Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  Her feet were too small and light to crunch the pebbly gravel, they only seemed to brush over it as she went quietly round by the back of the club house, past the row of green bathroom doors, all shut and emanating green damp, to the billiard room which was lit and where some tentatively whiskery boys were knocking around balls on the green lawn of the table. The windows were uncurtained, the light from the china-shaded bulb fell on the dark gravel in sheets of white paper and made Raka afraid of being seen by these newly hairy young men with their long awkward limbs that seemed unsynchronized and unhinged by youth so that there was something more alarming about them, to her, than in the wails of the jackals or the sudden rattles of the nightjars in the darkness.

  How much friendlier she found darkness. She sidled past the lighted windows into a tunnel of dark between the club wall and the hillside. Ferns brushed against her. A clutter of hoes, spades and gardeners’ baskets tripped her. Then she was at the corner and saw she would have to cross the garden if she were to reach the ballroom at the other end of the building. For a minute she contemplated retreat, then she remembered what Ram Lal had told her about fancy dress balls, how ladies dressed as queens and men as princes, and drank sparkling spirits that made them sing. So she made a quick, convulsive dash, lowering her head and refusing to see people coming and going, always in groups and clusters, all laughing, and no one looked at her, it was as if the lumpy grey sweater she had pulled over her head had made her invisible.

  Now she was in the veranda outside the ballroom and she slid in between pots of geraniums and the empty wine-racks that were used to stack up a wall, and burrowed into a dusty hole amongst the pieces of chalk and an old blackboard with bingo numbers marked up on it. She parted the thick green curtains and applied her nose to the parting, breathed in its mildewed dust, shut one eye and focused the other on the illuminated scene of cantonment revelry inside.

  Chapter 11

  THEN SHE FELL on her knees with shock.

  This was not what Ram Lal had led her to expect. This was no vision of kings and queens in a rosy court.

  To the heated drumming of the band, madmen and rioters leapt, bowed, swayed and jigged, costumes flying, paper horns blowing. It was lunacy rampant. Raka held her head between her hands, she thought it would crack in two.

  She wished she could close her eyes. She wished she were a million miles away from the band. She tried to think she was asleep and this was a nightmare.

  But a man in green leapt out from almost under her nose and shot up at the ceiling, his feet in green socks flapping. He should have fiddled like a grasshopper but he crowed like a cock – or was that the trumpet?

  A woman with a bucket on her head laughed inside it so that it was like a cooking spoon rattling in an empty pot. A figure in black answered her call and sidled up and bowed. When he straightened, Raka saw the skull and crossbones in white upon his chest. He had a scythe tucked under his arm and it glinted and shot off bolts of lights when he raised it and chopped off the woman’s bucket head. Under her dishevelled hair her pink throat opened wide and she laughed in bubbles of blood. The bucket clanked across the floor and came to rest at Raka’s foot. Her toes shrivelled.

  An outsized monkey with a stiff, curling tail scampered over and kicked the bucket away, then turned a somersault and the band yipped and yayed and a man in rusty black and yellowed white sang:

  ‘O take me out to the ball game,

  Take me out to the fair . . .’

  Bunches of balloons sighed and swayed to the music, then suddenly shot up and squeaked with alarm as a lady mouse ran out from under them, her whiskers trembling like antennae and a long tail losing handfuls of fur across the floor. She was being chased by a man who had his hair combed down over his eyes and wore a scarf around his neck like a noose before it is tightened. He caught her by the tail, she jumped into his arms, they threw up their knees, laughed and turned. Two balloons exploded, bang-bang, without being pricked. Their shreds lay in a corner like rubber tears.

  Rolling across to the chink where Raka’s eye hid, a brown animal with a brush-tail spiked and bristling and eyes glaring like two black marbles with white snakes coiled inside them, cried ‘Yip-yip-yip,’ then ‘Yip-yip-yippee’, and stood up and drank a mug of beer. White specks stuck to the corner of its mouth and solidified there.

  Into the midst of this rabble stalked a very tall man in white, a stethoscope about his neck and pink rubber glvoes on his hands – very pink, too pink. Raka stiffened – for he lifted his pink rubber hands into the air and she thought he would now silence them all, stretch them out on the ballroom floor and perform the operation that would wash them all away in a river of blood.

