Page 34 of The Sky Beneath Us
I feel guilty, though, that my presence in the village is putting an added strain on its already scant resources and after a few more days I ask Tashi if it would be better for me to leave. I could trek back to Namche Bazaar on my own, then see if I could get accommodation there and sort out transport back to Kathmandu. But he tells me, ‘No one go anywhere now. Government says to stay put. Not good in the world right now.’ Then he reassures me. ‘No worry,Didi. You stay here with us to be safe. And you help in fields, so you earn food like all of us.’
He waves his phone at me. ‘Anyway, we just hear they sending helicopter to drop supplies every week. Keep us going. After the earthquake,’ he tells me, ‘Phortse completely cut off for months, all through winter. Whole country badly affected and no supplies getting through because roads and tracks have been destroyed. We living outside, sleeping in tents in snow. Your old cousin Themi too, she afraid to be in her house in case more earthquakes come. Then, once we have managed to build homes up again, we all work together to make place for helicopters to land. So can receive supplies that way if needed.’ His phone flashes and he checks the incoming message. ‘Ha! It coming now. You want to go see?’
I follow him past the school, along a path through the rhododendrons to where the hillside flattens out a little before falling away steeply to the valley floor below us. A flat stone circle has been constructed, just big enough to land a helicopter on. A few other villagers have gathered there too. After a few minutes, we hear thefaint beat of the propellor blades and then the helicopter comes into view, flying up the valley beneath us. It soars higher, the noise reverberating from the mountainsides as it comes to hover above the helipad.
‘We not allowed to help. Must stand back,’ Tashi explains. ‘Let pilot unload first so no risk of virus.’
A heap of sacks and boxes are offloaded, and the pilot gives us a cheery salute before climbing back into the cockpit and taking off again. Then we file down to the helipad and collect up the supplies.
‘We bring to community centre,’ says Tashi. ‘Then everyone can get their share.’
Later in the day, I go with Tashi and Sonam to carry rice, bread and powdered milk up the hill to Themi’s house. She emerges, grinning broadly at the sight of such a bounty, and insists on making us all tea. ‘Sit, sit. I found something I wanted to show you, Daisy,’ she says. From a tin box on one of the shelves, she brings out a sheet of thick paper, torn from a sketch pad, and passes it across to me. ‘My mum painted that. I know she’d want you to have it.’
It’s exquisite. A painting of a poppy, its petals the colour of sky and in its centre a circle of fine, sun-gold stamens. I can just make out the writing, in Violet’s familiar script, in one corner.Meconopsis grandis. (Betty’s Dream).
Themi pours the tea and settles herself on the bench beside me, picking up her cup to take a sip.
‘One day, an expedition came through the village. It was led by a well-known plant-hunter called George Sherriff and comprised a number of men plus his wife, Betty. They set up their camp just below the house here, and Violet was pleased to be able to talk to them and get news from the outside world. She showed them some of her paintings and said she could help him with his expedition, but George Sherriff was very dismissive of her. He didn’t believe a woman could really know enough about plants to identify newspecies. He was an army man, used to giving orders, and he wanted to be the one to make the discoveries.
‘Violet liked his wife, Betty, though. She was a kind woman. I remember her teaching me songs in English and she gave my mother some of the medicines and bandages they’d brought with them so we could use them for people in the village who needed them. Betty told Violet that, to be honest, she was getting a bit tired of trailing around after her husband and his men and then being left on her own while they went off exploring, but that George wouldn’t rest until he’d found a new variety of the famous Himalayan blue poppy. He was jealous of another plant hunter, Frank Kingdon Ward, who’d already discovered a few, and wanted a poppy with his own name on it. And so the two women hatched a plan. Violet took Betty to the Valley of Flowers and showed her a place where this beautiful flower could be found.’ Themi points at the painting in my hands.
‘The women knew George Sherriff wouldn’t take kindly to being told where the poppy grew, though, it had to be his own discovery. And so when he returned to the camp, Betty told him she’d had the most extraordinary dream the night before. In it, she’d walked up the hill and discovered a hidden valley full of flowers, where a poppy with petals the colour of sky grew. And she persuaded him it was such a vivid dream that he should go and have a look. He returned triumphant. And he declared he would take the seeds home and name the poppyBetty Sherriff’s Dream, which he did. My mother had already painted this picture, but she added the new name beneath it, to remember how the two women had allowed him to have his wish of making the discovery. It was their secret.’
I pick up the painting to look at it more closely. ‘I think I read about that story. It’s a bit of a legend among gardeners who lovegrowing Himalayan poppies. But it should have been named after Violet!’ I say indignantly.
Themi smiles. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Betty Sherriff made sure my mother received a payment for the discovery. And the medical supplies she gave us for the village were worth more to Mum than the fame would have been. She enjoyed knowing the secret too, I think. That was enough of a reward for her.’
‘I’d love to see the valley,’ I say.
