Among Flowers

by Jamaica Kincaid

  That day we left Topke Gola, a Saturday, was exactly like all our other leave-takings and yet we were leaving a place unlike any other place we had been to before. I am now remembering how quiet it was, yet how full of sounds it was, but the quiet was only the absence of sounds I had been used to and the sounds were ones I had never heard before. The water falling out of the mountain, down into an abyss I would never see again, for instance. And its falling down seemed eternal, unchangeable, whether I could see and hear it or not. Three nights and two complete days in Topke Gola felt like a year. The actual span of a year, 365 days, spent in a place like that would be an eternity for someone like me. Within a year, you can remember the beginning and from that anticipate the future and the end. It was with Topke Gola in mind and all that had come before that I walked forward. Crossing over a bridge (made from the trunk of some wonderful gardenworthy tree, that was growing nearby) with a loud rage of water beneath us, we crept away, with nothing to make us sure we had really been there but our memories, and the rug and yak bells we had bought and the many collections of seeds that had been collected. That loud rage of water was the Mewa Khola and we traveled along its banks without paying attention until we met its confluence, joining up with an even larger body of water, the Tamur River, but that would be many days later. At this moment, I could almost certainly be convinced that I had not been to such a place as Topke Gola or slept on a carpet of Meconopsis and everything else besides.

  We walked down now, going up also, but mostly we were going down. As when, at the beginning of our adventure, attaining any height meant we had to also go down, so now too, going down meant also going up. We walked through yet again another beautifully forested area of oaks and maples but the farther down we got, each hundred yards or so, brought me to things that would not thrive in my garden in Vermont. Not the Panax, not the Strobilanthes, not the Cremanthodium, not the Sarcococca, some of which was fragrantly in bloom, some of which had already set seed. We walked for a long time, too long, and dropped too rapidly, and eventually, when we stopped for lunch at half past two, the seed collectors were angry. That valley we had just descended warranted at least a day of exploring. We started out that morning at twelve thousand feet or so and by lunchtime, at half past two, we were at eight thousand feet. In that part of the world, the difference between temperate and tropical is altitude, and in losing altitude we were losing that thing called the hardy plant, the plant that will live through winter, that time when the gardener is driven indoors.

  Oh, the sadness of it. For there wasn’t one truly flat place for hours. It was as if, once we were going down, we could only do so, just go down. The morning was beautiful, clear, cold at the start and then the lower we got, it became hot and then hotter in that insufferable way of the days before Topke Gola. Suddenly we came upon a clearing, an open area, and there was a little building, a cattle shed. By then, I knew where there were cattle, I couldn’t grow the plants growing there. To whom did it belong? It wasn’t occupied right then but we could see a pile of ashes, where someone had built a fire recently. That was where we stopped and had lunch, almost seven hours after we left Topke Gola that morning. If I had been told that it was seven days later instead of seven hours, I would not have been surprised. A big debate ensued: should we camp at the spot where we were having lunch and from there we could explore the valley back up to just below Topke Gola? Should we retreat, going back over the way we had just been? The valley we were descending into was rich in plants that could be grown in a zone such as the one in which I live, but also plants that were more tender than that. The botanists, Dan and Bleddyn, decided that we should make camp at the place we were having lunch, and so they told Sunam that is what we would do. But Sunam told them that the porters carrying our luggage, and the tents, and other essential things were miles ahead and could not be reached. Dan and Bleddyn insisted that someone race ahead and tell them to return. It is possible Sunam did this, it is possible he didn’t. How could we know? We didn’t understand Nepali. In any case, Sunam told us that the porters had refused to come back. They had descended quite a bit, thousands of feet. They would not come back up carrying all those loads of stuff. This was understandable. The path we were on was steep, rocky, and the rocks were wet—not moist—wet. In any case, I think they were tired of us all and our walk and rests for lunch or some other kind of break, and then our resuming the walk again and rest for the night, and our demands that they devote themselves to our needs, such as arriving in camp before us and setting up camp so that we could arrive to something we regarded as home. The sudden rebellion by the porters shocked us. They had been so nice to us, so kind; now, we wondered if all along what we had thought were encouraging words, spoken to us in their native language, was really them mocking us, finding us and our obsession of their native plants ridiculous, worthy of jokes made just before they fell asleep. But we had paid for this and we demanded that they return and make our camp where we wished. They didn’t come back up, and a bitter, sour mood settled over us. We ate a delicious meal of tinned fish and vegetables and then started to walk again.

