Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Nanda Kaul sadly, and moved towards the door, trying hard to cling to the vision of potato chips and tomato ketchup as the saving of them all. They sounded so cheerful but also, she had to admit, somehow inadequate.

  Ram Lal went back to sorting potatoes and onions with a fresh vigour, but kept a wary eye on the Memsahib as she trailed back to the house over the gravel and pine-needles, with a new hesitation in her normally sure step. ‘Old, old,’ he muttered, when she was out of earshot, in the shade of the apricot trees. ‘She is old, I am old. We are old, old,’ he muttered, quickly losing hope.

  A bony hen poked its neck in at the door and squawked in a particularly demanding and raucous tone. He flung his filthy market-bag at it in rage and it flew up onto the woodpile and stared at him with a surprised yellow eye.

  Chapter 10

  SHE DID NOT, after all, walk down to the taxi-stand to meet Raka. She sent Ram Lal instead. She knew she ought to go. She knew if she took the road very slowly, gave it plenty of time, and carried a sunshade, she could do it. But she could not bear the thought of curious eyes that would see her, the loose mouths that would turn to each other and flap questioningly.

  She stayed back, going into the guest room again and again to pick at the linen duchess set on the chest of drawers, drag open the cupboard doors and sniff at the damp, green smell of mould, pat the mattress and feel the hairy prickles through the smooth sheet.

  She considered filling a vase with flowers and placing it beside the bed. But, when she went to the window and looked out, she saw only such flowers as succeed outdoors, not one that might retain its shape or colour inside.

  On her way to the door, she bumped her leg against the bed-post. The bump seemed to knock the air out of her lungs. Gasping, she limped away to her room, feeling slightly sick.

  In her room, she pulled up the petticoat to examine her thigh. No, no broken bone protruded, but the pimpled pearl of flesh was already turning into a rainbow-tinted bruise. Blue now, it would be violet tomorrow, green thereafter till it faded to yellow and then back to pearl. The putrid colours of old meat.

  She groaned with self-pity and pain, certain that she was alone and no one would hear.

  In an hour that privacy would be over. She could never groan aloud again: the child would hear.

  Tenderly rubbing the bruise, she tried to distract her mind from the pain by remembering what she could of Raka. But now all the babies in her life ran together in one rainbow muddle – pinks, blues, bruises, bones – she could hardly separate her own from others. Was it Milon who had the ayah that fed him opium at night, under her fingernails, or was it Nikhil? Which of them, clinging to her knees, or lying dreamily with a head in her lap, had insisted ‘When I grow big, you will grow small, and then I will look after you’? Could it have been Asha, the writer of those terrible letters? It could, for Asha had been a small girl with curls all over her head and a round, soft hand with which she had patted her mother when she had approved of her sari and jewels as she dressed before the mirror. ‘When you are dead, I will get all your saris,’ she had smugly said. That certainly sounded like Asha. But there were the others – her own and then the grandchildren. Recently it was Tara who had demanded the largest share of her sympathy and attention, with her unhappiness and her breakdowns. But the pregnant Vina, too, needed care. During her first pregnancy she had typhoid. Disaster-prone, during the second she had broken a leg and survived an attack of appendicitis. Asha’s children appeared to attract all the tragedy that she herself had skirted with such complacent success. Now there was to be yet another great-grandchild. So how could she be sure at which point in time Raka had arrived, in which city and hospital?

  She had, in her time, embroidered so many muslin vests and cotton nightgowns, she could not recall if it was with a blue duck or a pink mouse that she had greeted Raka, whether she had sent a coral bracelet or a silver mug. It was not possible, groaned Nanda Kaul, when there were so many of them and they were as alike as human beings always are alike. She could not summon Raka out of the common blur. She was no more than a particularly dark and irksome spot on the hazy landscape – a mosquito, a cricket, or a grain of sand in the eye.

  Hanging her head miserably, it seemed too much to her that she should now have to meet Raka, discover her as an individual and, worse, as a relation, a dependant. She would have to urge her to eat eggs and spinach, caution her against lifting stones in the garden under which scorpions might lie asleep, see her to bed at night and lie in the next room, wondering if the child slept, straining to catch a sound from the bedroom, their opposing thoughts colliding in the dark like jittery bats in flight.

