Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  But Raka did not say anything more. Her face was pale, but composed. She might have been indifferent, although deliberately so. After all, she had known her mother ill for most of her life, mysteriously ill, mostly in bed, under a loose pink blanket that smelled of damp, like the lilies. It was no new shock. Her voice had something flat about it, Nanda Kaul noted, when she got up, saying ‘I think I’ll go out now, Nani.’

  The old lady nodded, partly in relief and partly in disappointment.

  Chapter 18

  RAKA SPRANG FROM the house as if shot out by a gun. She was going to the burnt house on the hill – she would go, she would go alone, no one would stop her, no one would come with her. She sped along the Upper Mall.

  Then scrambled up the steep hill, letting loose small avalanches of pebbles and gravel under her toes, making newts dash, lizards slip and tree-crickets crackle. She struggled through the wild rose tangle, their grasping hips and briars, skirted the nettles and the agaves with their sharp sawtooth spines, and flew over the clumps of pink zephyranthes that waved everywhere, risen from the stones like miracles, triumphant for the day.

  At the top of the hill was the burnt house she had come to visit. It was only the charred shell of a small stone cottage. The veranda roof was already torn off and flung onto the hillside, the paving stones of the floor were cracked and gaping. The doors swung rotten, the window-frames hung askew, shattered glass lay amongst the cinders. The stairs were a tumble of rocks and weeds. She climbed over them and stood still in the scorched, empty room, gazing up at the sagging roof that dipped lower every day, and listened to the murmuring, sickening silence with the taut expression of one waiting for an explosion.

  Further up the ridge, on another knoll, was a house for which stones had been bought and heaped but which had never been built, so that they lay stacked under the wind-stripped pines, lichen creeping over them like a shroud. It was said that the owners of the land had been frightened off by the forest fire that had razed the small cottage and so abandoned the building of it. No one ever came here but Raka and the cuckoos that sang and sang invisibly. These were not the dutiful domestic birds that called Nanda Kaul to attention at Carignano. They were the demented birds that raved and beckoned Raka on to a land where there was no sound, only silence, no light, only shade, and skeletons kept in beds of ash on which the footprints of jackals flowered in grey.

  This hill, with its one destroyed house and one unbuilt one, on the ridge under the fire-singed pines, appealed to Raka with the strength of a strong sea-current – pulling, dragging. There was something about it – illegitimate, uncompromising and lawless – that made her tingle. The scene of devastation and failure somehow drew her, inspired her.

  Not so the nurseries and bedrooms of her infancy, with their sickly-sweet smells of illness, sadness, drink, medication, milk and tension. Not so the clubs and parks of the cities in which she had lived but to which no one had given her the necessary pass, the key.

  Carignano had much to offer – yes, she admitted that readily, nodding her head like a berry – it was the best of places she’d lived in ever. Yet it had in its orderly austerity something she found confining, restricting. It was as dry and clean as a nut but she burst from its shell like an impatient kernel, small and explosive.

  It was the ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces in Kasauli that drew her: the ravine where yellow snakes slept under grey rocks and agaves growing out of the dust and rubble, the skeletal pines that rattled in the wind, the wind-levelled hill-tops and the seared remains of the safe, cosy, civilized world in which Raka had no part and to which she owed no attachment.

  Here she stood, in the blackened shell of a house that the next storm would bring down, looking down the ravine to the tawny plains that crackled in the heat, so much more intense after the rain, and where Chandigarh’s lake lay like molten lead in a groove. She raised herself onto the tips of her toes – tall, tall as a pine – stretched out her arms till she felt the yellow light strike a spark down her fingertips and along her arms till she was alight, ablaze.

  Then she broke loose, raced out onto the hillside, up the ridge, through the pines, in blazing silence.

  ‘Cuck-oo – cuck-oo,’ sang the wild, mad birds from nowhere.

  The caretaker of the burnt house, coming out of a tin shed with a tin mug in his hand, saw her running. ‘The crazy one,’ he muttered. ‘The crazy one from Carignano.’

