Goat - Justine Hardy

This is a story about goat hair, gathered from herds that graze among the high-altitude monasteries of Little Tibet, woven in villages near the Kashmiri border with Pakistan, and sold to the ladies-who-lunch of London's Notting Hill. It is also the story of a beautiful valley with some ugly secrets. A journalist based in India, Justine Hardy started trading pashmina shawls as a way of raising money to support an education programme in some of Delhi's slum areas. In setting up the company she spent time living among the market dyers in the polluted inner city of Delhi, in villages in the fighting zones of Kashmir, on the lakes beyond Srinagar, and in and out of design houses and the scented drawing-rooms of wealthy London. In Delhi the money from the shawls was turned into primary education for beggar children; in Kashmir, over the flight of the pashmina looms, stories began to be told of the hundreds of children who disappear each year, perhaps into terrorist camps where they are trained to become killers. Goat is an unusual story of shawls and missing children, of cappuccino bars in London and hostages in Kashmir.