  She would never be able to sleep, Nanda Kaul moaned to herself how could she sleep with someone else in the house? She was so unused to it, it would upset her so.

  And she would have to order proper meals even though she herself wanted nothing but a piece of toast, apricots from the garden, that was all. Perhaps the child would be bored and need to be entertained? How would she do that? Once she had known nursery rhymes, word games, possessed skills with paper and cloth, pins and scissors – but they were all gone, buried under layers of dust, she had not the vitality to delve for them. Should she take the child for walks then? To the club? Should she invite other children to play? But she knew no one, certainly no children, in Kasauli. She had held herself religiously aloof, jealous of this privacy achieved only at the very end of her life.

  There was only Ila Das who had followed her out of the past and still came to see her. Should Ila Das be invited to meet the child?

  The very thought wrung a snort of disgust from Nanda Kaul. Then she dropped her petticoat, stood, looked vaguely about the room and limped out to the veranda.

  It was very still. Ram Lal had left for the taxi-stand. Raka would soon be here.

  On the knoll and at the gate the wind ruffled the pine-needles so that they glistened silver in the sunlight. A cuckoo sang in the chestnut tree down by the road, with its low, domestic call.

  PART II

  Raka comes to Carignano

  Chapter 1

  RAKA – WHAT AN utter misnomer, thought Nanda Kaul, standing under the apricot trees with her hands pressed together before her and watching the child come in through the gate where the pine trees stood bending and twisting extravagantly in the wind as though miming welcome in a modern satiric ballet.

  Raka meant the moon, but this child was not round-faced, calm or radiant. As she shuffled up the garden path, silently following Ram Lal, with a sling bag weighing down one thin, sloping shoulder and her feet in old sandals heavy with dust, Nanda Kaul thought she looked like one of those dark crickets that leap up in fright but do not sing, or a mosquito, minute and fine, on thin, precarious legs.

  But ‘Raka’ she nevertheless said, hoping somehow to relate the name to the child and wondering if she would ever get used to seeing this stranger in her garden.

  Raka slowed down, dragged her foot, then came towards her great-grandmother with something despairing in her attitude, saying nothing. She sucked at the loose, curly elastic of an old, broken straw hat that drooped over her closely cropped head like a straw bag. She turned a pair of extravagantly large and somewhat bulging eyes about in a way that made the old lady feel more than ever her resemblance to an insect.

  Turning those eyes about, Raka watched Ram Lal go up the veranda steps into the house with her case, his outsized tennis shoes alternately flopping and squeaking on the stone tiles. Turning slightly, she saw a scraggy-necked hen pecking beneath a bush of blue hydrangeas at some pieces of broken white china.

  Then she raised her small, shorn head on its very thin and delicate neck and regarded the apricot trees, the veranda, Carignano. She listened to the wind in the pines and the cicadas all shrilling incessantly in the sun with her unfortunately large and protruding ears, and thought she had never before heard the voice of silence.

  Then it was not possible to postpone the meeting any longer a
nd both moved a step closer to each other and embraced because they felt they must. There was a sound of bones colliding. Each felt how bony, angular and unaccommodating the other was and they quickly separated.

  ‘Child, how ill you have been!’ Nanda Kaul exclaimed involuntarily, leaving her hand for a moment on the straight hard shield of the thin shoulder. ‘How ill. How thin it’s made you.’

  Raka pulled at the slack elastic with some embarrassment and rolled her eyes around to follow the flight of the hoopoe that suddenly darted out of the tree. She saw the old lady who murmured at her as another pine tree, the grey sari a rock – all components of the bareness and stillness of the Carignano garden.

  To Nanda Kaul she was still an intruder, an outsider, a mosquito flown up from the plains to tease and worry. With a blatant lack of warmth, she sighed ‘Well, better come in,’ and led her across the wavy tiles of the veranda to her room.

