Professor Kashmir

We are suckers for the beach ambulant sellers - baskets from Senegal, cashmere from Kashmir, cottons from North Africa. We are now remembered from the previous season. ‘Ciao amico, please buy something. It’s been a tough season. Most of these people don’t buy. My usual clients are missing. My son could work for you, yes?’

We are happy to buy.

Professor Kashmir is the most persistent. He sets himself down in the sand in his white gear, linen cap pulled over his bronze-bound round shades. He’s a language professor in Kashmir for two months each year.

You’d think we’ve turned up late for his seminar. Last year he had a lovely battered leather attaché case. I mark its passing. The big utilitarian red tote bag carries more but to me promises less.

He slips beautifully folded Kashmiri scarves from plastic wrappers and unfolds them into the soft moist breeze. Colours of such joy. We buy one. But he presses on relentless. We buy another bigger scarf - a beautiful muted emerald green. We play the husband and wife act. He proffers one for me as well but I got one last year, sadly underworn.

It is as if he has brought live butterflies from the other side of the world. But he presses on. We try to rein him in. No. Enough. Basta. He seems to hear. Packs away. Everything meticulously folded. Put away. And then he unzips another bag. ‘But these ones ...’

He is so much better at this game than us. But he does eventually stop. ‘You can pay tomorrow. If we can’t trust each other for this money who are we?’ It’s a good question that leaves a jitter on the back shelf of my mind.

And yet. When I see him next day in the afternoon with his money he is like a jealous partner:

‘Where were you this morning, I’ve been up and down, up and down.’

As if I’ve broken some unspoken pact that lay beneath the spoken bond of trust.

All is fine. All is good in the end. We shoot the breeze. Although it feels like I’m the castle walls in which he is looking for some weakness. And I feel his puzzled knowing anger. You. There. Sitting smug in your trunks playing Lady Bountiful. And me here in the sand trudging this weight up and down, debasing myself, importuning, forcing my way into these super-privileged fields of vision. Your unseeing, sneering staring at some distant horizon. Woke, my ass.

It’s a tough, really tough, way to make a living in the broiling heat amongst the scantily clad European sub-elites. And he says next year he can bring me a 5kg sack of Pakistani chickpea seed. His son could help me plant it, yes?

Next day he’s back. We laugh about having no more money although we’ve since bought four beautiful Senegalese baskets from Mustafa who we’ve chatted with in previous years. The Professor drifts back and forth and eventually tells us he’s not sold a thing since we bought from him. Four kids and a wife to feed as the little’uns don’t know he’s hawking Kashmir on the beach.

He gives the Boss a little bracelet- a heart breaking loss leader. We ended up buying a bracelet for me (!) and a bracelet for Boss - Pakistani 925 silver. But then he says there is one last thing: a beautiful big dusty pink pashmina. Back went the bracelet and another beautiful scarf was ours.

I found myself on another forced march back to the villetta for cash.

Yeah. It’s not how we’d all shop. But we’ve never regretted our purchases. He’s a nice guy. Maybe needs a bit of marketing rather than the tote bag, which I mentioned, suggesting he call himself ‘Professor Kashmir’ which he enjoyed.

Tomorrow the rent is due and he has a little more to meet the bills. ‘I’ll never beg’ he says. We believed him.

End note: I’ve been rereading and puzzling over Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’. This pair of sentences struck me. Not sure if I agree. But Professor Kashmir has something of this about him. It is given added power by our Covid facemasks.

‘A man’s power is in the half-light, the half-seen movements of his hand and the un-guessed at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies and desires.’ (p.359)

An extra of the cool kite seller’s string of kites. .