Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  The postman grunted in answer and got up, heaving his postbag over his shoulder once more.

  The pony man went by in a comfortable clatter, leading his pony by the head, a small blonde child from the hotel on its back, and waved his arm and hallooed to the two men. They gave him identical looks of grudging recognition and disapproval of his carefree, clattering ways, grunted in unison and began the climb. The pony man went whistling on, waving a wand he had cut from a bush of Spanish broom. The blonde child nodded involuntarily, sun-struck.

  Together, bent-backed, they toiled up the steep path, stones slipping from under their feet, in a way that wildly irritated Nanda Kaul who had come down from the knoll to wait for the postman at the gate, for she always made a point of keeping her back as straight as a rod when walking up that path.

  Sighting her, grey and only faintly stirring under the three pine trees that stood by the gate in their exaggerated attitudes as of men going up in flames with their arms outstretched, charred, too, about the trunks, the postman felt something ominous hover in the heavy summer light and mumbled to Ram Lal, ‘No visitors yet?’

  Ram Lal merely shook his head.

  The postman gave a snorting laugh. Ram Lal turned to stare at him with his small, red-streaked eyes. The postman immediately looked apologetic. ‘Every house in Kasauli is bursting now,’ he explained. ‘It is the season.’

  ‘We have none,’ said Ram Lal, firmly.

  At the gate, they parted. The postman stood shuffling through his letters and Ram Lal, slightly ducking his capped head to Nanda Kaul, went past her to the kitchen where great, bony, dusty chickens sprang down from the stack of wood by the door to greet him. He flapped at them with his market bag and they croaked back in alarm but crowded closer. They were said to be the descendants of Miss Jane Shrewsbury’s original poultry and certainly looked antique, hardy. When he had disappeared into the smoky gloom of the kitchen, they crowded about the door, scraping the floor with their crooked toes in an excited scrabble for attention. In a while he started flinging chopped vegetable heads at them, each one accompanied by a word of filthy abuse.

  In the meantime, the postman had detached one letter from the rest and silently handed it over to Nanda Kaul who said clearly but in a voice of suffering, ‘Thank you.’ Holding it with her fingers, at a little distance from her side, she walked slowly up the flagstone path along which day lilies bloomed desultorily, under the apricot trees to the veranda where she had her old cane chair.

  Here was a letter and she would have to open it. She resolved to say ‘No’ to whatever demand or request it contained. No, no, no.

  Chapter 4

  THE VERANDA LAY deep in shade. The tiles of its uneven floor were cool. Along the stone steps were pots of geraniums and fuchsias that bloomed unimpaired by the sun as they stood in the shade cast by the low, leafy apricot trees. Here was her old cane chair and she sat down on it, putting the letter down on her lap and gazing instead at the ripening apricots and the pair of bul-buls that quarrelled over them till they fell in a flurry of feathers to the ground, stirred up a small frenzy of dust, then shot off in opposite directions, scolding and abusing till a twist of a worm distracted them. Then there were only the cicadas to be heard, a sound so even and so insubstantial that it seemed to emerge from the earth itself, or from the season – a scent of pine-needles made audible, a spinning of sunlight or of the globe on its axis.

  Looking past the leafy branches of those trees and the silvery needles of the pines at the gate, she could see the red rooftops of Lawrence School on the hilltop across the valley, and the fine spire of its church emerging from the seclusion of Sanawar’s greenery. It was a comfortable view to have from one’s veranda – more comfortable than the one from the back windows of the cliff plunging seven thousand feet down to the Punjab plains – but she was not comforted.

  She looked at the scene with her accustomed intensity till a large white and yellow butterfly crossed over, disturbing her concentration, and made her look down at the letter.

