Page 30 of The Sky Beneath Us
I notice a new message from Jack has arrived as well while I’ve been on the phone.
Made it to the Azores. Moored off Sao Miguel. Still not allowed to land, but food delivery (at a distance) and refuelling possible. Are you in the mountains now?
And then there’s a photograph of whitewashed houses with red roofs set against a backdrop of lush greenery. He’s captioned it with another of his anagrams:
THE EYES – THEY SEE.
I prepare a message to send him later too, Wi-Fi permitting. It’s a picture of the pure blue sky outside the window of the teahouse, with Khumbila’s snow-capped summit standing tall against it and not a cloud in sight. I add a caption too.CORONAVIRUS: O, ’AV’ NO CIRRUS. It’s the best I can come up with.
I’d set the alarm on my phone, not wanting to waste time asleep when new-found freedom beckons with the opportunity to get outside and explore Phortse. But when I come downstairs to the dining room next morning, the sounds of chattering voices interspersed by great gusts of laughter are already coming from the kitchen. I tap on the door and push it open. Several smiling faces turn my way. A woman about my mum’s age gets to her feet and hurries over to envelop me in a hug. ‘DaisyDidi,’ she says. ‘I’m your cousin Pema. Violet’s great-granddaughter.’
The word ‘Didi’ seems to be added to the name of anyone close enough to count as a sister-cousin (and ‘Dai’ is added for a brother-cousin), so I feel a flush of gratification and pride when Pema – my third cousin, if I’ve worked it out correctly – refers to me as DaisyDidi.
I take both her hands in mine. ‘Pema,’ I repeat. And then, in a very British manner, I say, ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’ The words don’t even begin to cover my emotions. How can it be that I feel so at home, so welcomed and accepted, in a place that couldn’t be more foreign and a world that’s been turned upside down?
Several others come forward to hug me too. I try to take in their names but am too overwhelmed by it all for now. Dipa herds us through into the dining room where there’s far more space and we won’t be under her feet as she prepares gallons of tea and piles of pancakes for everyone by way of breakfast. The stove hasn’t been lit yet, but the room quickly heats up with smiles and excited chatter, as well as the steaming teacups and warmth of so many bodies, filling the teahouse with life after the quietness and emptiness of quarantine.
My long-lost, new-found family crowds round the table when I pull out the sketchy family tree and several new branches are soon added. There’s much discussion and debate as to where each of them fits in and I have to resort to starting a new page to accommodate everyone. It’s not so much a tree as a web now, and when it comes to adding Dipa’s sister’s husband’s brother who is married to Pema, thereby connecting in a whole new strand of the family, Tashi brings out a roll of sticky tape so I can add another page out to one side.
Filling in the spaces gives me the chance to ask questions about what family means to the Sherpa people. ‘When the rest of the world talks about Sherpas, they think it means the guides who lead expeditions to the top of Mount Everest,’ says Pema. ‘But that’s wrong. Sherpas are a distinct people. They were from Tibet originally, but they brought their yaks, their language, their faith and their traditions over the mountains from the east to settle here inNepal. And because they’re so well adapted to living and working at high altitudes, they’ve gained a reputation for being the best guides to lead climbers wanting to reach the summits.’
‘Number one best guides, like I told you,’ Tashi interjects. ‘This not something Sherpas very comfortable with though. Standing on heads of our mountain gods and goddesses disrespectful. Brings badkarma.’
Pema nods. ‘Violet saw many changes here in her lifetime, and my grandmother, Themi, can tell you more.’
‘And Themi is Scottish, like me?’ I ask, pointing at the family tree. ‘The daughter of Violet and Callum.’
‘Yes, but she honorary Sherpa. Grew up at Phortse. And she marry Sherpa too,’ says Tashi. ‘She our sister-cousin, ThemiDidi. Granny to us all.’
‘It was rare in those days for the Sherpa people to marry anyone outside their own community,’ Pema explains. ‘But it’s a bit more common now. We’ve become integrated, haven’t we, Dipa? Dipa is a member of the Rai tribe,’ she explains, ‘so we’re both outsiders in a way.’ She smiles across at her sister-cousin, who is busily piling more pancakes on to my plate. Then she pushes a jar of honey towards me, urging me to eat. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be the hallucinogenic variety.
‘But you both make good choice, marry Sherpa men,’ Tashi beams, reaching across the table to drizzle some more honey over the pile of pancakes on his own plate.
Luckily for me, everyone speaks at least a little English here. Pema’s is particularly good, I suppose because Violet and Themi must have spoken it at home. When I ask her about it, she smiles. ‘You’re right, my great-granny, my grandmother and my mother made sure I learned English as well as Sherpa and Nepali when I was growing up. They wanted me to be able to choose where I lived. Somehow, though, we’ve all chosen to stay here. It has itschallenges, as you’ve already seen, living at the limits of human endurance. But the world is a crazy place, and here, it seems to me, we are more concerned with the things that really matter. I guess having to work hard just to survive tends to focus the mind.’
