HIGH IN the barren gulleys and turrets of the Himalayas, we began to dream of tomatoes. Thin-skinned, split open, glistening with pulp. We thought of them red, the brightness of first blood, but we would have taken them pale too, not even ripe. We wanted them sliced, on a plate, sprinkled with salt, but we would have eaten them like apples if we could have, just bitten right into them, allowing the juice to run down our chins.

     Pete brought it up first – Old Pete from Germany, with his long, white beard and hollow cheeks, not the younger Peter, the American, the one I was travelling with. We were sitting around our plates of dahl and rice that second evening in Nako, in that scrappy little room at the front of our guest house, feeding chillies into our food for a bit of flavour and watching the evening hunker down on the road outside, when he suddenly came out with it.

     “God,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice, ripe tomato right now.”

     We paused in the middle of eating and eyed the bland mounds of rice and lentils on our spoons. Our collective mouths began to water – mine, Peter’s and Old Pete’s – and though we kept eating we couldn’t help noticing how lacking in colour everything suddenly seemed. The beige of the food, the walls, the scrubby road outside and beyond that, the little houses of Nako, made of pebbles it seemed, grey and forgettable, fading into the dry slopes all around. Forget what had drawn us to this place: the translucent blue of the Himalayan sky, the stab of the mountains against the horizon, the clarity of the air. At that moment, all we could see was what wasn’t there, what we didn’t have.

     After that, tomatoes were all we could think about. Not oranges, not mangoes, not the distant strawberries of our home countries to the west. No. It was tomatoes, those singular, scarlet globes. It wasn’t that the rice and dahl were awful and the portions the guest-house owner’s son – an awkward boy of 10, maybe 11 – served us certainly weren’t stingy. They even soft- boiled eggs for us in the morning and cooked them to Old Pete’s exacting specifications, not even complaining if he demanded, on breaking open one that was too soft or too hard, that a new batch be boiled. The owner’s son – who had taken to calling Old Pete his grandfather, perhaps in an effort to soften the sting of his demands – would just shuffle back into the kitchen in his oversized flip-flops and reignite the gas under the pot.

     The problem wasn’t that we were hungry or ill fed. The problem was that after a while rice and dahl tended to taste like cardboard and eggs like chalk. Having spent days travelling through Spiti Valley in India, eating hardly anything that even slightly resembled a fruit or vegetable, we had begun to forget about that sharp line of mountains against the sky, about the pale break of day across those peaks, about the contentment of sitting on a balcony in Nako during the late afternoon and watching sparrows dust bathe in the potato fields below. We forgot what started our journey in the first place and began to dream of better things.

     The younger Peter and I had been in India for more than four months, most of which we spent in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, working as volunteers teaching English to Tibetan monks. We had more than another month to go before heading to Thailand to look for paid teaching work, which would, we hoped, lead to better careers on our eventual return to the United States. We had left pointless jobs in New York and had no intention of returning before a year was up, maybe even two.

     Old Pete, I think, had been travelling for years. He hardly ever spoke of home, which we had assumed, before learning he was from Germany, was England, because he looked like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings and spoke with a slight British accent. He wouldn’t go into detail about what he used to do in Germany but he had numerous stories of his journeys, from Mongolia to Vietnam to Indonesia, even Afghanistan before the start of the war. I could picture him so clearly, with his frayed backpack and his lengthening beard, roving year after year, covering ground with his long sinewy legs, his face resolutely turned from the past. It seemed he had retired from whatever work he used to do and was spending the rest of his life roaming the world, demanding the perfectly soft-boiled egg.

     Peter, my Peter, thought maybe Old Pete had cancer and was travelling just to die, like dogs that drag themselves into the woods in search of the solitude needed for such a solitary act. It certainly seemed possible because he was so thin and his sunken eyes so haunted. He had, in fact, edged perilously close to death on our way up to Nako, so Peter’s speculation didn’t seem far off. It was not cancer that almost claimed him, however, but the valley we had to cross to reach Nako, that village perched on the world’s roof. The valley, the lack of rain, a road tumbled to nothing: a matter not of what crouched within him, but what lay outside, the elements of an earth none of us quite understood.

