She was wearing a loose white shirt over a tiered blue linen skirt and a pair of mud-encrusted boots. She was talking, pointing and laughing all at the same time. The man with her was looking in the other direction. He was even taller than his wife and suntanned, with coal-black hair and eyebrows and a half-grown beard. Between them was an angelic child, a little girl of about two. She had the same curling mass of hair as her mother, but the colour was white-blonde. Her head rotated as she looked from one parent to the other. Then she stuck her tiny arms into the air and yelled, ‘Carry.’
The woman was still laughing and gesturing. She stooped and, with the other arm, swept the child off her feet. She settled the little girl astride her hip and strode across to the food vendor. The air shimmered above a vat of boiling oil. The child pulled out a coil of her mother’s amazing hair and peered down through it, as if it were a veil, at the heads passing beneath her.
The man turned to see what his wife was pointing at. The vendor fished in the boiling vat with a ladle and brought up some shiny toffee-brown squiggles. He tipped them into a paper cone and handed this over in exchange for some rupees. The woman dipped in her fingers and extracted a deep-fried squiggle. She blew casually on it, then handed it to the child. The little girl bit into whatever it was with relish.
The woman tilted her head back and dropped some of the food into her own mouth. She chewed eagerly and laughed, wiping the grease from her chin. Health and satisfaction seemed to shine out of her. Her free hand floated lightly to her husband’s hip and rested there. It was a gesture of possession and affection, as intimate as it was casual. She steered him away from the vendor, and from Mair’s scrutiny, even though none of the three had so much as glanced in her direction. They strolled deeper into the maze of stalls. She followed them with her eyes, the red-gold and black heads, with the child’s pale one bouncing between them, until they turned a corner and passed out of her sight.
She stayed rooted where she was, despite her urge to run after the family. The food vendor shovelled another scoop of his mysterious wares into the cauldron; the oil sizzled and spat.
In the hubbub of the market Mair’s loneliness intensified.
She had plenty of friends, and had had the usual series of relationships, but there had been no one she could imagine spending the rest of her life with, not the way her sister Eirlys had undertaken to do with her Graeme, or Dylan with his Jackie.
She made herself take a deep breath of bazaar smells, and noted the ambling cows, the hens scratching on a hill of rubbish, the Buddhist monk returning from his trip to the prayer wheel, and the steady surge of people going about their business. Colours and scents and fresh impressions flooded her head, and her spirits floated again. She turned and retraced her steps, deliberately heading in the opposite direction to the glorious strangers.
The drive out to Changthang, eastwards from Leh, almost to what had once been the border with Tibet – and was now China – took the best part of a day. The other members of the sightseeing tour in a small Toyota bus were two portly, middle-aged Dutch couples and three Israeli boys, who managed to be rowdy yet noticeably unfriendly. They sprawled in the back, guffawing over the separate accompaniments of their MP3s. Curled up in her seat and braced against the jolting, Mair had plenty of opportunity on the long drive to reflect, and remember.
Before leaving for India she had done as much research as she could into her grandparents’ history. Three months ago, in the on-line edition of a book called Hope and the Glory of God, subtitled With the Welsh Missionaries in India, she had read the entry for Parchedig Evan William Watkins (1899–1960).
Evan Watkins had been educated at the University College of North Wales, and the College of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. After his ordination he had heard the call to work in India, and in 1929 he had travelled out to Shillong in what was then Assam. Subsequently he served as district missionary to Shangpung.
Since reading his clerical biography, she had regularly tried to conjure images of Evan Watkins, in his black coat and dog collar, as he gamely preached Nonconformism to the people of remote Indian hill villages. Had he thundered from his makeshift chapel pulpit on a steaming day with the monsoon rains drumming on the tin roof?
Since her arrival in the Indian Himalaya she had tried harder still to picture him, but the clash of cultures was too brutal to generate any kind of image.
According to his entry in the book, Parchedig Watkins had returned to Wales in 1938, where he had met and married Nerys Evelyn Roberts, born in 1909. In 1939 the couple had sailed from Liverpool, bound for Bombay, aboard SS Prospect.
That was easier to picture. Mair saw the sunset over the Suez Canal, and heard a band playing for the dancers in the second-class saloon. Probably the minister wouldn’t have had much time for the foxtrot, but she wondered if the young Mrs Watkins had been of the same mind, or whether she had sipped her lemonade and watched the laughing couples with a touch of wistfulness.
The Reverend Evan and Mrs Watkins were subsequently called to give service to the new mission of Leh, far up in Ladakh, where the minister became responsible for the work of missionary outreach throughout the region. Many roads in his territory were impassable for seven months of the year, the biographer noted, and electricity was almost unknown.
Mair looked out of the bus window at the stark landscape, and the purple-grey mountains rearing into the empty blue sky. The unmade road ahead zigzagged towards a distant pass in a series of pale hairpins scratched out of the rock and dust. Along this road giant trucks with painted fronts like fairground rides hooted and skidded. The small figures of the Welsh preacher and his wife still refused to take shape in her imagination, here or anywhere else in the Himalaya.
The rest of the entry was brief. After the war, the clergy-man’s poor health had forced him to return to Wales. Evan Watkins retained a strong interest in the work of the missionary services, but his health never recovered from the rigours of the Indian climate and he had died in 1960, leaving his widow and one daughter, born in 1950.
That daughter had been Mair’s mother, Gwen Ellis, née Watkins.
Gwen had died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage when her youngest child was barely into her teens. It was one of Mair’s greatest regrets now that, as an averagely self-absorbed and dismissive thirteen-year-old, she had never asked her mother to tell her a single thing about Evan and Nerys’s exotic years as missionaries in India.
The bus pulled in at a roadside stall selling tea and snacks. The Israeli youths leapt up at once and barged their way past Mair and the Dutch couples. Before climbing out to ease her cramped legs, Mair picked up the rucksack from the seat beside her and slipped the strap of it over one shoulder. She kept it pinned to her side with the pressure of her elbow.
‘Where are you from?’ one of the Dutch wives asked her, as they sipped heavily sweetened tea from the vendor’s Thermos. A column of Indian Army trucks ground slowly past, part of the border defence forces. Young soldiers with guns at the ready peered at them over the tailgates.
Instead 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