  At around four o’clock in the afternoon as we started to descend into the bottom of the valley the sun disappeared, leaving behind a light that seemed to come from a long distance away, a light struggling to reach us. It started to rain, at first just a steady drizzle; by that time we had gotten used to the rapid change in the weather and thought, hoped, that perhaps it was just a phase, the rain would fall and then suddenly stop and then suddenly turn into sunshine. But the rain did not stop, The drizzle grew and grew into a full shower. Sue and I were walking alone, Bleddyn and Dan were behind us, the porters and Sherpas were ahead of us, looking for a flat place for us to spend the night. Sue and I stopped and took shelter under a massive outcropping of rock that had been arranged in such a way that it looked like a natural domestic dwelling place. Many people must have taken shelter there, for in a corner was a makeshift fireplace for cooking and keeping warm with ample space left over for sleeping or just taking shelter, the way we were doing. The rain did not let up; in fact it came down harder than I have ever experienced rain falling anywhere before. And I thought this: if weather ever becomes an economic commodity, this part of the world would dominate the market for it. Every way in which the weather can manifest itself represents the ideal way for it to do so. The hot sun was the best hot sun I had experienced. The cold nights defined such a thing as the cold night. The snow on the pass going over to Topke Gola seemed a snow that other snow might imitate. The domed sky seemed to be the place from which skies were made and then dispatched to other parts of the globe. The water falling down from this sky was rain but it had a different consistency, it wasn’t pelting and it wasn’t torrential, it wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t soft, it just came down and coated everything it fell on with its supersaturated moistness, making everything slippery and unstable. We had to walk carefully now, for any misstep might lead to a broken bone, and that would be a disaster for the person with the broken bone. We walked down and down into a seemingly bottomless gorge until, just before the light of day vanished forever, we came to a place where the porters had made our camp.

  How they divined such an area, I will never know, for it was not a normal place to make a camp, it was hell. We were at the entrance to a deep gorge and above us towered its granite sides, moist with water seeping out of every tiny crack of its surface. A beautiful magenta-colored Impatiens grew on the sides of this wall and so too did some kind of small-leaved Rhododendron. We were in the midst of a thickly growing patch of Edgeworthia, a plant that I had only seen in illustrations before, my interest in it limited to that because I can’t grow it in Vermont. It was beautiful, as all those things are when seen growing in their natural habitat, growing without restraint, growing not to be observed or appreciated or possessed by any gardener. Where our tents had been set up, a large patch of Edgeworthia had been cut down and thrown aside to make way for us. What a pity, just the way it was a pit
y when Dan saw the Viburnum that is a treasure in his garden near Seattle all bundled up as fodder for a domesticated animal way back in the village of Chichila.

  We had supper of mostly potatoes and they were cooked more properly than the last few days, all because we were at a lower altitude, but I didn’t have much of an appetite. I crawled into our tent and my sleeping bag. It rained and rained all through the night and I prayed that nothing above me would become dislodged and crash down on me. Nothing did. That next morning we practically ran out of there. Everyone, the plant hunters and the people supporting them, just left in the greatest hurry. We walked out of the gorge, carefully threading over the rocky, muddy, slippery path. It was dark and cold all the way through until three hours after we left we came up into the thick sunshine of a beautiful day. At the top, we rested and tried to be jovial about the night at the bottom of the gorge. Soon, like all the rest of our experiences, it seemed like a figment of our imagination, for so pleasing and dramatic was the scene in front of us. A wide vista of green forested mountains reaching up to touch that everlasting blue cloudless sky and the mountains themselves reaching down into a valley, the bottom of which we could not see. The day before, at lunchtime, I had seen a boy who was not of our party, passing us by shepherding some cows, heading in the same direction we were. Now I saw him again but he was going toward the place I had seen him the day before, the place where we had lunch, the place I might never see again. And it was brought home to me again, that while every moment I was experiencing had an exquisite uniqueness and made me feel that everything was unforgettable, I was also in the middle of someone else’s daily routine, someone captured by the ordinariness of his everyday life.

  We stopped and ate lunch in a hamlet just before Donje, the place where we would camp for that night. It was so pleasant, so magical really. It seemed to be a minor monastery, lots of prayer flags covered the outside area of a place for doing holy things, like praying. The extended family living there was very friendly and did not show us any sign that they found our sudden presence among them mystifying. Sunam bought some fresh vegetables for lunch, something we had not had for a while, and when we noticed that the wife of the house had a foot-manipulated weaving machine from which she made the beautiful aprons that the women in that part of the region wore, we wondered if we could buy some. She had none freshly made so the one that she was then wearing was sold to us. This craven behavior on our part can be explained: we were becoming afraid that there was less and less evidence to show, to ourselves only, that we had done what we thought we had done, that we had been to the places we had been, and the impressive collection of seeds that we had made seemed not enough. From there we could see our night’s resting place, the village of Donje. We could see its yellow painted buildings; we had not seen painted buildings for a while.

  We got to Donje at about half past two in the afternoon. The sun was still out in full, making it hot and dry. There was not a cloud in the sky. But this village was a place that I most probably had read about in a newspaper in my part of the world under the heading of “Dateline” or something like that. Maoist guerrillas had driven out the Nepalese authority at gunpoint. A building that had housed the police was burned out, empty inside, just its walls still standing, a ruin. The school building was intact, but it was shuttered up and the familiar red letters were written on its outside. Above the village itself stood a beautiful white building, a temple, and it stood out from the other buildings because of its siting and color, pristine white, while the other buildings were painted a creamy yellow. That building was shuttered up because the Maoists forbade religion. The school too was shuttered up, but Sunam said it was in observation of a holiday. I wanted to know what holiday it was, but by then I had come to see that every time we were in a village, starting with just after Num, and there was some unexpected difficulty, Sunam would say a holiday was being observed. I didn’t doubt him at all.

