Page 41 of The Sky Beneath Us
‘So you are leaving tomorrow, we hear?’ she says, taking my hand. ‘It’s time for you to go home.’ I clasp her gnarled fingers between my palms. They feel fragile, like dry twigs, and I nod, suddenly unable to speak as the realisation dawns on me that I mightnever see her again. Over the course of this trip, I’ve lost so much, but I’ve found so much too.
Themi must be thinking something similar because she smiles at me, the deeply weathered lines of her face crinkling, and she says, ‘Every meeting holds the seeds of parting. Which reminds me ...’
She gets up and goes over to the plastic drum in the corner of the room. Her stiff hands struggle to lever open the top, so I hurry over to help her. She reaches into the depths of the container and brings out a pile of sketches. I recognise Violet’s handwriting, annotating them. She sets them to one side and rummages in the drum once again. This time she brings out a small glass jar. She holds it up to the light and squints at its label. It’s clearly not what she was looking for as she replaces it and rummages again. Over her shoulder, I see the bottom of the container is filled with many more jars, each one neatly labelled. At last, she finds the one she’s been searching for and hands it to me.
‘Meconopsis horridula,’ I read. The jar is tightly sealed, but the minute seeds it holds whisper softly against the glass as I turn it in my hands.
‘Violet’s legacy,’ Themi tells me, nodding towards the drum. ‘She saved these samples of all the seeds she collected, told me to keep them safe. She saw how fragile the plants could be and she knew it was important to protect them for the future, as this region opened up to the world. Take those seeds and grow them when you get home, to remind you of all you’ve found here.’
I tuck the jar into my pocket. When I can speak, I say, ‘I feel as if my heart is breaking all over again at the thought of leaving you so soon after I’ve found you.’
‘Ah, Daisy, your heart isn’t breaking in a bad way. This time it’s breaking wide open, like a seed. And when that happens, there’s the possibility of a transformation, the birth of something new.’
‘It’s just so hard to say goodbye,’ I say, still clutching her hand between mine.
‘Yes, it is.’ Her words are calm and matter-of-fact. ‘But it’s what we’re all doing in this life – coming and going, loving and losing, living and dying. In the end, we’re all just walking each other home, aren’t we? Finding our way along the paths of life, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of others, until we find a way to let go. This is what our faith is for. Because this is where all paths eventually lead.’
She extracts her hand from mine and gently brushes away the single tear that’s running down my cheek. ‘Don’t only be sad, DaisyDidi. Be happy too. Make space for all those feelings, and know you have the space in that beautiful, broken heart of yours to contain them all. Violet used to say to me when I was feeling sad that even in the hardest times the joy is always there, like the blue sky behind the clouds. When we know that, maybe we can let the clouds drift away, letting happiness shine through again.’
Pema sets mugs of tea on the table before us and then comes to settle herself on the other side of me. We sit together for a couple of hours, talking about our families, and I show them the latest pictures Mum has sent me of Mara and Sorcha at Ardtuath, holding up their muddy hands to the camera. They’ve been resurrecting Davy’s vegetable garden, digging a new potato patch, inspired by my descriptions of the Phortse spuds and how good they taste.
‘Violet would definitely approve of her great-great-great-nieces,’ Themi says. ‘When you go home, Daisy, please will you send us pictures of the flower paintings you told us about? The ones Violet sent back from here. I’d love to see them.’
‘I will,’ I promise. ‘And I’m going to go to the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh as soon as it’s okay to do so, to try to track down more information about her. All those specimens and drawings shesent back from the expedition and afterwards, once she was living here at Phortse – they must still be there somewhere.’
‘The rain has stopped,’ says Pema, peering through the window. ‘Let’s walk down to thestupatogether. Will you come with us, Granny?’
Themi shakes her head. ‘I think I’ll stay here.’ She turns to me apologetically. ‘My arthritis is always bad in the rainy seasons and today I need to rest. But I will come to the teahouse tomorrow first thing to see you before you go, Daisy. So there’s no need to say our goodbyes just yet.’