  It was addressed in her daughter’s handwriting. The least loved or, at any rate, the most exasperating of her daughters. Asha, the beauty, had dedicated her life to the cultivation of long, glossy hair and an un wrinkled skin and had had little time left over for her unfortunate daughter, the one who married a diplomat and, as a result of his ill treatment of her, the affairs he had, his drinking and brutality, was reduced to a helpless jelly, put away out of sight and treated as an embarrassment who could, if she tried, pull herself together. In her last letter Asha had written, with her usual heartless blitheness, that she had persuaded Tara to try again. Tara’s husband was given a new posting, this time in Geneva, and Asha had persuaded her daughter to go with him, to give him another chance. There was the little problem of their child who was only just recovering from a near-fatal attack of typhoid, but Asha was sure they would find a way to deal with this minor problem. The main thing, she had trumpeted, was for Tara to rouse herself and make another try at being a successful diplomat’s wife. Surely Geneva would be an excellent place for such an effort. ‘Why, why shouldn’t she be happy?’ Asha had written and Nanda Kaul had not replied, had been too disgusted to reply.

  She felt an enormous reluctance to open this letter. She looked at it with distaste and foreboding for a long time before she finally tore it open and drew out the bundle of dark blue pages across which Asha’s large writing pranced. This writing had none of the writer’s loveliness – it sprawled and spread and shrieked out loud an aggressive assurance and aplomb.

  In this writing she conveyed a series of disasters and tragedies to her mother who read it through with her lips pressed so tightly together that it made deep lines furrow the skin from the corners of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, dark runnels of disapproval.

  ‘Darling Mama’ (wrote Asha, and Nanda Kaul could scarcely believe that there had been a time when she was actually addressed as such and heard it quite naturally and calmly), ‘just a note this time as I’m in a mad rush. Now that I’ve persuaded Tara into going to Geneva and Rakesh into taking her – one day I’ll tell you how I did that, I had a long talk with him, he’s not really so bad as Tara might make you believe, she simply doesn’t understand him, doesn’t understand men, and she really is the wrong type of wife for a man like him so I can’t blame him entirely although it is true that he does drink – well, I have to get Tara ready. This last year she’s done nothing, Mama, just let herself go to rack and ruin, as well as her house – and poor little Raka, as you well know. Now she depends on me to wind up her household here and prepare her things and do her shopping for her – she says she can’t, all she does is sit by Raka’s bed and read her stories. So it’s poor me who has to dash about all over Delhi – in the heat and dust-storms of summer – buying her saris, jewellery, getting her blouses tailored, having her suitcases mended, everything! Well, I mustn’t complain, Mama, you know all I want is Tara to be happy and lead a good life. So I am doing all this for her without complaining.

  ‘But there is one problem I can’t help Tara with’ (the letter ran on just as Nanda Kaul had known it would, and she tensed her knees under the silk folds of her sari) ‘and the problem is, of course, Raka. Now, Mama, you know I have to dash off to Bombay at the end of the month to help Vina with her confinement – you see how old grandmothers have to rush about these days, it’s almost as bad as having another set of babies oneself – and Tara thought I could take Raka with me. But that is quite out of the question. Poor little Raka looks like a ghost and hasn’t quite got over her typhoid yet. She is very weak and the heat and humidity of Bombay will do her no good. Everyone who sees her says she should go to the hills to recuperate. So Tara and I have decided it will be best to send her to you for the summer. Later, when Tara is settled in Geneva and has set up house, she will send for Raka. At the moment it is not possible for the child to travel or live in an hotel. We can’t think of a better way for her to recuperate than spend a quiet summer
with you in Kasauli. And I know how happy it will make you to have your great-grandchild for company in that lonely house’ (here Asha’s writing, bloated with self-confidence, doubled in size and fairly swelled up out of the blue paper at Nanda Kaul). ‘Now Rakesh’s brother has very kindly agreed to take Raka with him as far as Kalka – he’s taking his family to Simla for a short holiday and Raka can travel with them as far as Kalka. There, he will put her in a taxi and send her up to Kasauli. It should be quite safe. She will be with you on . . .’

  Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes as she went over the details of her great-grandchild’s journey. Then she folded the blue sheets firmly, as if suppressing the hurry and rush of her daughter’s excited plans, and slipped them back into the envelope. Placing it on her lap again, she looked out into the apricot trees, down the path to the gate, the cloudy hydrangeas, the pines scattering and hissing in the breeze, to the red roofs of Lawrence School on Sanawar’s green hill-top. One long finger moved like a searching insect over the letter on her lap, moved involuntarily as she struggled to suppress her anger, her disappointment and her total loathing of her daughter’s meddling, busybody ways, her granddaughter’s abject helplessness, and her great-granddaughter’s impending arrival here at Carignano.

  She tried to divert her mind from these thoughts and concentrate on this well known and perpetually soothing scene. She tried to look on it as she had before the letter arrived, with pleasure and satisfaction. But she was too distracted now.

  All she wanted was to be alone, to have Carignano to herself, in this period of her life when stillness and calm were all that she wished to entertain.

  Chapter 5

  GETTING UP AT last, she went slowly round to the back of the house and leant on the wooden railing on which the yellow rose creeper had blossomed so youthfully last month but was now reduced to an exhausted mass of grey creaks and groans again. She gazed down the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves, to the Punjab plains – a silver haze in the summer heat – stretching out to a dim yellow horizon, and said Is it wrong? Have I not done enough and had enough? I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing? But there was no answer and of course she expected none.

  Looking down, over all those years she had survived and borne, she saw them, not bare and shining as the plains below, but like the gorge, cluttered, choked and blackened with the heads of children and grandchildren, servants and guests, all restlessly surging, clamouring about her.

  She thought of the veranda of their house in the small university town in Punjab, the Vice-Chancellor’s house over which she had presided with such an air as to strike awe into visitors who came to call and leave them slightly gaping. She had had her cane chair there, too, and she had sat there, not still and emptily, but mending clothes, sewing on strings and buttons and letting out hems, at her feet a small charcoal brazier on which a pot of kheer bubbled, snipping threads and instructing the servant girl to stir, stir, don’t stop stirring or it’ll burn, and then someone had to be called to hold the smallest child from falling into the bubbling pot and carry it away, screaming worse than if it were scalded. Into this din, a tonga had driven up and disgorged a flurry of guests in their visiting saris, all to flap their palm-leaf hand-fans as they sat in a ring about her – the wives and daughters of the lecturers and professors over whom her husband ruled. She thought of that hubbub and of how she had managed and how everyone had said, pretending to think she couldn’t hear but really wanting her to, ‘Isn’t she splendid? Isn’t she like a queen? Really, Vice-Chancellor is lucky to have a wife who can run everything as she does,’ and her eyes had flashed when she heard, like a pair of black blades, wanting to cut them, despising them, crawling grey bugs about her fastidious feet. That was the look no one had dared catch or return.

  Looking down at her knuckles, two rows of yellow bones on the railing, she thought of her sons and daughters, of her confinements, some in great discomfort at home and others at the small filthy missionary-run hospital in the bazaar, and the different nurses and doctors who had wanted to help her but never could, and the slovenly, neurotic ayahs she had had to have because there was such a deal of washing and ironing to do and Mr Kaul had wanted her always in silk, at the head of the long rosewood table in the dining-room, entertaining his guests.

  Mentally she stalked through the rooms of that house – his house, never hers – very carefully closing the wire-screen doors behind her to keep out the flies, looking sharply to see if the dark furniture, all rosewood, had been polished and the doors of the gigantic cupboards properly shut. She sniffed to make sure the cook was not smoking biris in the kitchen and to verify that all the metalware smelt freshly of Brasso.

  She seemed to hear poignant shrieks from the canna beds in the garden – a child had tumbled off the swing, another had been stung by a wasp, a third slapped by the fourth – and gone out on the veranda to see them come wailing up the steps with cut lips, bruised knees, broken teeth and tears, and bent over them with that still, ironic bow to duty that no one had noticed or defined.

  Now, to bow again, to let that noose slip once more round her neck that she had thought was freed fully, finally. Now to have those wails and bawls shatter and rip her still house to pieces, to clutter the bare rooms and the cool tiles with the mountainous paraphernalia that each child seems to require or anyway demand. Now to converse again when it was silence she wished, to question and follow up and make sure of another’s life and comfort and order, to involve oneself, to involve another.