  Chapter 2

  LEFT TO HERSELF in the afternoon, Raka felt over the room with her bare feet. She walked about as the newly caged, the newly tamed wild ones do, sliding from wall to wall on silent, investigating pads. She patted a cheek of wood here, smoothed a ridge of plaster there. She met a spider that groomed its hairs in a corner, saw lizard’s eyes blinking out of a dark groove. She probed the depth of dust on shelves and ledges, licked a windowpane to cool her tongue-tip. She sagged across the bed on her stomach, hung her head over its edge, but the sun caught her eye, slipped in its yellow wedge and would not allow her to close it.

  It summoned her to the window, dragged her the length of a ray and drew her to the ledge where she laid her head on its comfortable guillotine.

  Below the window she saw stones in a heap, flowers that held no interest, a snail’s discarded shell. Not much.

  But a few feet further on, under the hopeless wooden railing, lay the lip of the cliff and the sudden drop down the red, rock-spattered ravine to the plain that lay stretched out and heavy, the dusty pelt of a yellow animal panting in the sun. Raka blinked at it. She knew it – that plain, that pelt, that yellow summer dust.

  Slipping one leg over the window sill, she climbed out into the bed of day lilies and went quietly to lean over the railing and look down. She knew her great-grandmother’s window overlooked the same scene. She was careful not to crunch the pebbles under her feet. Crouching by the rail, she made out the details that gave the hazy scene edges, angles and interest.

  Shoals of rusted tins, bundles of stained newspaper, peels, rags and bones, all snuggling in grooves, hollows, cracks, and sometimes spilling. Pine trees with charred trunks and contorted branches, striking melodramatic attitudes as on stage. Rocks arrested in mid-roll, rearing up, dropping. Occasional tin rooftops, glinting.

  Looking down the length of the jagged ledge, Raka saw it lined with other back walls and servants’ quarters, tin sheds and cook-houses. Around the bend, these grew in size, rose and billowed into the enormous concrete walls of what looked like a factory, for sharp chimneys thrust out cushions and scarves of smoke, black on the milky blue of the afternoon sky. Chutes emerging from its back wall seemed built to disgorge factory waste into the ravine and immediately below them were small, squat structures that looked like brick kilns amongst the spiked, curved blades of the giant agaves that were, besides the pines, the only vegetation of that blighted gorge.

  Puzzled, Raka turned her head on its stalk, gently. Her father and grandmother had extolled the beauties and delights of a Himalayan hill-station to her, but said nothing of factories. Here was such an enormous one that Raka wondered at their ignorance of it. To her, it seemed to dominate the landscape – a square dragon, boxed, bricked and stoked.

  Lizard-like, she clung to the rail and slid along its length to the outdoor kitchen and looked in to see if Ram Lal were there and could enlighten her. But the place was empty, a blackened, fire-blasted cave in which one fiery, inflamed eye glowed and smouldered by itself. A white hen that had insinuated itself into the kitchen unnoticed, saw the flutter of her white dress, squawked out loud and shot past her, making her step aside in surprise.

  In the room next to the kitchen, still smaller but somewhat brightened by the myriad magazine and calendar pictures stuck to the smoky walls. Ram Lal lay on his string cot, his limbs flung out to its four corners, his cap on his nose, lifting and falling with the low growls and sudden snorts that came and went beneath it.

  Leaving him, Raka detached herself from the kitchen walls and climbed the knoll that rose above the kitchen, helping herself up by holding onto fistfuls of hairy ferns and protruding rocks, to the top where pine trees grew in a ring amongst the stones. Here a breeze stirred, cool, dry and resinous.

  Raka leaned against the crusted bark of the tree, as thick and scorched as pieces of burnt toast, feeling the cracked surfaces by rubbing her shoulder-blades against them. Down below her, on the other side of the knoll, was the green rooftop of a large, low building that had bright geraniums in baskets along its verandas, white muslin curtains that the windows alternately inhaled and exhaled, a giant deodar tree to shade it and, across the road, freshly swept and marked tennis courts, empty and waiting. That must be the club her grandmother had spoken of, but deserted now, asleep. It seemed that all Kasauli slept except for the cicadas that sawed and fiddled without stop. In the sky, huge vultures circled lazily, stealthily, on currents of air, prowling for game.