  Instead, the band took his gesture as a kind of signal, changed its tune, and the singer began to warble:

  ‘You are my sunshine,

  My only sunshine,

  You make me ha-pee . . .’

  and the doctor lowered his hands to the waist of a silver fish dressed in hundreds and hundreds of soda bottle tops, and they swung away together in a dance that made the fish’s tail jingle and clank like a thousand broken bottles.

  A walking maypole revolved slowly to the music, her pink and blue and yellow streamers twining and untwining about the green stalk of her body.

  In walked a brass cage, a fathead for a bird, held in place with plastic clothes-peg claws. Arm in arm with the caged head-bird came a Pierrot in black and white and scarlet lipstick who suddenly ripped off his mask, revealing eyes as pink as a pig’s flung it up into the air and began to prance, singing

  ‘Mama, she loves Papa,

  Papa, he loves Mama . . .’

  which made everyone laugh without ceasing and swing their bottoms from side to side, big and thick and heavy bottoms, all turned to face Raka’s transfixed eye in the curtains.

  Then the row of bottoms parted to let through a figure in a brown robe that came stalking straight up to Raka as though it saw her there behind the curtains. Yet it could not see for it had no head, only a shawl dipped in blood dripping about its neck. It held its head tucked underneath its arm, grinning like a pot, with too many teeth.

  A whimper burst from Raka then, like a whimper from a pod or a bud when it is pricked, or pressed, and bursts. Shooting out of the corner like a seed from the burst pod, she threw down the blackboard, crushed the chalks underfoot, thrust past the stacked wine-racks and fled like an animal chased, sobbing ‘Hate them – hate them . . .’ as she ran, her sweating fists beating her sides and her feet tearing through thorns, ferns and gravel. All the caged, clawed, tailed, headless male and female monsters followed her, pell-mell, prancing to the tune of The Bridge on the River Kwai:

  ‘Ta-ra, ta-ra, ta-ra-ra

  Ta-ra . . .’

  Somewhere behind them, behind it all, was her father, home from a party, stumbling and crashing through the curtains of night, his mouth opening to let out a flood of rotten stench, beating at her mother with hammers and fists of abuse – harsh, filthy abuse that made Raka cower under her bedclothes and wet the mattress in fright, feeling the stream of urine warm and weakening between her legs like a stream of blood, and her mother lay down on the floor and shut her eyes and wept. Under her feet, in the dark, Raka felt that flat, wet jelly of her mother’s being squelching and quivering, so that she didn’t know where to put her feet and wept as she tried to get free of it. Ahead of her, no longer on the ground but at some distance now, her mother was crying. Then it was a jackal crying.

  Wildly, Raka veered. She had been about to go down the ravine. But that was where the jackal cried. Turning, she found the windowsill, scrabbled over it and fell into her room. Then there was no sound at all but of her heart leaping and plopping in a black well, drowning out the music from the band on the other side of the knoll.

  Chapter 12

  THERE WAS SOMETHING flushed about her thin invalid face after that. Her eyes darkened, as if with a secret she would not divulge. She was no longer the insect, the grasshopper c
hild. She grew as still as a twig.

  Then the twig would move and show itself an insect still. She still went down into the ravine to wander. Watching her surreptitiously from her window, then from the railing, Nanda Kaul, who had sensed a change, saw her slide down a chute of rubble and red earth to one of those ominous brick kilns under the Pasteur Institute, keeping herself steady on the steep incline by holding onto two tufts of blond grass. What was she looking at? Nanda Kaul could not make out or imagine, she saw only the tension in the straddled legs and the white knuckles. A branch of a pine tree dipped. A vulture had moved its claws up a little, shrugged its massive shoulders, stretched out its rubber-hose neck and belched. The child started. Then walked backwards, away from the tree. Turning around abruptly, she dropped on all fours and came scrambling up the hill so fast that Nanda Kaul had to hurry in order to vanish into the kitchen in time not to be seen.

