"Early twentieth century, before any of us — up in Abbottabad, Mustang,
Kumaon, men with little knives and notebooks collected these specimens of
Bergenia ciliata, stuffed it into drawers, filed it under “Economic plants of the
trans-Himalayan belt.” In the mountains we called it Pakhanbhed. Pathar
phod buti. Stone-breaker. The plant doesn’t mess around. Its roots go deep,
right into mountain crevices, glaciers, and split the rock. Ever seen a soft root
tear through granite? And it does the same inside the human body—kidney
stones, it breaks them into fine dust particles. So we boil the rhizomes, make
a medicine, Pāshāna-bheda in the old texts, a common herb used in
Ayurveda. Common enough that we forget its mystical strength, common
enough that one to two thousand metric tonnes are traded in a year. NMPB
reports the plant ‘Assessed as Vulnerable in Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya
and Sikkim.’

This year—the mountains themselves were breaking open, not by plants. Too
much of it, all at once, cloudbursts, floods, landslides, the whole of land
patches sliding into absence, tired of holding itself together, and this, they
say, is something else, a warming, a fever, not the kind you heal with herbs.

—-
Collage of charcoal and pastel marks made on archival paper, these works
are based on three specimens of Bergenia ciliata flowers from the archives of
Harvard Herbaria and the recent satellite images of cloud bursts, landslides
and floods in Dharali, Mandi, Darjeeling, Kashmir and Ladakh."

- Garima Gupta