  It seemed hard, it seemed unfair, when all she wanted was the sound of the cicadas and the pines, the sight of this gorge plunging, blood-red, down to the silver plain.

  An eagle swept over it, far below her, a thousand feet below, its wings outspread, gliding on currents of air without once moving its great muscular wings which remained in repose, in control. She had wished, it occurred to her, to imitate that eagle – gliding, with eyes closed.

  Then a cuckoo called, quite close, here in her garden, very softly, very musically, but definitely calling – she recognized its domestic tone.

  She gave that ironic bow again, very, very slightly, and went to the kitchen to see what Ram Lal had for her lunch and tell him about the great-grandchild’s visit.

  He blinked rather nervously, she thought.

  Chapter 6

  WHEN SHE WAS back on her cane chair on the veranda, watching the sunlight spread over the tiles like a bright lacquer – too bright, too dry – the telephone rang. It rang so seldom, at Carignano, that its ringing sounded extraordinary, ominous.

  Sitting bolt upright in her chair and trembling slightly, Nanda Kaul pressed the palms of her hands together and wondered whether to punish it by letting it ring itself to death or end her agony by answering it quickly. Its persistent shrilling was so painful that she was obliged to do the latter which seemed to her like a weakness, offending her still further.

  She held the black ear-phone awkwardly, resenting its uncomfortable pressure on the small bones of her ear, picked surlily at the pages of the telephone directory and stared out of the window at a large hen scratching under the hydrangea. The look on her face was one no one had ever caught on it – she had allowed no one to, ever.

  A burst of crackling and hissing, as of suddenly awakened geese, a brief silence, then a voice issued from it that made her gasp and shrivel, balling up her fingers tightly. The voice was not merely shrill, not merely strident, it was shrill and strident as no other voice ever was but Ila Das’s.

  Moving the ear-phone a few safe inches away from her ear, Nanda Kaul sighed resignedly. She knew this voice was Ila Das’s tragedy in life and wondered, as always when she heard it, if Ila Das herself knew it. They had been together in school and college and from that time to this there had been no hint that Ila Das might harbour such a devastating suspicion about herself.

  The shock of that hideous voice made it impossible to follow what was being said for a
minute or two.

  ‘Where are you speaking from, Ila?’ she asked when there was a small pause in the piping, shrilling screech that was poor Ila’s speech, like a long nail frantically scratching at a glass pane, or a small child gone berserk and prattling on and on in a voice no one could hear without cringing.

  ‘I’m lunching at the sanatorium with the matron, my dear,’ screamed Ila Das, ‘and I thought, how nice, now I can make a few phone calls and get in touch with my friends. You know, I hardly ever get away from my village – it keeps me sooo busy, I never get a minute . . .’ she babbled on and Nanda Kaul turned her head this way and that in an effort to escape. She watched the white hen drag out a worm inch by resisting inch from the ground till it snapped in two. She felt like the worm herself, she winced at its mutilation.

  ‘And when can I come and see you?’ screeched Ila Das. ‘We haven’t met for ages, dear, and I’ve so much to tell, I’ve been so busy, I must tell you all . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Nanda Kaul into the phone, her voice as pale as her face, ‘but my great-granddaughter is coming to stay at the end of the week. I’m a bit busy myself, getting a room ready for her and so on . . .’

  ‘But, Nanda, how marvellous,’ the voice shrilled, achieving a new pitch, and it was not impossible, thought Nanda Kaul, that Ila was jumping up and down on her two feet in excitement. ‘Your great-granddaughter did you say, Nanda? How marvellous, how – I must come and see her. At once! May I? May I, Nanda?’

  Nanda Kaul’s face seemed about to crack. It was cut from end to end with black furrows of desperation. She pressed her hand to her forehead and found it clammy. Her voice dropped lower and lower as she dropped words like small, cold pebbles into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes, Ila, you must come – but wait a bit – when the child is settled, I’ll let you know, I’ll write you a note,’ and quickly she put the phone down.