‘Is your mother still living here in the village?’ I ask, pulling the family tree towards us and pointing at the name ‘Poppy’ that sits beneath Themi’s name.
She shakes her head. ‘No, she and my dad died many years ago,’ she says softly. ‘And once someone has gone, we don’t say their names. Or if we do, we then sayOm mani padme hum, as a blessing for their departed souls.’
I want to ask her more about her parents, but Dipa and Tashi begin to clear away the plates and teacups and Pema stands up, pulling on her quilted jacket. ‘Are you ready,Didi?’ she asks. ‘Come and meet your cousin Themi.’
The others remain in the teahouse, catching up with the rest of the news from the outside world that Tashi and Soman have brought from Kathmandu, while I follow Pema up the path that runs to one side of the teahouse. The morning sunshine has melted most of the snow from the fields now and the people working yak dung into the soil to replenish it ready for this season’s crops call out a greeting ofTashi delekas we pass. It’s the Sherpa equivalent ofNamaste, Pema tells me.
I’m quickly out of breath, and Pema slows her pace a little as we climb the path towards the monastery at the highest point of the village. A baby yak watches us with big eyes, its mother busily cropping the longer grass along the edge of the stone wall as we pass. We stop to watch a helicopter fly up the valley below us. ‘They’re running an emergency service only now,’ Pema says. ‘Just rescues and delivery of essential supplies. All the climbing expeditions have been cancelled.’
A series of stone steps continues upwards past a brightly painted prayer wheel towards the monastery, where giant prayer flags wave against the backdrop of the mountains, but instead of climbing them, Pema leads me on to a left-hand fork of the path, which follows the contour of the hill. We’re above most of the other houses now. Up here there are just a few low-built stone cottages. Several look uninhabited, judging by their closed-up windows and doors. One, however, has a wisp of smoke issuing from a hole in its roof. Pema walks over to it and calls out, announcing our arrival.
And then she appears, drawing aside the traditional cloth curtain, with its appliquéd geometric design, that serves as a door covering: Violet’s daughter, Themi. She’s small and stooped, the years having bent and gnarled her slight figure like a rhododendron branch, and she wears the traditional Sherpa dress and apron. Her pure-white hair is twisted into a braid and a pair of coral and turquoise earrings dangle against her wind-reddened cheeks. My throat constricts so tightly I can’t speak as she takes my hands in hers. Her smile crinkles her beautiful face into a thousand creases as she gazes at me with a pair of clear hazel eyes.
Without a word, she leads me inside and pats the brightly striped blanket on the bench, gesturing to me to sit down. She stands back, scrutinising me again for a long moment, and then says, in an accent that still carries a faint Scottish lilt, her voice soft with age, ‘So you came to find us at last. You are very welcome, DaisyDidi.’
She and Pema build up the fire to make tea, giving me time to take in my surroundings. There’s no stove in Themi’s one-room home, just a low fireplace at one end, built from stones and mud. There’s no chimney either, just a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, and I wonder how bitterly cold it must get in the depths of winter. The walls and ceiling of the simple stone dwelling are completely blackened with soot. In one corner is a low sleepingplatform made of rough wooden planks, upon which sits a lumpy mattress covered in a pile of quilts and blankets. A small table stands beside the bench on which I sit, but there’s no other furniture apart from a battered trunk and a large plastic drum, which, I imagine, must hold Themi’s clothes. Everything else she owns is arranged on shelves lining the walls. I notice how, in the dim light entering through the age-frosted windows, every pot, pan and plate gleams, spotlessly clean against the soot-blackened stones.
Pema has begun stoking the fire with juniper twigs to rekindle it, but Themi waves her aside and sets about making tea the Sherpa way, her movements a fluid dance of familiarity. She pours water from a jerrycan into a pot and places it above the flames, then throws in a handful of tea leaves, some sugar and a good glug of milk. The whole lot is boiled up together and then she decants it into a tin kettle before pouring it through a strainer into cups. It’s nothing like the tea I’m used to, but the strong, sweet concoction warms and energises. I feel the chill in my bones begin to ease, and the heavy tightness in my cold muscles lifts a little, as if someone has switched on my internal central heating.
I spread the newly extended family tree on the table before us and Themi asks about my mum and Davy, about my brother, Stuart, and his family, and about my girls. I pull out my phone and show her pictures of her long-lost relations in Scotland and she nods her approval at each one, her face crinkling in delight. ‘We thought we must still have a Scottish family, didn’t we, Pema? Although Violet didn’t talk about them much. She always said her life was here in Nepal.’
I wonder, fleetingly, about saying Violet’s name. Maybe it’s okay if she wasn’t born a Sherpa, or perhaps it’s all right to sayOm mani padme humin our heads, because it seems to be acceptable to talk about her. There are so many questions I want to ask, I hardly know where to begin. So I start by pulling the tiny shoe from mypocket and placing it alongside the family tree. ‘This was in the chest where I found Violet’s journals and letters.’