  Raka slid down on her haunches, then lowered herself onto a flat stone at the foot of the tree. Resting the small knobs of her spine against the trunk, she surveyed Sanawar which lay in the deep shade of its trees, and Dagshai and Sabathu, handfuls of pebbles gleaming on golden hilltops. A cricket close by broke in raucously upon the silence and she spent the rest of the afternoon lifting stones in search of it.

  Chapter 3

  WHEN AT LAST she heard Ram Lal knocking about in the kitchen, making tea – the loose, jingling sounds so clearly proclaimed tea-time and not any other, heavier meal – she slid down the knoll and went to question him about the factory.

  In between setting out the tea-cups on an old walnut tray, blowing up the fire into a blaze and whipping at clouds of smoke with his kitchen rags, Ram Lal told her.

  ‘That is the Pasteur Institute. It is where doctors make serum for injections. When a man is bitten by a mad dog, he is taken there for injections – fourteen, in the stomach. I’ve had them myself. Once a whole village was rounded up and taken there – a dog had gone mad and bitten everyone in the village. The dog had to be killed. Its head was cut off and sent to the Institute. The doctors cut them open and look into them. They have rabbits and guinea pigs there, too, many animals. They use them for tests.’

  He stopped to pour boiling water from the great black kettle into the tea-pot and Raka watched the hissing stream, hanging onto the edge of the table by her fingernails.

  ‘Why is there so much smoke?’ she asked, in a somewhat weak voice.

  ‘Oh, they are always boiling serum there – boiling, boiling. They make serum for the whole country.’

  Going out with the tea-tray balanced professionally on the palm of one hand, he stopped by the railing and nodded in the direction of the concrete Institute walls that had worried Raka by their incongruity and their oddly oppressive threat. ‘See those chutes? They empty the bones and ashes of dead animals down into the ravine. It’s a bad place. Don’t go there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Jackals come at night to chew the bones. Then they go mad and bite the village dogs. The mad dogs run around, biting people. Keep away from there, huh? Specially at night. At night you hear jackals howling and people have seen ghosts.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The ghosts of people who have died of dog-bite and snake-bite roam on the hillsides. It isn’t safe, hear?’

  Raka pressed pale lips together and nodded. She followed Ram Lal to the veranda where he put down the tray, and sat down very stiff and still while her great-grandmother poured out a cup of milk for her with a drop of tea in it.

  As she h
anded over the cup, Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes and said ‘How pale you are, child. Didn’t you rest at all?’

  Raka ducked her head and lifted the cup to her mouth. Her great-grandmother was left to interpret the motion as she wished.

  After they had emptied their cups, ‘What will you do with yourself now, Raka?’ Nanda Kaul wondered, having watched the child seethe silently on the small stool beside her, seethe as if she were a thousand black mosquitoes, a stilly humming conglomerate of them, and did not know whether to contain or release this dire seething.

  She chose not to. She did not want to be drawn into a child’s world again – real or imaginary, it was bound to betray. Sighing under the weight of her destiny, she poured out another cup of hot, black tea, murmuring ‘How hot it’s grown. Too hot. Do you think you’d like to take a walk or is it too hot?’ Let her contain herself or release herself, whatever she could do best, thought Nanda Kaul, drinking the bitter dregs.

  Chapter 4

  NANDA KAUL NEVER discovered what Raka did with herself. All she discovered was that the child had a gift for disappearing – suddenly, silently. She would be gone, totally, not to return for hours.

  Occasionally she caught a glimpse of her scrambling up a stony hillside, grasping at tufts of grass or bushes of Spanish broom, her small white-knickered bottom showing above a pair of desperately clinging heels. Or wandering down a lane in a slow, straying manner, stopping to strip a thorny bush of its few berries or to examine an insect under a leaf. Then she would round a boulder or drop from the lip of a cliff and vanish.

  She would return with her brown legs scratched, her knees bruised, sucking a finger stung by nettles, her hair brown under a layer of dust, her eyes very still and thoughtful as though she had visited strange lands and seen fantastic, improbable things that lingered in the mind.