  But Raka did not come up over the lip of the cliff. She must have taken another route of escape: she knew many. When her great-grandmother ventured back to look for her, there was no one in the ravine but a herd of goats nibbling at the sparse thorns and nettles with rubber-lipped greed and nervous avarice. Up on the hill the Pasteur Institute flung writhing snakes of smoke into the sky. Nanda Kaul pursed her lips at the ugly sight – it did so spoil the view. And added to the heat of the summer afternoon. What did Raka see in it? Why did it fascinate the child?

  Missing out the tea that was always so disappointingly liquid and no more, Raka came in through the gate only late in the evening, tossing a horse chestnut from one hand to the other and chanting under her breath, defiantly and inaudibly ‘I don’t care – I don’t care – I don’t care for anything!’

  She stopped as soon as she saw her great-grandmother who was strolling up and down over the pebbles of her garden with a rather exaggerated nonchalance. She glanced at Raka’s dusty hair and scratched knees but only said ‘If it doesn’t rain soon, these hydrangeas will die.’

  Raka came to look. They both stood gazing at the bush of leathery flowers that were turning brown at the edges. Under it a cicada shrilled and whirred frenziedly.

  It was still light, still warm, and they strolled together, hands behind their backs and fingers clenched. They heard the two ponies clatter past on the Lower Mall and watched them carry two small blonde children down to the Alasia Hotel.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to go for a pony ride, Raka?’ Nanda Kaul asked. ‘You could take one down to Monkey Point.’

  ‘No,’ said Raka shortly. ‘It’s no fun: that man always comes along.’

  ‘Oh, the pony man,’ said Nanda Kaul. ‘No, that wouldn’t be fun.’

  ‘Look,’ said Raka suddenly, small seeds of spit hissing out from behind her teeth. ‘Is that the moon? Is that the full moon?’ She pointed to a copper glow that outlined the shoulder of a hill in the east, then bloomed rapidly into the evening sky, a livid radiance in that cinereous twilight.

  ‘N-no,’ mused Nanda Kaul uncertainly. ‘The moon’s not nearly full, not nearly.’

  Then little pin-pricks of light went up in the black mass of the hill. They exploded here and there, ran up and down in lines, burnt clearly. As the sky darkened, the glow reddened.

  ‘It’s a forest fire,’ Nanda Kaul breathed out at last. ‘A big fire, it seems. Oh, there’s always a forest fire at this time of year.’

  But it was the first Raka had seen. Shivers ran through her, zigzag, leaving streams of sweat in their wake. Hugging herself with bone-thin arms, she stood on one leg, then the other, waiting. It was far away, across the valley, they could neither smell the burning pine trees nor hear the crackling and hissing. It was like a fire in a dream – silent, swift and threatening.

  Seeing her dance from foot to foot, Nanda Kaul said ‘If you want to go to the bathroom, run along, Raka.’

  Raka shook her head, but in a little while turned and fled. Nanda Kaul followed slowly. While shutting the door behind her, she took another look at the fire, now spilling down the hillside in runnels of sparks, in streams of heat.

  ‘I wonder if the fire brigade will be able to do anything about it,’ she said, shaking her head, as Raka came into the room and stood at the window beside her.

  ‘What if they can’t? What will happen?’

  ‘Oh, it will burn itself out in the night, I expect. It will reach a dry, rocky belt and stop. Or they might try to stop it by building counter-fires. They certainly won’t have enough water to put it out. There isn’t a drop of water to spare in the Simla Hills, in June.’

  ‘What about houses? What if houses burn?’

  Nanda Kaul thrust out her lower lip and dropped her eye-lids. ‘Yes, they will burn. Whole villages may burn in a fire that big.’

  Raka stood looking through the window at what looked like a display of fireworks in the distance. Its soundlessness was eerie.

  ‘Lucky it is not closer than it is to Kasauli, or Sanawar. We’ve had fires right here, at the edge of the town.’

  Raka nodded. ‘I’ve seen trees, all burnt.’

  At night she kept getting out of bed and coming barefoot into the drawing-room to look out of the window and see the fire spread.

  Nanda Kaul lay on her back in bed and heard the bare feet slapping softly on the tiles with a sound like damp cloth. It kept her awake – the feet going back and forth, obsessed.

  Raka was aware of her great-grandmother’s wakefulness. She heard her deep, tired sighs, but she had grown used to ignoring her. She went back and back again to the window to see if the fire had come any closer to Carignano, to Kasauli.

