He pauses.
‘Maybe your husband wear boots? Maybe you send me second-hand boots from your country?’
The Tree Of Life
She’s flat on her face. ‘Fuck,’ she says out aloud. Her canvas bag is lying in the dirt ahead of her, a metre out of her reach.
Someone helps her up, and restores her bag to her hand. She looks up into a black moustache in a fleshy, pock-marked face.
‘No bones broken I hope,’ says the black moustache. ‘This is being a bad footpath with all these tree roots.’
She has a bad pain in her knee. She wants to brush the light brown dust off her white trousers and shirt, but all she can do is stand there.
‘I guess I’m winded. Thanks for picking me up.’
‘Come and sit a moment, that was a big fall.’ After that, it’s like a sudden love affair.
‘I’m not sure I can walk yet, oh yes I can, thanks.’ The hand on her elbow guides her through the pain in her knee and into the shop whose window she’d glanced at just before she fell. The window displays carpets in bright reds, oranges and blues, silver necklaces studded with coral and lapis hanging in the foreground. As she limps through the doorway she reads the sign, Ladakh Arts – The Gift Shop, above it.
She sits on a stool at the counter and discovers an Aladdin’s cave. This impression is reinforced when a tray with two cups of chai appears before her.
‘Please drink, you will feel better,’ Aladdin says.
‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she says, and sips the tea, which smells of honey and tastes strong and gingerish. It’s a small space, the walls smothered in carpets, the ceiling a tent formed by fabric embroidered with stars and moons, glistening with sequins. Glass cases hold yellow, green and purple fabrics, brass and sandstone figurines of Ganesh, the elephant god, and a many-armed deity whose name she can’t remember, rings laid out on trays, tiny wooden dolls’ houses and wooden monkeys and velvet trays with necklaces hang on shelves behind Aladdin. A perfume, partly sandalwood, partly fabric dye, softens the air.
‘What a funky shop,’ she says.
‘Funky?’
‘Yes, you know, super duper, sick, awesome, wicked. Get the drift?’
‘Sick?’
‘Beautiful,’ she says.
Aladdin still looks mystified. Then he laughs.
She gets up, tests her knee, and steps outside to dust herself off. Aladdin hands her a rag. It feels damp.
‘It’s clean. I have no water here, you can wipe your face and hands.’
Use of the rag freshens her up. The equivalent of a Wet One. She sits down again to finish the chai and makes a mental note to look up Ladakh in her guide book. Aladdin goes behind the shop and comes back unfolding a map.
‘Here is Ladakh,’ he points to the very top.
‘Your stuff sure travels to get all the way down here. You’d better show me some of your funky carpets.’
The first carpet he unrolls with a click of his wrists so that it stops just at her feet, is a tree of life motif, framed by a Moghul arch, in pale blues, pinks, greens, soft browns, showing unicorns, butterflies and birds nestling in the branches. Her hands stroke its soft pile. She feels blown away by this carpet, so she remains silent.
‘Silk on silk’, Aladdin intones, preparing to roll out another.
‘Hang on, just let me look at this one.’ It is the lightning flash, the instant recognition of the known in the unknown. She loves it.
The motifs of the carpet are childhood revisited, a world before adult understandings and responsibilities change everything. It’s the life of swimming at a beach where the water is clear through to the light-coloured sand where schools of baby fish swim. It’s playing basket ball in the backyard with her sisters and the boy next door, jumping, reaching for the ball, up to the ring with it, and all over again, waiting for one’s turn. It’s stories with her father at bedtime. He sits with her, sometimes with a picture book, other times he’s just telling about when he went fishing when he was little. These memory stories are what she likes best.
Aladdin doesn’t seem impatient as she continues to smooth the carpet with her hand.
‘Okay, go ahead, show me more,’ she says.
‘Silk on wool, you like these?’ The colours change to dark reds and blues. ‘Wool on wool. Harder wearing colours.’ Geometric patterns with burnt orange, blue, red and brown. ‘Very popular. Popular prices too. And now, still very good quality, wool on cotton.’ Large geometric patterns lacking the subtlety of the earlier ones, but striking.
‘Show me the very first one again.’
He rolls up each carpet, stacking them along the wall behind the counter until the tree of life pattern lies at her feet. It’s the world a part of her aspires to, where what is known is good, where life’s shadows are kept at bay.
‘My name’s Sandra, Sandy to friends.’ They shake hands. His name is Naseer.
‘I’ll think about your Tree of Life carpet. It’s very beautiful. And thank you for the tea. I’ll be off now, to the Shore Temple. That was where I was going before my fall.’
She’s surprised when Naseer phones his home and tells her his wife is expecting her for lunch at his house. She can’t believe her luck. In India, and invited back home!
He closes the shop and accompanies her to the Temple saying they’ll go straight from there to lunch. The sunshine outside seems dust and car-exhaust free compared to earlier that morning.
At the end of the day, she catches the email outlet.
Sandy Darling,
I hope all is going well for you. We’re so happy for you that London was such a success—especially from the business point of view, and some nice warm weather in India will be just the thing to offset all that dreadful rain and cold you endured. Dearest, Daddy is out at the Austin Repat again. Just for a few days I hope. He asks after you often, ‘Selfish of me I know,’ he says, something like that. He wants all his girls around him, which is only natural. Don’t worry about me, your sisters are almost wrapping me up in cotton wool.
Your loving Mum.
Mammallapurum, Tamil Nadu
Darlings, Mum and Dad,
I had an adventure today, fell down in the street and was invited by this cute guy Aladdin, no less, to lunch at his house. First he took me to the Shore Temple. Bought me a sugar cane drink, no ice, s o o o considerate. I paid for the entry tickets. I wanted to commune with the seventh century stone underfoot, all those other bare feet over the centuries, but we had to hop from bit of shade to bit of shade, too hot to stand still an instant. It’s very beautiful there, the Temple is on the seashore, and it’s survived all the storms over the centuries. At home, Aladdin introduced ‘My dear and lovely wife, Gazella’—she’s not lovely but she’s convinced him, force of personality. ‘Table’ cloth spread on floor, meat dishes galore, sorry for the rhyme excusable in a vegetarian you’ll agree, rice and so on. On and on. How to get away? Gazella tells me, ‘We never mix business with pleasure’. Who’s she kidding? Telling me, when he’s got a shop full of carpets?
Love you both, Dad I think of you every day,