Cold India
It’s winter. It’s cold and there are traces of snow sticking. It’s been consistently freezing overnight. I walked to the Little Free Library to drop off a book; the box was full and the front of it was icy. Fewer people have visited it in the cold. I recognized several books as ones I left there over the past couple weeks. So I looked at the selection, thinking, I’ll take away a book so I can fit this one in.
I picked a hardback large print former library book, the sort that is intended to appeal to older women: contemporary or Regency or some intriguing historical period, definitely a romance or romance-adjacent, mysterious but nobody’s been murdered, harmless but full of heart, some tragedy and some humor and lots of exploring the milieu. This particular book I expected would be some kind of romance; it’s called The Kashmir Shawl. A middle-aged Welsh woman finds a fancy antique Kashmir shawl in her father’s cupboard while cleaning out his house. She claims it, and her siblings do not object. They both have families to care for and can’t easily travel, so she’s the one who goes to India to find the source of this shawl. It’s her grandmother’s shawl, so besides traveling with her through northern India, we get chapters of her grandmother’s life in India.
The story is interesting and I want to know how it ends. There’s lots of discussion, observations external and internal, of what a marriage relationship is, what it should be, how to maintain internal balance when it’s not… quite… hmmm. I’m interested in the discussion, as a widowed middle-aged woman. My husband and I were well past the honeymoon stage and into the we’re-going-to-stick-together-for-the-duration-however-long-that-is. My husband and I had a good relationship, with hills and valleys, some things he liked and didn’t like, some things I liked and didn’t like. He died at a point when we could have broken or not; he was ready for a change of venue and I was not. We had not argued at all. Instead he tempered his expectations to not-moving-again and started considering what was available nearby for him to do. The Lord didn’t require him to continue that sacrifice but removed him from the situation, at the same time freeing me to become… a different version of myself. Hopefully better, certainly more autonomous.
I’m learning about India, about the social milieu of English missionaries and English social elites in northern India in 1941, about conditions in northern India, the skirts of the Himalayas, in about 2010. It’s fascinating. And cold.
COLD! I don’t like cold. I tolerate winter because it’s beautiful and because it’s necessary to temper our expectations of spring and summer. I wear a jacket in the house and bundle up outdoors: hat, scarf, hood, ski gloves, parka. I even wear two pairs of socks in bed when it’s really cold out, like below zero Fahrenheit. My husband asked me how I survived northern Wyoming, with my sensitivity to cold. He laughed about my hat and scarf, while he went outdoors in just a coat with no hat, hair only a quarter inch long, bristles all over his head. Part of knowing he was dead was feeling those bristles lie down when touched; they no longer sprang back up as if spring-loaded.
I’ve read other books set there, in the cold. Three that come to mind were: one written by the wife of Sir Edmund Hilary traveling through India with her children and another woman with her children, the wife of one of Hilary’s traveling companions; a single man trekking through Tibet when it was still Tibet, not China (his writing felt somewhat self-congratulatory: I got through this awesomely difficult and dangerous place, here’s what it was like); a group of random strangers who ended up traveling together to the backside of beyond in China, ending in the far reaches of what used to be called Tibet. The random strangers stuck together because they had the beginnings of communication with the Chinese and Tibetan people only when they pooled their linguistic resources. None of them were fully prepared for just how difficult their trek would be, not how long, not how cold, not how primitive life arrangements would be; their account felt, in the end, depressing. Once they reached the far western border of China they dispersed to the winds, none of them willing to trek back the same way.
I’ve also read at least one account of climbing Mt. Everest, but I do not include it here because it only covered from base camp to the peak and some of the return, none of the surrounding terrain or people. The Kashmir Shawl includes a variety of other people, select Westerners with their entitled or humble attitudes, plus a wide array of people they meet, none of whom sticks around long as the Westerners are on the move. I have to remind myself: the Westerners come across as particularly privileged in part because they’re the Westerners who have the resources, time, and energy to travel to a faraway place for no other reason than, “it’s there and I want to see it”.
I’m held captive in the cold by my own desire to know the end of the story.