  No sooner had we set up camp than the Maoists appeared. At this point, setting up camp involved taking out all the seeds that had been collected, five hundred packets so far, and laying them out in the sun to dry. Some of them needed further cleaning, more washing, more separating from the chaff. Perhaps that moment is one of many that holds in it a metaphor of the very idea of the garden itself: we had in our possession seeds that, if properly germinated, would produce some of the most beautiful and desirable flowering plants to appear in a garden situated in the temperate zone; at the very same time we were in danger of being killed and our dream of the garden in the temperate zone, the place in which we lived, would die with us also. At the very moment we were projecting ourselves into an ideal idyll we were in between life and death. The Maoists appeared in a way we had never seen them before, belligerent, loud, and serious about the Maoist business. A few of them looked like people from Tibet but most of them looked like people from India. They wore badges of the red star on the lapels of their jackets or shirts. They wanted all of us to sit down and listen to them but succeeded in only Sunam and Thile and Mingma and some of the other Nepalese doing so. We—Dan, Bleddyn, Sue, and I—couldn’t understand anything they said, for they were speaking in Nepali, and so kept drifting off to take care of the seeds. Cook had to take care of dinner. Sunam, perhaps knowing of what we would encounter later, had bought three chickens at the place where we had lunch and Cook was busy murdering them and cleaning them and making them into a meal. The Maoist lecture lasted all through the afternoon into the setting sun. They mentioned over and over again the indignity of being called mere terrorists by President Powell of the United States, and then they left. Their departure did not lessen the tension in our camp. Sunam, trying to make us less tense I suppose, went off and found us some chang. It was forbidden in Maoist-controlled areas, so acquiring it was very secretive and yet drinking it was so elaborate. For it it had to be drunk from large wooden containers, the size of jugs, made from bamboo, through a straw made from bamboo also. It tasted terrible but I must have drunk enough of it because I got drunk. After staggering back to our tent, and lying in my sleeping bag, I could hear the rest of them—Dan, Bleddyn, Sue, and the rest of our party—for a long time afterward. Later than that, I heard great loud booming sounds and thought they were landslides; but Sunam told us that the sounds we heard were the Maoists perfecting their bombs. In the middle of the night, when I staggered out of my tent to go take a pee, I was afraid I would be killed by the Maoists, but I could also see that the night sky was clear and full of stars and perfectly innocent of whom I might wish to harm and who might wish to harm me.

  We walked away from the experience of spending the night with seeds of flowers we loved while all the time vulnerable to people who might not like us and decide to do something about it. We walked through a village that was one of their headquarters, down to the Mewa Khola, and crossed it happily under the illusion that we were free of them. I saw a begonia, something that looked like a houseplant growing on the side of the Mewa Khola. That shocked me. We passed a little building, a house of worship in the middle of this thickly forested area on this river’s banks. We walked, knowing the area of real seedworthy collectibles was behind us. We had lunch in an unexpected grand place. We came upon a lone dwelling, prosperous with animals, pigs, and cows, an abundance of areas carefully cultivated in which were growing grains and vegetables. The dwelling place itself was carefully painted: newly painted-on whitewash, and brown diamond-shaped stencil patterns ornamenting the area just beneath the roof. We were on the banks of the Mewa Khola and we could hear it roaring toward its final destination. Sunam pointed out to us the path he had originally wanted us to take. To say it was a mile above is not an exaggeration. We had to crane our heads back quite a ways to see the path he had thought for us to walk. We then walked on that afternoon through areas that had become forested with poinsettia and Datura, plants that are native to Mexico. They were in bloom, both of them with trunks as thick as maple trees in Vermont. We crossed roaring streams that made a false ste
p positively dangerous. We descended mostly, crossing fields of millet and then finally landed in the village, Phapung, that had a banner with the red star running across it. It had in it four little shops, each of them selling the same things, and for some reason that made it seem safe. How to explain it? Four little shops, each of them filled with exactly the same amount of dirt and disorder or dirt and order, the same little bars of soap for sale that are a staple in motels in North America. All the men wore the same little hats, the shape of a carefully molded sharp-sided pudding, on their heads. Some of them seemed pleased to see us (and that made us suspicious), some of them seemed angry at us (and that made us uneasy), some of them seemed indifferent to us (and that made us suspicious), in other words, we were not feeling comfortable being there.

  We walked down a bank littered with feces, human and animal, to the river and washed ourselves, knowing full well that it brought with it whatever the people above us had deposited in it. But we were desperate to renew ourselves and water always offers the illusion of that, renewal. And so we walked through the stench and tried to clean ourselves. We were not clean and we felt it. We ate a supper of noodles, the exact concoction that my son, Harold, likes to eat all the time, ramen noodles, only it was made by some company in India, not Japan, the way his is. Strangely, this Maoist-controlled village was not at all frightening. Beer and cigarettes were forbidden here, and perhaps that was what reassured us. All the passions were under control. Right then, calm strangers were a blessing to me.