     It was early September and the dry season in Spiti Valley, which never saw much rain anyway. All around us the mountains were crumbling. They seemed to be made of sand and grit, occasionally rock. Walking up a hill, our feet would sink into the soil and we would scrabble for purchase, sending a scattering of pebbles down the slope. The air was so dry it made us thirsty just to breathe. Everything was faded with weariness, coated with dust. And over it all was the clearest blue sky we had ever seen, occasionally studded with clouds, but clouds that released no rain.

     In conditions like those, the Himalayan roads, never stable to begin with, began to disintegrate. Often, this just meant they would sift away a little at the edges, making the narrow track even more perilous, forcing passing buses to slow to a crawl to inch their way past each other. But sometimes whole chunks of road disappeared, collapsed, and tumbled into the valleys below. Workers would begin reconstruction but it took time and meanwhile – there being only one major paved road running the length of Spiti Valley – access from one side to the other was blocked. The only option was to walk: leave your vehicle, take a few deep breaths and trek down into the valley, then up the other side, hoping there would be transport there to help you continue on your way.

     Such was the case with the road that headed east to Nako and to the rest of the valley, the road that led eventually into the lush greenery of the rest of Himachal Pradesh, down to fabled Rishikesh, where holy men bathed in the river beside holy cows, where the chanting from temples layered the air with sound, where there was fresh papaya every morning for breakfast. The last thing we wanted to do was turn around and go back the way we had come, to ride the same overcrowded 12-hour bus a second time in defeat, back through landscape we had already seen, back to Manali and eventually to Dharamsala, where we had already spent so much time and left with such hope, such promise, such expectation of what was to come. So when we heard that an entire swathe of the road had apparently slid away, leaving a blank hillside tumbling with the random falling rock, we felt we had no choice but to press ahead. Backpackers we met in Tabo, the main town to the west of the landslide, who had made the journey in the opposite direction, all said it was no big deal, that you just walked down to the river and up the other side and caught a bus waiting for such passengers. It took an hour, tops. They also told us there was another option: glide across the chasm in a basket used to transport luggage and goods, a basket strung on a cable from one side of the landslide to the other. But being afraid of heights, this hardly seemed an acceptable solution to me.

     When the bus pulled up in Tabo we boarded without misgivings, even happily because Old Pete – whom we had met in Kibber, a village so high you lost your breath climbing a simple set of stairs – was already on it and cheerfully waving from a window. It was about 10 in the morning when we left Tabo. We thought we would be in Nako by two, at the latest.

     Of course, such expectations are foolish, especially in India, where nothing ever goes quite as planned. We did make it to the landslide by noon, as scheduled, but crossing to the other side was another matter entirely. We entrusted our backpacks to the metal basket strung across the gap, the same one we had been told about and that later transported without incident several tourists we met afterwards. This time, however, the men operating it said the line had snapped a couple of times, although they had thankfully lost only sacks of rice. I peered down the length of the cable strung so precariously across that chasm, pictured it snapping, me tumbling head over feet through the clear Himalayan air. One look at Peter and Old Pete told me they were thinking the same. So we walked.

     I had feared descending the most because, as I said, heights made me nervous. But it was no big deal; I just followed the winding track all the way down. The Indians from the bus made it to the bottom first, hopping from rock to rock as though they had been doing it all their lives, which I suppose they had. Then came Old Pete and Peter and finally me, the rearguard. We paused for water and to catch our breath, which at that altitude was more difficult than it sounds. Then we braced ourselves for the journey back up the other side.

     The problem was we hadn’t really considered the altitude. We had already been high in the Himalayas of Spiti Valley for a week or more and should have been used to being short of breath. But we hadn’t really tried to climb an entire hillside. We didn’t know just what our lungs were capable of, or not. Plus, we had been in India for months by then and the various food-borne parasites had taken their toll on our strength. Peter and I were already two sizes too small for the clothes we had brought and Old Pete, for all we knew, was being slowly devoured by cancer.

