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His earliest memories of fabric were totally sensory, he said, recalling the downy feel of a jamawar shawl at home in Srinagar and the soft warmth of his mother's shahtoosh saris.

It produced an illusion of comfort, like that of an old shahtoosh shawl, but it was arousing, too, stirring memories of places I had never been, sensations I had never known.

“I always take a very comfortable shawl, a shahtoosh. They weigh almost nothing and they’re as warm as a down comforter. It’s paper thin, it goes through a wedding ring.”

If you can pull the fine wool scarf through a ring, it is likely a shahtoosh, not a pashmina.

Its wool came from a Central Asian species of goat, Capra hircus in Latin or shahtoosh in indigenous terms.