Photo: Sukhada Tatke

1. Water of Leith

[ST]

Have you heard the river? Listened to the stories she tells you when you place your ear to the bank, your whole body? Once you get past the murmur, the susurrus, the dog bark, the wicked laugh of the gull, the creepy-crawly up your bare leg, the din overhead, the child bounding after his dog friend; you shut out the world, and a riverine voice speaks to you. I was here, it says, here long before your body or mind took shape, long before the first among you was formed. In this moment of union, a shudder rises in your head – the source of all that you thought you knew – and cruises through your torso, the length of your spine, meandering down your arms, bending around your legs, your feet and toenails, scorching your every pore; and your mouth searches for the sea. Not a sound is heard.

Many eras later, members of an intelligent species will, while strolling along these banks, stumble upon some clumsy remains, indistinguishable from earth. They will regard this curled-up portrait of surrender – forehead on the ground, legs folded under the body, arms hugging the chest, rump raised skywards – with curiosity. Look, they will say, pointing at the relic, a petrified human. 

[RH]

To stand on this bridge with you, looking out over the river purling below us: rich and strange in its rippling presence, though I know the pour and gurgle of its onrush so well already from your stories. To gaze up at the trees reaching heavenward like annunciations scripted in an extinct language. We hear a woman call after her runaway dog, distraught primate sprinting after excitable canine through the shrubbery. The dog is already passing into dream, into phantasm, into story. We look down: the water is running low, lifting the rocks on the riverbed to view. Born in volcanic fire, these rocks have slept underwater for centuries. Now they look like seals, basking in the late summer sunlight. We touch them, trace the lines incised into their surfaces by geological action, time, weather. They are the red of dried blood and shadowed leaves. They would speak to us, if they could.

What does it mean to find speech? Or for speech to find you?

2. Royal Botanic Garden 

[RH]

As some look for the story of their lives in a novel, we might look for the story of ours in these walkways that wind through – we interrupt ourselves with delight; the detour teaches us more than the drive; Wynd, from the Old Norse venda, we remember from another walk, another conversation, is an old Scottish and North Country word for a narrow lane between houses. We were saying? Yes: walkways that wind through Himalayan tracts. At our feet, pine cones. And the deodar, which never dies: a giant of the mountains, forking and spreading into a canopy under which we look for a word for story. Gunadhya sat under this tree, composing his ocean of fables and contes, calling out to the bears and wolves, the deer and falcons.

Katha. This could work. But isn’t it too bright a word for this mellow day on which late summer shades into autumn? A word jarred by screeching actors dressed in red silk and gilt and glitter, their faces caked with the powder of a desiccated mythology, their epic gestures reduced to staccato moves under kliegs, keeping tin-pan time with a synthesiser?

Look for me in the spiky flowers of the Chinese lantern tree. Look for me in the wavelets of the stream that runs beneath this hillock, if you can hear it; I hide myself in other voices. Look for me in the phut-phut-phut of seed pods being shot into the air; I disperse myself in each fusillade, never losing the hope of tomorrow.

Those who look for me call me Afsaneh.

[ST]

The air crackles with the Scotch broom pods exploding in the sun. We pause and pay attention – the memory of the biosphere resides here, in this garden.

Every species may one day go extinct; their Latin names somehow prefigure this fate, consigning them already to musty antiquity. If our memories, too, disappeared, who would tell our story? Never mind that. We must regain some control. Let us tame plants. Tame animals. Tame rivers. Tame seas. Let us create small islands of knowledge we loot from distant lands. Exploit. Extract. Expand.

Here she is, the Queen Mother, enshrined within walls of seashells, pine cones, branches and horns. We are here to memorialise our dead; who will remember us when the last tree is fed to the demon? Brick by brick they dismantled the Gardener’s Cottage on Leith Walk and moved it across the city to anchor it here, in its rightful home. We need to preserve what we can’t let go. The cottage came up, etched with the ghosts of its violent history.

We walk along the curves of this open catalogue of the living, its spectral hymns surging in our blood. The deodar calls out to your forebears across the archipelagos. Our feet sizzle from what’s growing under them. The roots crisscross around almighty points on the globe – from Himalayan heights to Caribbean depths; from Jamaica to New Zealand; from the Falkland Islands to Saint Helena – and the fire that rises is the roar of the enslaved, of shackled memory.

3. Dunbar’s Close Garden 

[ST]

This jewel does not gleam uniformly in the bouncing light. Domed whitebeams stand guard over shrubbery laid across parterres. Flowers the colour of wine red, bruise purple, van Gogh yellow, shoot out of beds. Jasmine and honeysuckle creep up the trellises. All the hubbub of Royal Mile dims in this garden. The trees host songbirds, lattice the earth at midday with leaf shadow.

