The Kashmir Shawl

We were at The Gardens, Mid Valley, standing in the queue to have dinner at Sushi Zanmai with another two friends. But the queue didnt seem to be moving at all. Thats when we noticed, the bookstore, BORDERS was just next to the restaurant. So my friend and i decided to let our hubbies stand at the queue while we went to the bookshop for a quick shopping :) And as i browsed through the racks and displays of books, The Kashmir Shawl caught my attention, for a few reasons...one, i LOVE shawls ! two, Kashmir reminded me of the snow capped mountains in Switzerland which i recently visited, three, of course because it was about India ! and above all , coz i was curious how a simple shawl could be made the central character of a novel. I mean how much of a story could be linked to a SINGLE shawl ??  So i grabbed this book to read the outline at the back. Just as i guessed, it sounded pretty interesting. So without thinking further i took it right up to the counter and paid for it....and off i went back to the queue.

The story begins with the exquisite antique shawl found by Mair ( the grand daughter of the person who owned this shawl long time ago ) . Mair becomes curious about how her grandmother could afford such an expensive shawl and decides to trace its history which stretches way back into 1850's  in war torn India. She embarks on a quest all the way to Kashmir from England to unravel the mystery behind this shawl....and thats how the story begins. I wouldnt get into details as you can always browse or read the book itself. 

I only wish to share my thoughts about how sometimes a simple thing like a shawl could hold so much. It explains the Pashmina weavers and traders in Kashmir and their lifestyle then. The traditional weaving method takes months to complete a single piece of shawl in painstaking process which requires absolute concentration, energy, patience and of course love !! 

I wish to share excerpts from the novel which explains how important shawls were to these people:

"The finest items were made in the hope that the completed shawl would find a wealthy buyer, perhaps to be worn for a wedding or laid in as part of a bride's dowry. In Kashmiri families shawls of all grades represented the women's security. They could be cut up , sold in pieces to buy food or pay debts, retrieved and pieced together again."

"Shawls were given as gifts, hoarded as treasure, passed on from mother to daughter. The finest examples, the Kani pieces like Mair's grandmother's, these were hardly made nowadays and the techniques were all but lost. They were too costly and the weavers couldn't any longer afford to spend months bent over a loom in the hope of their shawl fetching a good price when it was finally completed. "

" Laid out in a tidy row across the breadth of it were hundreds of kani bobbins, each one wound with a different shade of 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 instructions were written out on a rough grid pinned up in front of the weaver, a tumble of scribbled digits that looked like mathematical calculations of an early astronomer.

Mair let out a breath she had been holding.

It must take fifteen minutes of concentration, she calculated to weave just one single row of the shawl. Less than half a metre takes three months to be completed."

Now, how would you feel if you owned such a shawl !! how precious it would be. But then, such things dont seem to attract people nowadays...all we want is ... FAST FAST FAST....who on earth today , has the time to sit on a single piece of shawl for THREE months...!! But then, seriously, where are we all rushing to ? it makes me laugh when i think of it sometimes, the earth is swirling in the same speed for billions of years...and yet what gives us the idea that we need to rush into everything in order to live well ! yoga tells you to breath slowly...the slower the better, but do we even remember we are breathing while we are rushing like mad?? as my friend Kym always mentions " running like headless chickens" !!haha isnt that we are doing ?

Anyway this story about shawls also reminded me of my mom's wedding saree which is about 47 years old now but still looks as good as new. Such beautifully woven silk with gorgeous shades of orange, gold and earthy colours. The gold  thread still glows beautifully. Now i am tempted to follow the history of my moms saree :) Though i know the village from where it came from, just curious to know how it was made and by whom. Wouldnt it be great if i found out !?? hahaha...me crazy as always, having crazy ideas :) But it could be possible, because those days, the Kashmiri shawl weavers had the habit of weaving a sign like alphabets or symbols on the shawls to identify the weavers. So , who knows,my moms saree might have a history too :)  

Nature has thought us that anything that grows slowly , grows the strongest. Like the mighty oak ,or chinese bamboo ! So, lets take time to weave our lives, a single thread at a time, a different colour at a time, and let it finish elegantly to last forever ! :) 

Lets be a Kashmir Shawl .......