     We started the upwards trek together. Then I had to stop, after just a few steps, to catch my breath. And then again. Peter, whose lungs were already saddled with asthma, stopped a few times too, but then miraculously seemed to rally himself and kept on, forging up the rocky trail, leaving the two of us behind. I kept stopping, wheezing and panting, unable to gasp enough air to keep me going for more than a few steps. It was Old Pete though who started having the worst trouble. He halted every five steps or so, which was a relief to me because I too had to stop and didn’t want to be the only one left behind. But then he started lying down, right there on the rocks, complaining of dizziness. I would pause and reassure him and brush off his apologies for slowing us down. After a few minutes he would stand and start moving, but after a few steps he would be lying down again. He was wheezing worse than I and his face was the colour of putty, his eyes more haunted than ever. Sometimes it would take him a few tries before he could sit up, then he would make it only a step or two before having to lie down again. Finally, there came a time when he couldn’t stand up, no matter how much he wanted to. He kept sitting halfway up then having to lie back down again, saying his head was spinning. I thought of Peter’s speculation about his approaching death and saw the look in his eyes, as empty of light as my lungs felt of breath, and I was afraid.

     I didn’t know what to do. All the Indian passengers from the bus had long since disappeared. Peter by then was probably at the top of the slope, but that was too far away to call him back. Old Pete, though terribly thin, was more than six feet tall and there was no way I could lift him. We had long since run out of water. It was just the two of us, the rocky trail, the valley below and the blue sky over Spiti Valley.

     Eventually I said, “I’ll go for help.” Old Pete just nodded, his head lolling against a rock. I thought maybe I could find some men at the top to carry Old Pete up the trail. It was laughable though. Climbing quickly to the crest was a joke, considering the state I was in. I was still stopping for breath every few steps. There was no chance I’d be able to reach help in time. Old Pete, it seemed, was doomed.

     As luck would have it, on my way up I met Peter, who was coming down, a clutch of apples in his hand. Apparently he had made it to the place where the metal basket had deposited our backpacks and been given apples by the men operating the pulley. He realised we had been a while and came in search of us. I wheezed out my news about Old Pete and my failed plan to save him. Peter handed me an apple and wished me luck reaching the top. I continued upwards, taking fortifying bites of the apple every few steps. Peter, however, kept going back down the mountain to Old Pete. As he recounted later, he hunkered next to him when he found him and cut pieces of apple that he fed into his mouth, the way you would a baby. Eventually, Old Pete, who had apparently eaten nothing that day, was able to sit up, then stand, then slowly but purposefully continue his journey to the top.

     By the time they reached me, where I had collapsed next to our backpacks, Old Pete was grinning, joking about his hardship. Even when we continued our journey – another two kilometres, past falling rocks, to a bus so packed we had to ride on the roof all the way up the hairpin turns to Nako – he maintained his good cheer, forging on ahead with the strength of a much younger man. And when we finally arrived in Nako at twilight, he felt well enough to produce a bottle of rum from his backpack and pour glasses all round for a toast to our survival.

     I think it was those apples that saved Old Pete’s life. Whether he was truly dying of cancer, or if he’s still alive somewhere, I’ll never know. But he managed to survive then, on that day in Spiti Valley. He lived long enough to see the sunset over the peaks from the roof of the bus to Nako, long enough to reach that village made of stone and dust, a lake like a gem set in its centre, long enough to clink glasses together at journey’s end, warm rum settling in his belly like fire, like life. Because of apples, those simple little orbs.

 

* * *

 

So I guess there was a forerunner of Old Pete’s craving for tomatoes, a kind of foreshadowing of what he thought he needed in life. Something round and sweet, something juicy. No wonder he became so adamant on the topic of tomatoes. He knew, of course, what could save him and it wasn’t rice and it wasn’t dahl. Maybe at first he thought it was soft-boiled eggs, but it turned out it wasn’t those either. Just tomatoes. That’s all he wanted.

     He began to pester the owner of the guest house for them. The guest house was also a shop, apparently the only one in Nako and he was sure the owner would be able to scavenge some tomatoes from the muddle of onions, potatoes and eggs stuffed into the unlit room that served as the people’s market. Unfortunately for us, this wasn’t the case, but Old Pete persisted. He eventually even began offering to pay exorbitant prices, prices far beyond what he would ever have thought of paying down on the Indian plains, where tomatoes were plentiful.

     “Just a tomato,” he would say. “Just one tomato, that would be perfect. I’ll give you 20 rupees for one, 50 even. Really, why don’t you have any tomatoes up here?”

     But the owner would just laugh and waggle his mustachioed face from side to side and order his son to boil another egg or two.