  Chapter 19

  THE PINK LILIES folded up and disappeared. The plains were swallowed up by the yellow dust again. The sun frizzled the grasses and blazed on the rocks of Kasauli. All was either bleached or blackened by heat and glare.

  ‘People wonder sometimes,’ said Nanda Kaul in that unusually high-pitched voice that made Raka feel strangely itchy, ‘what I see in this dry, dusty, dull little place. Kashmir, where I lived as a child, was so different, you know.’ She didn’t look at Raka but knew the child had lifted her face and was listening. ‘It is the water that makes the difference – the streams lined with poplars, gushing white over cold stones, the lakes reflecting the willows, the rivers with houseboats lined along their banks. Everywhere, water. It rules the lives of those who live in Kashmir.’

  ‘Did you live in a houseboat?’ asked Raka, lifting bunches of dusty hair from her ears – it was growing long and lay hot and thick on her neck.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Nanda Kaul, elegantly eating a pear. ‘Houseboats are only for tourists. We had a proper house, on the banks of the Dal Lake. But we rowed about the lake in shikaras – light little boats, even children of four and five can row them – and do. In summer, yes, we did take a houseboat. When our relations came up from Lucknow and Allahabad, we would engage a houseboat, or sometimes two, and have them punted to Nagin Lake. It was even lovelier there than on the Dal – with orchards and saffron fields coming down to the water’s edge, and the cherries ripe at that time of year. We would fish in the lake and ride through the orchards, picking cherries as we went. For picnics we would row in shikaras to the Shalimar or Nishat gardens and drink tea out of samovars on the lawns beside the fountains. It was, I can tell you, a different world from Kasauli,’ she ended on a note of surprise.

  Raka’s words did not reflect the poetry of this vision. They were blunt and straight. ‘Why did you come here then,’ she asked, ‘instead of going back to Kashmir?’

  Nanda Kaul simply shook her head and seemed to wander in a field of grey thoughts, alone. ‘One does not go back,’ she said eventually. ‘No, one doesn’t go back. One might just as well try to become young again.’

  ‘Would you like that?’ pursued Raka, which was unlike her, but then, Nanda Kaul had provoked her.

  So Nanda Kaul felt bound to answer. Laughing, she said ‘No. No, I don’t think I would. I don’t think I’d find it – quite safe.’

  ‘But you had such good times, in Kashmir.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The old lady’s eyes flashed. ‘What splendid times. There was a stream, you know, at the back of the house, lined with poplars and willows, where our ducks and geese swam. Before the rains, it was shallow, we could paddle in it. Sometimes the ducks swam too far downstream, into other people’s gardens and we’d go and fetch them. In the rains, the stream would fill and sometimes overflow into the garden so that the back door opened onto a lake. The adults would cry and worry, the children splash and laugh.

  ‘All round the house was an orchard. Mostly apple trees, but my father was fond of experimenting – it was another hobby of his, only I hesitate to use the word hobby, for his interest was so passionate and the results so successful. For instance, he grafted a plum tree onto a peach and the result was a most curious and delightful fruit – the skin downy, like a peach, only one bit into it and found it plum.

  ‘There were almonds that we ate while they were still green and milky, we hardly let any ripen. That was sad for my mother – she liked to fill her store with sacks full of dried fruits and nuts, enough to last us all through the year and s
end to our relatives in Allahabad and Lucknow. But we thought green almonds better than ripe ones. Not walnuts, though, no one could eat one unripe. There were just three walnut trees – they grew in a grove by the well – but each one was as big as a house – yes, each was bigger than Carignano, a house of branches and leaves – and we would get sackfuls of nuts from them. There was a store room in the house that my mother kept locked but we would creep in if she left it open for a minute, and sit among the sacks and eat our fill of almonds, walnuts, pistachios and chilgoza nuts. There were all kinds of things there – gucchi, those curly black dried mushrooms, you know, and dried apricots and raisins. You could say the store room held a fortune, a small fortune. Certainly it was the fortune my mother cared for most. I don’t think the orchard meant anything to her but as a provider of that fortune.

