kashmir from Samarkand. “A prince of Kashmir in the fifteenth century was put in prison there for many years and learned this craftwork in jail.” Ah, the jails of Samarkand, said the sparkle in his eyes, where a man could learn such things! He told her about the two parts of the creative process, the sakhtsazi or manufacture, the soaking of waste paper, the drying of the pulp, the cutting of the shape, the layering with glue and gypsum, the pasting of layers of tissue paper, and then the naqashi or decorative phase, the painting and lacquering. “So many artists together make every piece, the final work is not one man’s alone, it is the product of our whole culture, it is not only made in but in fact made by Kashmir.”
When he described the weaving and embroidery of the shawls of Kashmir his voice dropped with awe. He compared them lyrically to Gobelin tapestries though he had never seen such things. He fell into technical language, the decoration is formed by weft threads interlocked where the colors change, and such was his boyish excitement at the weavers’ skill that she, listening, was excited too. He told her about sozni embroidery techniques, which could be so skillful that the same motif would appear on both sides of the shawl in different colors, about satin-stitch and ari work and the hair of the ibex goat and the legendary jamawar shawls. By the time he was done, apologizing for boring her, she was already half in love.
But she had not come to Kashmir to fall in love. What then was this man doing, loving her? What, when his father was not two weeks dead, was that foolish expression doing on his face, his admittedly handsome face, that expression which needed no translation? And what was wrong with her, by the way, why was she lingering here in this strange garden that seemed immune to history, setting aside her quest and listening instead to the buzzing of these innocent bees, wandering between these hedges which no evil could penetrate, breathing this jasmine air unpolluted by the smell of cordite, and passing her days bathed in this stranger’s worshipful regard, listening to his interminable accounts of handicraft manufacture and his recitals of poetry in his admittedly beautiful voice, and somehow insulated from the city’s daily noises of marching feet, clenched-fist demands and the age’s insoluble complaints? Feeling was rising in her also, it was necessary to concede this, and though it had been her habit not to surrender to feeling, to control herself, she understood that this feeling was strong. Perhaps it would prove stronger than her ability to resist it. Perhaps not. She was a woman from far away who had defended her heart for a long time. She did not know if she could satisfy his needs, did not see how she could, was amazed that she was even thinking about satisfying them. This was not her purpose. She felt shocked, even betrayed, by her emotions. Olga Simeonovna had warned her about the essentially sneaky nature of love. “It don’t approach from where you’re looking,” she had said. “It will creep up from behind your left ear and hit you on the head like a rock.”
At night he sang for her and his voice kept her trapped in his spell. He was enough his father’s son to know something of the music of Kashmir and could play, albeit falteringly, the santoor. He sang the muquam ragas of the classical form known as Sufiana Kalam. He sang her the songs of Habba Khatoon, the legendary sixteenth-century poet-princess, who introduced lol or lyric love poetry to Kashmir, songs of the pain of her separation from her beloved Prince Yusuf Shah Chak, imprisoned by the Mughal emperor Akbar in faraway Bihar-“my garden has blossomed into colorful flowers, why are you away from me?”-and he apologized for not having a woman’s voice. He sang the irregular-meter bakhan songs of the Pahari musical style. The music had its effect. For five days she stayed in the enchanted garden, soporific with unlooked-for pleasure. Then on the sixth day she awoke and shook herself and asked him for help. “Pachigam.” She spoke the name as if it were a charm, an open-sesame that would roll back a boulder from the door of a treasure cave inside which her mother glistened and gleamed like hoarded gold. Pachigam, a place from a fable that needed to be made real. “Please,” she said. And he, declining to mention the dangers of the country roads, agreed to take her, to drive her into fable, or at least into the past. “I do not know the situation in that village and to my shame cannot tell you what you want to know,” he told her. “The village came under crackdown some time back. This was reported. It was my father who had contacts there. I regret I have not been sufficiently active in the culture area. I am a businessman.” What did that mean, crackdown, she wanted to know. Was anyone, is anyone, what happened. He did not tell her how brutal an event a crackdown could be. “I don’t know,” he repeated wretchedly. “As to specifics I am regrettably unaware.” But we will go and find out, won’t we, she said. “Yes,” he miserably assented. “We can go today.”
She sat in his olive-green Toyota Qualis and when they drove out of the gates of his house, that tiny Shangri-La, that miraculous island of calm in the middle of a war zone, she gave him a sidelong look, half expecting him to wither and die, to age horribly before her eyes as immortals do when they leave their magical paradise. But he remained himself, his beauty and grace undimmed. He saw her looking at him and was vain enough to blush. “Your home, your garden, is so beautiful,” she said quickly, seeking to disguise the light in her eyes: too late. His blush deepened. A man who blushed was irresistible, it could not be denied. “In my childhood, it was a heaven inside a heaven,” he said. “But now Kashmir is no longer heavenly and I am not a gardener like my father. I fear the house and garden will not last, without.” He stopped in midsentence. “Without what?” she teased him, guessing the unspoken words, but he blushed again and concentrated on the road ahead. Without a woman’s touch.
Kashmir in spring, the leaves budding on the chinars, the swaying poplars, the blossom on the fruit trees, the cradling mountains circled all around. Even in its time of darkness it was still a place of light. How easy it was, at first, to avert the gaze from the burned-out houses, the tanks, the fear in every woman’s eye, the different terror in the eyes of the men. But slowly the spell of Sardar Harbans Singh’s garden wore off. Yuvraj’s mood darkened also. “Tell me,” she said. “I want to know.” “It is hard to speak of such things,” he said. This is real life. “I need to know,” she said. Awkwardly, full of euphemisms at first and then more plainly, he told her about the two devils tormenting the valley. “The fanatics kill our gents and the army shames our ladies.” He named certain towns, Badgam, Batmaloo, Chawalgam, where militants had murdered locals. Shootings, hangings, stabbings, decapitations, bombs. “This is their Islam. They want us to forget but we remember.” Meanwhile the army used sexual assault to demoralize the population. In Kunan Poshpora, twenty-three women had been raped by soldiers at gunpoint. Systematic violation of young girls by entire Indian army units was becoming commonplace, the girls taken to army camps, naked, and strung up from trees, their breasts cut with knives. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for the ugliness of the world. His left hand shook on the steering wheel. She placed her right hand over it. It was the first time they had touched.