     Old Pete wasn’t the only one to develop this craving. Peter and I yearned for them too, though we heckled the owner less. After what we had seen in India we were both trying to stay satisfied with our lot. It wasn’t just the limbless beggars in Delhi or the lepers in Dharamsala; just the sight of a Nako woman trundling down the road in her layers of dirty blankets, a child strapped to her front and a couple of cement blocks balanced on her head, made me conscious of my well-stitched shoes, my unburdened head. Even our Tibetan students back in Dharamsala – most of whom had walked a month or more over these same mountains to escape the Chinese occupation of Tibet and reach India – were a reminder of what we had come from and where else we had the ability to go.

     But though we told ourselves we were lucky we still couldn’t resist the idea of tomatoes. The thought of something so sweet, so juicy, was just about driving us crazy. We talked about it, Peter and I, and sometimes Old Pete too, during those afternoons on our balcony when we had done our exploring for the day and there was nothing left to do but idle away the time talking about everything we missed from home.

     Because it wasn’t just tomatoes I was craving. Though our American money went quite far, Peter and I were still trying to save as much as possible, not knowing what would happen to us when we were in Thailand. In Dharamsala we had sought the cheapest lodgings we could find, not wanting to spend more than 50 rupees a night, the equivalent of about US$1.50. What that bought us was a dank little room at the base of a guest house, a room so deep in shadow and damp that mould grew on everything, even our passports. At night, the sheets were so slick and cold it would take forever to warm them up and we would lie there, listening to the plunk of rain outside and the rustle of insects in the corners of the room, and congratulate ourselves on saving so much money.

     And now here we were in Spiti Valley, whose landscape was so beautiful it almost hurt to gaze upon it, but which was also cold and lacking in the simple luxuries of home. I would lie awake at night in our chilly room above the potato fields, with the stunning stretch of the mountains just outside our door and dream of all the things I missed from New York. Tomatoes, obviously, but also bagels and cheese and wine and grapes and steak and anything else I could think of. Clean sheets and soft pillows, comforters in enormous snowy piles, anything other than the damp chill of our room in Dharamsala, or the dry frigidity of the guest houses in Spiti Valley. I dreamed of soap, big bottles of liquid soap and shampoo and lotion from the pharmacy; and of the fluorescence-lit aisles where I could find them, down which I could wander at my leisure, selecting any item I wanted without having to bend over a wooden counter at some roadside stall and point at grimy little jars, scratched bottles, tubes speckled with flies. I had taken such things for granted, I knew that and now I wanted them back. Except I couldn’t have them, because we had set ourselves on this journey through Asia and couldn’t go back, not then, not any time soon.

     It wasn’t just our hope of better jobs; it was India itself that wouldn’t let us leave. The sweep of the mountains, the vaulted sky, even the overstuffed buses with their camaraderie and the distinct and pure calm that would settle over me after the fifth jolting hour of travel. Even the stink and clamour of its city streets, the excitement of careening through traffic in a flimsy autorickshaw, laughing at death through gritted teeth. The trains in the night, the hot cups of chai, the sight of folded saris in rainbow hues stacked on a shelf. The people with their numerous kindnesses and their precise English, the moustaches of the men, the combed and oiled hair of the women, the shouted Hellos! of uniformed children on their way to school. The smell of trash burning, the waft of incense. The thrill of crossing a landslide and living to tell the tale. There was no way a simple desire for tomatoes could cancel all this from our lives. So I dreamed instead, while on the other side of our flimsy wall, in his own chilly bed, Old Pete was dreaming too.

 

* * *

 

Then came the day they were finally here. Peter and I were still sleeping when they were delivered; they must have been dropped off before dawn. When we woke to find the box of tomatoes sitting outside the shop attached to the guest house, I imagined their arrival: the blue light before dawn, the hush of the sleeping village, the box wrestled free from the back of the pickup truck that had rattled its away along the switchback road to Nako, the sound it made when dropped into the owner’s waiting arms, like a sack of stolen money being passed from hand to hand, something illicit, something precious.

     There they were when we stumbled from our room in search of our morning chai. The heap of scarlet globes in an unassuming cardboard box, dusty from their journey but no less enticing for that. As though it were Christmas and Santa Claus had come in the night.