  ‘Not to my father. He was adventurous, Raka, adventurous. He did not like being in the house at all. Even when he had to do some paper work – and normally he left it to his overseer – he would have his table and chair taken out under the walnut trees, near the well. He could keep his eye on the estate from there and not feel confined. He was happy travelling, exploring. His interests were so much wider, and his collections reflected them.

  ‘I will tell you now what he liked best in the house,’ said Nanda Kaul, lowering her eyes on Raka who was growing restive, finding this luncheon too tiresomely drawn out.

  Until now they had eaten their meals together in a kind of secretive hurry, each eager to set off in another direction, alone. But now Nanda Kaul seemed unwilling to stop talking, to let Raka out of her sight. There she flopped on her chair, the child, a small fish gasping for its native air, but the old lady had her on the hook – a sharp, bright hook – and held the string tight. As Raka tore at it in impatience, the old lady tightened it, drew her in, reluctant to let go.

  She put her long hands down on the table as inspiration descended.

  ‘His private zoo,’ she said solemnly, and was gratified to see Raka glance at her – a bit suspiciously but still, her eyes gave that flick of interest as of a fish wheeling around when it spotted bait. ‘Yes, animals too he collected, I forgot to tell you,’ Nanda Kaul laughed out with relief. ‘Oh, the house in Kashmir was full, full of animals, the strangest ones. He had a bear, you know, a great big Himalayan bear that he had found as a cub in the forest when he was out hunting. The cub grew and grew and was enormous by the time I can remember – too enormous for its cage, a huge, shaggy fellow with a white horseshoe on its black chest. But there was nothing my father could do about it – there was no zoo in Kashmir that he could give it to, and he could not set it loose in the forest. It had lost its fear of human beings, you see, and might have strayed into villages for food and frightened, perhaps mauled, the villagers. So there it lived, in our house, in a cage, like a pet King Kong.’

  ‘In a cage, always?’

  ‘Well, my father would let it out on a long iron chain sometimes, but of course only he dared do so, and then it would drive the dogs mad. They would have to be locked upstairs whenever the bear was let out. They were hunting dogs, big wild mastiffs, and could not stand the sight or smell of bear.’

  ‘What would have happened if you had let them together?’ asked Raka, slitting her eyes.

  ‘Oh, a massacre – there would have been a massacre,’ said Nanda Kaul, not pleased with the expression on the child’s face.

  The subject of the bear now seemed exhausted and Raka slipped one leg off the chair in readiness to dart but quickly, quickly Nanda Kaul pulled the line tight again.

  ‘It wasn’t the wildest creature by any means, or even the smelliest. We had a cage of leopard cats that had that honour. My father said the leopard cats were the fiercest of all creatures, and they never, like the bear, grew accustomed to us. He kept them on the landing, just outside his room, and whenever anyone came near, they’d spit and snarl. Even he could not touch them without leather gloves. He would feed them himself. They loved fish. We used to catch fish in the stream for them, but we never dared feed them ourselves – they had such sudden, vicious claws.’

  But Raka seemed not to enjoy the picture of the caged animals devouring the fish. The great-grandmother spotted the hurt in the child’s eyes at this picture and abruptly she put another in its place. New as she was to the game, she was becoming an adept, she had a talent, she saw, for giving the child a slide-show, coloured and erratic. One slide would appear upside-down, or there would be a whole series that fluttered past too rapidly to be seen, but now and then one appeared steady, glowing and riveting and then Nanda Kaul straightened up with pride.

  ‘Then there were the peacocks in the garden, Raka, and perhaps they were the only tame creatures we had – nearly tame. You wouldn’t have thought so when you heard them screaming like wild things in the orchard, but if they saw us having our meals out on the terrace, in summertime, they would come at a run and peck the rice off our plates, greedily. My mother didn’t like that, they broke quite a few plates, but we enjoyed sharing our meals with peacocks,’ she laughed.

  ‘And you would have found the lorises sweet, Raka,’ she hurried on, with an unaccustomed lightness and dreaminess of tone. ‘Of course they slept all day and you had to stay up at night if you wanted to play with them. They were like babies, the way they’d cling to your arm or neck, and their huge, round eyes would shine in the dark as they moved slowly, slowly about the room.’