  Occasionally a great cloud of illuminated smoke rose into the air and burst. Lower down the hill were only pinpricks, fireflies of light, constantly moving, gathering, dispersing.

  Holding her ear to the cold pane closely, she thought she heard the cries of animals and birds burning in that fire. But when she removed her ear from the pane, she heard only the crepitation of silence. Once, the soft hooting of an owl.

  The disturbed sky, livid with firelight, kept her awake: it was too light. If she fell asleep, she felt the fire might creep up and catch her unawares. It had the quality of a dream – disaster, dream-spectres that follow one, trap one.

  But she went back and forth so often that eventually she tired and fell onto the sofa and was found there, asleep in her nightie, by Ram Lal next morning.

  She woke to find the hills blotted out by smoke and summer haze. The fire was blotted out, too. The north wind brought with it a cindery smell and a layer of ashes that it deposited on Kasauli like a grey pelt. Raka went about thoughtfully drawing lines in it with her finger.

  Chapter 13

  ONE WOULD HAVE thought Raka searched Ram Lal out. Certainly she neither followed nor waited for anyone else, thought Nanda Kaul, sourly, as she watched from the veranda while Raka hung about the kitchen for Ram Lal to finish his work there and come out to light the hamam for her bath. She noticed how, every evening – briefly, to be sure – the two would sit together by the hamam in the coppery light of those June evenings. Sitting together on their heels, watching the eagles soar and glide soundlessly in the gorge and out over the plains, they talked dreamily. Ram Lal could arouse Raka’s interest and hold it as Nanda Kaul could not. Interest her, but at the same time give her reassurance of safety. Nanda Kaul knew that a child needed to have the two elements combined, but she could not, or would not, be bothered to try, while Ram Lal did it naturally and comfortably, for Raka. The low pitch of their voices conveyed the comfort in these conversations that she could not hear, only observe.

  ‘I saw you go down there last night,’ Ram Lal said, drawing at his biri through his fist. ‘That was bad.’

  ‘Why? The moon was shining, I could see so clearly.’

  ‘But you could be seen too.’

  ‘There was no one to see.’

  Ram Lal shook his head, knowingly. ‘The churails were there. They see you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Churails. Did
n’t you know they lived in that gorge there? They always live amongst the dead. They live off their flesh. They feast on the corpses the Institute doctors throw down after they have cut up the mad dogs and boiled their brains. If at night you hear sudden sounds, like shots, it is the churails cracking bones.’

  Raka’s eyes grew black hoops around them. She put one hand on his knee and asked ‘What are they like?’

  ‘Very big. Bigger than any man. Dressed in black so they can’t be seen in the dark. Only their red eyes glow like coals. And their feet are turned backwards. That is the surest way to tell a churail – its feet are turned backwards.’

  ‘But how will I see their feet in the dark?’

  Now Ram Lal’s eyes grew great black hoops. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t look down at their feet. If you see red eyes glowing in the dark, just turn and run. I know a woman who turned to stone because she saw a churail’s feet. She was walking down to Garkhal at twelve o’clock on a moonlit night, and met a churail. I can show you the stone at the side of the road if you come with me.’

  ‘Will you? Will you?’ Raka cried.

  She was answered by a sudden clamour as if the churails had arrived in one swoop, black-bat females, to avenge themselves – whooping and whistling, tearing through the air and thundering across the roof: a band of langurs had arrived. Pierrots in black and white, clowns and bandits at once – bawdy, raucous and marauding. Suddenly every tree was full of them – their whip tails and jewel eyes, their mask faces and spider arms, black and grey and silver. They swung from the branches of the pines to the apricots and from there to the roof and sprinted across the corrugated iron sheets. They ran nimble-footed along the railing, dived through windows and shot through doors. Even as Ram Lal and Raka ran into their midst, yelling and waving their arms, they tore leaves off the apricot trees in search of fruit, plucked hydrangeas to bits, dashed into the kitchen and grabbed at potatoes, baring their teeth and gibbering at whoever came in the way. Robbers, bandits, they never forgot to be clowns and stun their spectators with acrobatics out of a jungle dream.