Among Flowers Read Free Page B

mammal, a rat. Eventually, I saw it, and I freaked out but only a little. I made a tiny squeal, I shuddered a little bit, but it was as if instinctively things were immediately being put in perspective: what is a lone rat scurrying in a small restaurant in a crowded city next to a small village situated in the foothills of the Himalaya full of Maoist guerrillas with guns?
    I awoke the next morning to the sounds of the Himalayan crow crowing outside. It is a beautiful bird, black-feathered like the crows I am used to seeing but with a broadish band of gray around its neck. This band of gray is more like a decorative belt than a necklace, and it makes the crow seem less menacing, more friendly, as if it is not capable of the devious cunning of the crows I am used to seeing here in North America. And when seen from afar, a large number of them grouped together winging their way toward some unknown-to-me destination, they looked like a thin, worn, ragged piece of darkened cloth adrift.
    I went to breakfast and ate something with curry and mango and bananas, doing this with a feeling of getting into the local spirit of things. The king had dismissed Parliament, and I wondered how that would affect our trip, for the king’s dismissing Parliament had something to do with the Maoist guerrillas, and I was going into the countryside where the Maoist guerrillas might be, and since they couldn’t kill the king would they kill me instead? What was I doing in a world in which king and Maoists were in mortal conflict? The irony of me getting into the local spirit of things was not lost on me, but this feeling of estrangement was soon replaced altogether with a sense of being lost in amazement and wonder and awe. From time to time I lost a sense of who I was, what I thought myself to be, what I knew to be my own true self, but this did not make me panic or become full of fear. I only viewed everything I came upon with complete acceptance, as if I expected there to be no border between myself and what I was seeing before me, no border between myself and my day-to-day existence. My tent, for instance: I loved my tent and would have probably died for it, and am now so glad things never came to that.
    After breakfast, I sorted out my luggage, putting away my traveling clothes and shoes and jewelry in a plastic bag, leaving them with the hotel for safekeeping. All four of us had to do this, and this little event suddenly filled us with the excitement of what we were about to do. There was a lot of running up and down the hallway, into each other’s rooms, and asking questions about who had what and did they have enough of it. A last-minute run to a bank, for me, and finding it closed; running to another one and finding it also closed, but it had a cash machine. I was told I needed a certain amount of money so that, at the end of our journey, I would be able to tip the porters and Sherpas properly. And then I was with my companions and our Sherpa guide, a man named Sunam, in a little bus heading toward the airport. On our way to the airport we passed by the Royal Palace, where the king and his family live, and I should have been properly interested in that, but I was not at all. Along the palace walls are some enormous trees, junipers, and in them were fruit bats hanging upside down and asleep. I so badly wanted to see them. I craned my neck out the window, looking up as the bus in a swift crawl passed by, but I could not see them. They were there; everyone, even the driver, could see them, but I could not. Dan would say, “There’s some, there’s some,” but my poor eyes, influenced by a combination of the anxiety, wonder, and strange happiness that I was feeling, could not see the fruit bats. We boarded an airplane that made my anxiety dominate all the other feelings. It resembled something my children would play with in the bathtub, rounded and dullishly smoothed, like an old-fashioned view of the way things will look