As Pema and I walk down the hill, following the line of themaniwall, we stop frequently to stop and chat with people who’ve come out to work in their fields as the sun breaks through the clouds. I’ve got to know them all now, over the weeks I’ve been here, and they’ve all heard I’ll be leaving on the supply helicopter tomorrow.
At last we reach thestupaat the foot of the village, startling a pair ofdanphe, which squawk indignantly before flapping off into the juniper bushes. Four pairs of all-seeing Buddha eyes watch over us as we walk clockwise around the white-domed shrine. A breeze has got up, sweeping the rainclouds from the valley and tugging at the skeins of prayer flags, scattering more of their blessings on to the wind.
‘I shall miss all this,’ I say as Pema and I stand by the wall, gazing out across the Khumbu.
She smiles. ‘It will still be here for you when you’re ready to return. All those lines on your family tree connect you to this place now.’
Practical as ever, she spots a plant growing in the shade of a birch tree with spikes of tiny white flowers and pulls a bag from the pocket of her jacket. She kneels down and carefully pinches off a handful of its bright-green heart-shaped leaves.
‘Is that a variety ofTiarella?’ I ask.
She nods. ‘I use it to make a hot compress, which is good for my granny’s arthritis.’
I snap a photo of the plant on my phone and then we continue slowly along the lower edge of the village, spotting several moredanpheand a pair of musk deer grazing peacefully where the hillside falls steeply away beneath us. I drink it all in – the breeze ruffling my hair, the smell of the damp earth, the mountains rising above us and the random xylophone notes of the yak bells in the distance.
Pema walks quietly at my side until we reach her low-built whitewashed cottage. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Daisy,’ she says, then disappears through the door curtain with her bag of leaves.
I trudge the rest of the way back to the teahouse, standing outside the lodge for a while, shading my eyes from the sun’s rays that warm the fields, letting my muddled feelings wash through me like the turquoise river flowing in the valley far below. All at once, something falls from the wall above, tapping me softly on my shoulder, nudging my wandering thoughts back to the here and now. I laugh, then stoop to pick up the dried disc of yak dung and add it to the pile beneath the porch: my one last small contribution to this extraordinary community that gave me refuge when I needed it most.
It doesn’t take long to shove my belongings back into my pack the next morning and lug it downstairs. There are a surprising number of people gathered in the dining room, filling their mugs from large thermoses of tea. Dipa has made pancakes for breakfast and sets platefuls on the tables around the edge of the room, alongside jars of honey. ‘Everyone want to say goodbye,’ she explains.
The room is filled with laughter and chatter. I know I need to make the most of this gathering. Not only does it touch me deeply that so many people have come to bid me farewell, but I also realise this will probably be the last party I’ll be at for the foreseeable future. The village has been able to form a self-contained bubble of community in this locked-down world, its natural inaccessibility making it safe to socialise and mix. Once I step beyond the wall of mountains that protects us, it will be a very different story.
Tashi checks his phone. ‘Helicopter coming,’ he says. ‘Time to get ready.’ And then an extraordinary thing happens. One by one, the people of Phortse come up to me to say goodbye, pullingkatasout of their pockets and draping them round my neck. Each person clasps my hands between theirs, saying ‘Tashi delek, Didi.’ Good luck, sister. I’m wearing so many of the silk scarves by the time they’ve finished that I can’t do up the zip of my jacket.
Sonam shoulders my pack and Tashi leads the way to the helicopter landing area, while I follow, arm in arm with Pema and Themi. Dipa and some of the others bring up the rear. We stand beside the patch of rhododendron bushes, and I say my final goodbyes, promising Pema that I’ll keep in touch and send her photographs and news from Scotland. The distant sound of the approaching helicopter signals the moment when I must take my leave of Themi. This particular goodbye is the hardest one of all, because I don’t know whether I’ll see her again.
She hugs me tightly, then holds me at arm’s length, her hazel eyes searching mine, as if she’s memorising my face. ‘Remember what I told you the first time we went to the Valley of Flowers? That Violet always used to say life is not about finding yourself – it’s about creating the person you want to be. You’ve taken the first steps, Daisy. Now keep going.’