Isn’t this miraculous? you ask. Mystical language is deeply veined in you. Sacred, divine, magical – how easily these words gambol on your tongue. I want to shrug. I nod instead. We have wound our way here through thorny tracts of time, but time is no serpent that eats its own tail. Next to us, a cherry tree prepares for the future, sheds leaves it no longer needs, so that we can walk on their crunch and know what it means to be alive. People come and go, eating out of the last days of summer. The garden is small, its scale immense. It is miraculous, this surprise of discovery. How did we get here?

We watch the serpent rustle away; you take my hand. WomanMan. ManWoman. WomanWoman. ManMan. It does not matter. The last two humans journey back to Paradise. 

We will never tame this garden, you and I. We are only transiting through. We were never here.

[RH]

The street sloped upward and our muscles fell in step with the gradient. A space opened up to our right and in a breath and a heartbeat we had left the tourists behind in their tartan caps. Behind a gate, a garden. Peri daeza: the Zend name for a walled garden of the angels. Every garden has its angels, welcoming or inscrutable, homegrown or drawn in from far away. The tulip tree, bursting with flowers. The yew, its bark poison, its berry nectar. Rosemary, spangled with purple flowers. Fig, lining the base of a wall. We sit on a stone bench, gathering our thoughts and our selves – distributed across cities and continents – and allow the drowsy minutes to settle on the leaves, the branches, to drip to the earth, to evaporate on the grass. To leave a garden is to suffer the deepest Heimweh, the ache of leaving home behind. But we leave in the certainty that we will be back here, among the ripening trails of these parterres. Heimweh has a twin: Heimkehr, the circling return.

This garden will never let us go. 

4. Calton Hill 

[RH]

Vistas converge on us from every side as we stand on this hilltop, with nothing between the burnt gorse at our feet and the clouds above our heads except ourselves.

I brace myself for the impact of the uhlan wind. You, breathing deeply, are the earth compass. You stand still and let the wind whip around you, sculpt itself around you.

Every vista – the one that surges in from the sea, from Portobello Beach over the roofs of houses and the spires of churches; the one that carries news from St Giles and the Scott Memorial; the one that hesitantly wafts towards you the fragrance of the Scottish flowers that grow around the rotunda of the Burns Monument; the one that calls in with the addresses of every constellation in the sky beyond the Observatory – brings you a word on the wind.

Waqt. Exposed brick. Ashlar-cut slate. Gables. Gargoyles. On all these, the signature of farewell. 

Samay. Water dripping on glass. Doorways leading us into closes, courts, ferneries. On all these, a patina of mystery.

When I turn, the earth turns on its axis, ushering out one cast of actors, stopping for breath before it brings another onstage. I watch them go. Now the slave-owner on his impossibly high column, beyond the reach of protestors, but not safe for ever. Now the philosopher of thrift and profit, crowned with an orange traffic cone. Aavartan.

That bird with one velvet blue-green wing, the rest of its plumage coal and snow. It pauses on the grass near the colonnaded portico of the National Monument. Following it, we pause too. It hops away and does not tell us its name. Thairaav.

The vistas are billowing out now. You call after them, ask them what these names name. A voice answers: You are my time.

[ST]

A time ball drops from the Nelson Monument. Nearby, at the Castle, the gun is fired. It is time for the ships at the Firth of Forth to set their maritime clocks. Keep your eye on the ball, the wind whispers, don’t lose track of time. It is not yet one o’clock when we climb, so we don’t hear the nudges. The ships no longer need them. 

How often have I walked up these stairs, caught my breath and lost it again? From here my eyes swallow the whole city in several deep gulps. The mountain air spirits me to a place I have never known nor will, but it tugs at me so insistently that for a fleeting moment an arrogance takes hold of me. This fabric stretching across the skyline was stitched to my shape, I say, this city that carries not the weight but the sparkle of history was created just for me. Your indulgent smile responds: I know you love this city like a lover.

Arthur’s Seat is an extinct volcano, they claim. But how can this colossal memorial to time, presently blazing before our eyes, be anything but extant? We see the crags at a distance – when did we last touch them? Yesterday? Or was it several million years ago when we swam in the shallow seas, surrounded by nothing but the newborn world? 

You know we could see nothing beyond this mesh of gorse, I tell you, pointing at a charred void. Everything was blurry on our first visit here, like waking up one day to a new light your vision could not adjust to. It was like floating on clouds. Then came the sun, which brought fire, torching everything in its path.

The gorse pods split open to new life.