Read Online Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid - Free Book Online Page A

o’clock we were allowed to go and make camp on the school grounds. To get to the school grounds we had to thread carefully through a rice paddy, carefully because we didn’t want to ruin the crop and because we didn’t want to get our shoes wet. That was done well enough, and we were just about to sink into the deliciousness of the danger we were in, when we realized our shoes were crawling with leeches that were eagerly burrowing into our thick hiking socks, trying to get some of our very expensive first-world blood. I shrieked of course, then took off my shoes and socks, then searched all the parts of my body that I could and asked Sue to search the parts of my body that I could not. She did and I did the same for her.
    Things began to look grim. Sunam thought it would be best if he kept my satellite phone. The Maoist had told him that we would not be allowed to pass on through the village. The four thousand rupees were only for spending the night. We began to think of alternate routes. Sunam really began to think of alternate routes. Around that time, Sue and Bleddyn became Welsh and Dan and I became Canadians. Until then, I would never have dreamt of calling myself anything other than American. But the Maoists had told Sunam that President Powell had just been to Kathmandu and denounced them as terrorists, and that had made them very angry with President Powell. I had my own reasons to be angry with President Powell too. In any case I had noticed that all of the bridges I walked on to cross from one side of the Arun to the other had a little notice bolted onto the entrance, thanking a donor for the bridge. The countries mentioned were either Canada or Sweden. I had no idea how familiar Maoists were with people from Canada and Sweden. Canada seemed so broad, non-particular, open-minded. I decided, that if asked, I would say I was Canadian. I didn’t feel ashamed at all.

    Village children
    Whenever we had stopped to spend the night in a village, no sooner had we arrived then it seemed all the children in the neighborhood had come to stare at us. A few adults would come too, but mostly it would be children and they would stare at us as we cleaned ourselves, ate, went to bathroom (a little tent that we carried with us and was almost always the first tent to be set up wherever we were), even just sitting around reading. In this village no one came to look at us. All the children seemed to have walked up to a ledge that was right above us, and they climbed into the trees and began to make the sounds that some monkeys, who were also above us and in the trees, were making. It was meant to disturb us but it didn’t at all. Nothing could be more disturbing than sleeping in a village under the control of people who may or may not let you live.
    The village was situated in a rather strange place and there must be a good reason why people settled in just that spot. It was surrounded on all four sides by high steep cliffs. It was more like a dam, a place made for storing things, than a place to live. It had three openings through which people could come and go. But the cliffs were so high that they shrank even the vast Himalayan sky when seen from the village. That night we did the usual leech check. There was no laughter from our tents. We got up the next morning with the usual tea brought to us by Cook’s assistant and an unusual amount of anxiety. Would they let us proceed or send us back? They let us go. Sunam gave them some more rupees, how much more, he wouldn’t say. He made them give him a receipt to show to the other Maoists, if we should meet them, that he had already paid what could be made to seem like a toll, but Dan said with surprising anger, that it was extortion. Sunam had learned from someone that we should avoid spending the night or even going near the village we had planned on spending the night in because the people who controlled that village were even more committed to Maoism and