Themi pats my hand. ‘Pema will take you. Maybe I will come too. I haven’t been up there for years, but it would be good to see it again. We’ll give the flowers a bit more time to have a chance to blossom after all the snow that came so late, but we’ll find a good time to go soon. I have one more thing to show you, too.’ She gets up stiffly from the bench, and rummages in the tin box once more.
‘Open your hand,’ she says, and then she drops something into my outstretched palm.
Tears spring to my eyes as I realise what it is: the first gift Callum gave Violet, all those years ago.
Reverentially, I stroke the whittled palmetto leaf with my thumb before returning it to Themi for safekeeping. The small wooden talisman seems more precious than if it were made of solid gold. Because it embodies so much love. And it has endured where so much has been lost.
After another week of warmer weather, the first tiny green spikes begin to push their way into the sunlight in the fields. One morning, we pack food and bottles of water and Pema comes to call at the lodge to take us to the Valley of Flowers. Dipa’s coming too and she’s added some cotton tote bags to her own pack for collectingleaves to make incense, as well as anything else she can forage to add to her cooking.
I’m very thankful for the distraction. The news from home is no better. Davy’s still in intensive care and Mum has told me they’ve put him into an induced coma to try to allow his body to rest and fight the virus. Every waking minute – and I know there must be many through the long nights as much as during daylight hours for all of us – is an agony of hoping for the best and fearing the worst.
I’ve been trying to throw myself into helping Tashi and Dipa with chores around the lodge to keep myself busy. Even the effort of doing washing has become a welcome ordeal. It involves clambering down to the river carrying a large metal bowl heaped with clothes, sheets and pillowcases, then scrubbing them in the freezing cold water. We rinse the items and wring them out between us, before hauling the bowls filled with the heavy, damp washing back up to the village, a climb of half an hour even at Dipa’s brisk pace. Pushing myself physically is a way of channelling my anxiety about Davy, though.If I can make the climb in five minutes less than the day before, I tell myself,then he’ll recover.With every searing breath, I think of him in his hospital bed, his own lungs labouring, and I feel as if I’m breathing for him, desperately trying to will him to stay alive.
On the day of our trek to the Valley of Flowers, we walk up to Themi’s house, where she’s already waiting in the sunshine outside her door. She doesn’t carry a pack, but neither does she use a stick to help her on the walk, and when I begin to breathe more heavily as we start to climb, she’s the one who slows her pace to allow me to catch up.
It feels a little like a pilgrimage as we process in single file along the narrow path running above the village. Pema leads the way, then Dipa and Themi, and I bring up the rear: four women of different ages and backgrounds bound together by Violet’s story.
While I can scarcely draw breath – let alone speak – Themi talks more about her reminiscences of coming this way with her mother all those decades before us. ‘She would tell me about the plants, of course, teaching me to identify them so I could help her. But she would also talk about the plant hunters who’d come before us and the way they were greedy sometimes, taking everything they found. “It’s our job to change that, Themi,” she’d say. “Always remember, there’s a big difference between being given something and taking it. We’re the guardians of this place now. If anyone else comes looking for plants, choose carefully which ones you decide to give them.” She was one of the first people to realise how important it is to conserve what we have.’
Pausing to catch my breath and press a hand into the stitch that’s gnawing at my side, I picture the envelopes of seeds I’d unearthed from the wooden chest back at Ardtuath. How sad it was that the damp had got in and I never managed to get any of them to germinate.
We push on along the path, which, to my relief, mostly follows the contours of the mountainside once we’ve made the initial climb from the village. I stop beside a small heap ofmanistones piled on top of a deeply carved rock and draped in a string of prayer flags so old and tattered they’ve become bleached of their colours. I turn and look back the way we’ve come. Phortse is spread out beneath us, dwarfed by the might of the snowy peaks surrounding it and the valley that plunges away to the thin ribbon of turquoise river a thousand feet below. The fields and houses look so tranquil from up here on this beautiful day, and yet it takes such determination and strength to be able to survive in this environment where Mother Nature can be as cruel as she is kind.
I notice Themi has taken a new string of prayer flags from her pocket and is winding them round the carvedmanistones. ‘This is my mother’s memorial,’ she says. ‘We remember her here.’
I reach out and trace the outline of a stylised flower, incised into one of the slabs. I realise this is the point where the path twists up and over the next ridge – the final viewpoint from which the village can be seen. In Violet’s case, of course, it must have been the spot she described in her journal after fleeing from her kidnappers. It was from here that she got her first glimpse of the place that would become home for the rest of her days, Themi heavy in her belly, as Palden guided them to safety.
At last, we reach a point where the main path carries on ahead of us, but we turn to the right and scramble upwards alongside a little stream that tumbles over white stones. There’s nothing much to differentiate the spot from the many other meltwater streams we’ve picked our way across, but Pema turns to smile back at me, saying, ‘Here’s where we enter the Valley of Flowers.’