     “Holy shit,” said Peter. “Are they for us?”

     Sadly they were not. Old Pete, who always woke at dawn, had already discovered the unfortunate fact. There he was, all six feet of him, his long white beard blowing gently in the Himalayan breeze, bent over the box with what can only be called a maniacal gleam in his eye, arguing with the owner about prices.

     “Fifty rupees,” we heard him say. “Fifty rupees for one tomato. Come on, where else can you get a price like that? It’s 50 rupees, sir, for one tomato.”

     But the owner wasn’t having it. He just kept waggling his head in that gesture that meant “no” instead of “yes”, his expression the resolute blank that people in India seem to assume when they have passed the point of compromise. It was clear that Old Pete had no hope. The owner was not going to sell him any tomatoes.

     “Damn it,” I muttered. Peter and I nodded at the owner as we passed into the room that served as their cafe to signal our desire for chai and eggs. “I would love a tomato right now.”

     “God, me too,” said Peter. “I’d eat the hell out of one.”

     “Do you think we should ask for one?”

     “I dunno. It doesn’t look as though Old Pete is having much luck. Do you wanna try?”

     I shrugged. “Kind of.” I looked longingly back at the box, at the tableau of Old Pete and the owner caught in their battle. The owner’s face looked thoroughly sealed; it reminded me of the metal shutters pulled over New York storefronts at night. There would be no persuading him.

     “You’d think he’d part with at least one.”

     “You’d think.” I sat down at the table. “It’s definitely not worth arguing with him.”

     “Yeah. Poor Old Pete.”

     I choked out a single bitter laugh. “Poor us.”

     Peter joined me at the table and together we stared morosely at the road outside, its potholes, its stones, its dry dirt. With the loss of hope for tomatoes all my other hopes seemed to recede. There would be no bagels, no wine, no family-sized bottles of shower gel, no pristine sheets or fluffy comforters. No. Those days were past. From now on, this would be it. Dahl and rice, with the occasional pebble in it scraping our teeth. Tea boiled with old milk. Pale eggs and dry toast burned at the edges by the fire. Flat rounds of Tibetan bread like we ate in the Spiti capital of Kaza, served to us in a dirty room by a straggly haired woman, bread we had broken open only to find two long, coarse black hairs baked in, like a nasty little surprise. In that moment, all my joy in India, in what it had come to mean to me, dwindled to nearly nothing. This was our road now, our journey. This was what we had braved that landslide for, what we had travelled on all those 12-hour buses for, sweating, hungry, packed in among children and baggage like so much cargo. This was the path we had chosen so we had to accept it.

     We knew this, we did, but that didn’t really stop our mouths from watering when we thought of those tomatoes, sitting innocently in their box just outside the door. Old Pete, of course, couldn’t forget them either. We could still hear him arguing, out there by the shop. By then, he had reached an offer of 100 rupees, which was about US$3, a ridiculous price for a tomato, even in New York, but the owner still wasn’t budging.

     Finally he gave up and joined us at the table.

     “He wouldn’t sell me even one.” Old Pete shook his head in bewilderment. “Not even one. What could they possibly be saving all those tomatoes for?”

     “Beats me,” I said. “Maybe there’s going to be a wedding or something. Maybe a special customer ordered all of them. Who knows?”

     It wouldn’t, however, remain a mystery for long. We had breakfast, which took a while because Old Pete must have sent his eggs back at least three times, perhaps in retaliation for the owner’s refusal to sell him the goods. Finally, on the third try, Peter and I just left him there, wanting to move on with our day. We showered and dressed and left our room, intending to hike up a trail we had seen that led to a mountain pass just above the village. But we stopped outside the guest house shop, amazed by what we saw.

     “Oh my God,” Peter said. “Will you look at that? They’re all gone.”

     And they were. Every last tomato had disappeared. There wasn’t even a small bruised one left, only a couple of stems and a smattering of dirt. The box had been scraped clean, stripped bare, like a field ravaged by locusts.

     The owner was nowhere to be found but Old Pete was at the table again, his head in his hands.

     “They took them all,” he said when he saw us. “All of them. You should have seen it.”

     “Who?” Peter asked. “Who took them?”