  ‘In the room?’

  ‘Oh yes, all my father’s animals lived inside. I really believe he cared for them as much as for us. Even the pangolin. You wouldn’t think anyone could be attached to that hard, scaly creature, always curled up inside its armour, but somehow my father was. He admired it, you see – he admired anything uncommon, extraordinary . . .’

  As she murmured on, touching the knives and forks on the table, her eyes wandering in a kind of grey thicket of dreams, the child squirmed, looked over her shoulder at the window, at the sun glistening on the knoll, the pine boughs dipping as the parrots sprang on them, screaming, and longed to get away. She could not understand this new talkativeness of her great-grandmother’s who had preferred, till lately, not to talk to her at all, nor had wanted to be talked to. Now she was unable to stop.

  But she did, with a start and a look of guilt, as if she had transgressed involuntarily and could not understand her own motive. If Raka had cared to notice, she would have seen a storm of disintegration cross that old, yellowed face with its intricate mapwork of fine lines. But she did not care. She wanted only to go.

  They flew apart then, in a kind of anger.

  Chapter 20

  NANDA KAUL COULD not let go.

  She paced the garden at twilight, the hem of her sari sliding over the pebbles – srr, srr, srr – like a silken snake. She cast her eyes up and down the Mall, waiting to see Raka come dawdling along, tossing a horse chestnut from one cupped hand to another and chanting under her breath.

  But Raka did not do that. Instead she came suddenly up over the lip of the gorge, scratched and dusty and breathless. She bit her lip when she found she had bumped into her great-grandmother.

  ‘I never saw a child less like a Raka – a moon,’ smiled Nanda Kaul with a smile that was meant to be sweet but which Raka’s expression had rendered tart. ‘You little jumping thing, you don’t come up calmly and shine, do you?’

  Raka backed away from her, embarrassed, dubious. But Nanda Kaul began quickly to talk.

  ‘Let us stay here, we’ll soon hear the owls,’ she said, obliging the child to pace at her side as the garden grew shadowy and still and the hills darkened. The green, glassy sky was full of rooks, searching for a resting place, wheeling in circles, cawing and calling to each other, somehow incapable of settling down for the night.

  Nanda Kaul found herself pressing her hands together behind her back in an effort to find some topic that would interest the child. She must not drive her away out of boredom or embarrassment. Somehow, she could not bear to l
et her slip away. It was as if Raka’s indifference was a goad, a challenge to her – the elusive fish, the golden catch.

  She found herself talking in a flood again, with a nervous animation and lightness of speech that struck Raka’s ear with a false note.

  ‘I kept animals, too, you know, for my children, remembering how much I’d enjoyed having them as a child,’ she plunged in recklessly. ‘Not only dogs and cats but unusual ones too. Monkeys. We had a pair of monkeys that we kept chained to the veranda rails because they were too destructive to let loose. They were gibbons – long-limbed, black-faced and silvery, like langurs, such fun. You could hear them whooping miles away. Your great-grandfather said he could hear them in his office at the other end of the campus, they disturbed him – but he didn’t really mind. He knew we enjoyed them, so he let us keep them. The children used to take them for bicycle rides. They had horses, too – your great-grandfather liked them to ride, he thought it good for them and didn’t care for the expense. Some of them were really fine horses . . .’

  She murmured on, flexing and unflexing her fingers behind her back, and if she had only glanced down and met Raka’s eyes then, she would have been halted by something doubting in them, a lack of trust in that clouded look, but some instinct told her not to look into those eyes while she spun her charmed fantasies. She kept her eyes strictly averted from Raka, looking up at the moth-furred sky where the rooks wheeled and cawed, and talked, talked at an exhausting length, till the rooks fell silent, pressed by the darkness into the treetops, and then the owls began to call – softly, experimentally.

  ‘He loved to go riding with the children himself. At that time the campus was surrounded by open fields and you could ride for miles, if you plunged right through the canals and took the footpaths between fields of wheat and sugarcane and mustard.