     “The villagers. It was like something out of a horror movie. They came in a swarm, a horde of them. I guess word got out that there were tomatoes at the shop and they all just came running.” Old Pete’s eyes were glazed, as though with wonder or despair. “I thought the first woman would buy the whole lot, but no, the owner just sold her one or two, and then the next one came, and then the next. He made sure everyone who showed up received at least one tomato. He had it all regulated, like he had done this before, but it went so fast. Within 10 minutes they were all gone. And he didn’t even save me one.”

     “Wow,” said Peter.

     “Wow,” I echoed. Peter and I looked at each other and I could read the shame written on his face, as I’m sure he could on mine.

     For some reason, we hadn’t even considered the people of Nako, what a tomato would mean to them. In my craving I had almost forgotten the women with their cement blocks, the children with their mucinous and hungry eyes. How often did they have tomatoes? Or apples? How numerous were their apple trees, how bountiful their harvests in such dry conditions? What had it meant for the men at the landslide to give Peter those apples, the ones that had kept us going, saved Old Pete, the ones we’d accepted without a second thought? How many eggs had Old Pete wasted in his quest for perfection? We were griping after eating rice and dahl for a week or two; the people of Nako ate them all year long.

     Old Pete, however, was still lost in his dream, his eyes more sunken than I’d known.

     “I would have paid him 100 rupees,” Old Pete said. “One hundred rupees for a tomato. But he didn’t even save me one. Not even one.”

     We stayed another minute, in silence, as though mourning a death, then we left him there, Old Pete sitting at the table with hands clutching his head, his hollow eyes closed and the cancer perhaps eating its way farther into his body. He had no tomatoes and he had no apples; as we left him there, I wondered what could possibly save him this time.

     Walking towards the trail we passed a few patchy potato fields, a straggle of huts, two yaks huddled together in a pen – and at the point where the houses stopped and the mountains began anew, a wall of prayer stones. The stones were different sizes and shapes, but they had all been engraved with the Tibetan prayer with which we had become so familiar back in Dharamsala. The Om Mani Padme Hum, with its curlicues, squiggles and lines, the way all language looks before you learn to decipher its meaning. Each stone painstakingly etched, then stacked in among the others to form an entire wall. The barrier stood as high as our shoulders and stretched all the way across the ridge between the end of the village and the first sloping rise to the mountain pass towards which we were heading. A wall like that took time and patience and hope, the hope of a people wanting its prayers to be heard.

     How long had it taken to build it? Who had engraved those stones? How often did villagers visit the wall? I thought of the women with their burdens, the potato farmers with their hoes and shovels, the children in their thick and greasy sweaters, cold all year round. How they would perhaps trek there once in a while, on special days, to run their fingers over the stones, to murmur the mantra etched on them, to give their thanks for what they had and perhaps to pray for a little more.

     We spent a while wondering about that wall, tracing the prayers with our eyes and fingers, taking a photograph or two. Then we continued on our way. We walked without hurry, because of the altitude, but nowhere near as slowly as we had up the landslide. We had eaten, we were rested and we had the energy to pick our way up that slope with just a little bit of breathlessness.

     At the top, beyond a herd of goats hunting windblown weeds among the crags, we stopped and sat down, Peter on one boulder, I on another. I looked, down past the goats intent on their simple task, down the trail from which we had come, down to the wall of prayer rocks, which I could just discern as a winding snake across the ridge, down to where the village of Nako nestled among the peaks.

     A cluster of houses around a lake, each one made of mud and stones stacked one on top of another. A few potato fields where sparrows went to bathe and flutter in the dust. A switchback road leading up to it from below and beyond that, a landslide that tempted each foreigner to fail. A sky overhead so blue it hurt to look at it. And somewhere in that muddle of stone houses, a single shop selling onions and hair oil and hard candies from dingy plastic jars. A store with an empty box sitting outside its door that had briefly contained our hopes. We who thought we had suffered so deeply, come so far, deserved so much.

      Just an empty box; and inside each one of those ramshackle houses around the shop, a man or a woman or a child slicing into a tomato with a blunt, rusty knife, sprinkling it with salt and biting into it with a sigh. The way the pulp would glisten in the morning light, the seeds slip over their tongues. The way they would lean back while they chewed, closing their eyes, the juice running down their chins, a look of bliss spreading across their faces, as though all their prayers had suddenly been answered.