Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  ‘Another thing he got up for the children was a badminton court, and we’d have such games out on the lawn, all of us, at times even by moonlight.’

  Just then, as if to illustrate her tale and prove it true, the moon did rise, a great copper-red moon that swelled like a bubble out of the dusk and shone lavishly upon the undulating hills, flooding the valleys and hillsides with such extravagance that the town and village lights grew pale and misty, as if they were under water. Down in the ravine, a pack of jackals was roused to howl lugubriously at the moon and at each other.

  Raka turned from the moon – disappointed: she had hoped it was another forest fire.

  Trembling inexplicably, the old lady quavered ‘We could have anything we wanted of him, anything . . .’

  But now Raka sighed and twisted aside to see if Ram Lal would not come and release her from this disagreeable intimacy. He did not come. She would have to do something. She would have to break out into freedom again. She could not bear to be confined to the old lady’s fantasy world when the reality outside appealed so strongly.

  She thought desperately, with longing, of the charred house on the ridge, of the fire-blasted hilltop where nothing sounded, mercifully, but the creaking of the pines in the wind and the demented cuckoos, wildly calling.

  And here she was hedged, smothered, stifled inside the old lady’s words, dreams and more words. She yawned with boredom.

  ‘You are tired,’ said Nanda Kaul, sadly.

  Chapter 21

  RAKA HAD GIVEN her the slip.

  Nanda Kaul moved from one window to the other, mournfully looking out of each pane in turn at the furred yellow mass of afternoon. It was true this was not an hour they normally spent together. Nanda Kaul was supposed to be resting. So was Raka. But when she had peeped in – slyly, slyly – through a crack in the door, she had seen the room empty, the bed flat and untouched. She did not know that the still somnolent afternoon was Raka’s best time for exploration, for Raka took care to be back in time for tea. But Nanda Kaul wanted her now, now. She pouted, childishly. One might have said she had arrived at her second childhood if one believed in such things. She looked so exactly like a baby thwarted, wanting attention she did not get, as she stalked through the hot, waiting house.

  Then a scream rang through the house, tearing it from end to end. It was the telephone.

  Nanda Kaul was obliged to go to it if she did not want the house utterly shredded to bits by its slashing blade. She picked up the receiver with murder in her heart.

  It was Ila Das of course. And what was worse – the peremptory shrilling of that instrument, or the gay, mad shrilling of that dreary old friend’s voice? One could hardly choose, thought Nanda Kaul, putting her hand to her forehead that had broken into sweat with terror at the sudden screaming.

  ‘I didn’t wake you, did I, Nanda? Oh, I do, do hope not, that would be too, too naughty,’ warbled Ila Das. ‘But you know, I so seldom get at a telephone, I have to seize the opportunity when I can.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ asked Nanda Kaul tiredly, and lowered herself onto a chair to stop the bumping of her knees.

  ‘Guess!’ shrieked Ila Das. ‘Do try and guess!’

  ‘Oh, Ila, how should I know?’

  ‘You could see me, you know, if you went out on your veranda and looked right across at – now can you guess?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Nanda Kaul.

  ‘But Sanawar of course, dear. I’m having lunch with Miss Wright. Have you met Miss Wright, the head of the Home Science department here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you must, you’ll be so amused, she’s so gay, Miss Wright –’

  ‘Ila,’ interrupted Nanda Kaul tersely, ‘I have my great-grandchild staying with me, you know. At my age, I really find that quite enough.’

  ‘But of course,’ shrilled Ila Das, fluttering up like a shot crow. ‘I hadn’t forgotten about her, dear, but I wanted to leave you alone a while, just to let her settle down. Now, my dear, I can’t bottle myself up any longer. I must come and see her. Asha’s child, isn’t she?’

  ‘Asha’s grandchild.’

  ‘Of course, of course, I hadn’t forgotten at all. Now what I was going to suggest, dear . . .’ and the voice ran through a series of engagements, meetings and assignations that Nanda Kaul made no effort to follow. She held the receiver away from her ear and mopped her face and tried to blink a kind of grey film out of her eyes. She ought to have had her afternoon rest, she told herself, no matter how uncomfortably warm the bed and troublesome the flies. At her age, it was clear, that hour’s rest was more important than running after a child who seemed quite independent enough to look after herself.

  She cut off Ila Das’s endless burble with an abrupt ‘Well, come to tea then. When can you come? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow? Tomorrow!’ shrieked Ila Das. ‘Oh no, no, Nanda dear – you simply have no idea how my days are spent, how full, how busy, how impossible – tomorrow, did you say?’ she laughed hectically, then said suddenly in what was, for her, a quiet little voice, ‘Yes, well, tomorrow then. May I come at five?’

  Nodding wearily, Nanda Kaul rang off before that tiresome friend’s voice could take off on another crazed flight.

  She went and sat on the veranda rather than return to the bed which the flies had taken over in any case, happily burbling and nuzzling and sticking to the white cotton.

  She hoped to catch a glimpse of Ram Lal and tell him to bring the tea early. She would ask for lemon tea today. She thought of lemon tea, of its reviving tartness and clarity in one hot cup after another.

  Raka would come to tea. Where was Raka? Fretfully, she looked out over the still, empty garden in which cicadas audibly sizzled as though the sun were frying them in its great golden pan. The child was not there, was never there. She did not like being in Carignano. Perhaps she would not leave her the house after all. Why should she? Raka no more needed, or wanted, a house than a jackal did, or a cicada. She was a wild creature-wild, wild, wild, thought Nanda Kaul.

  Perhaps she ought to have refused to have her. Perhaps she ought to leave the house to Tara who needed shelter, a cave to crawl into and die. Perhaps, perhaps . . . the alternatives were as many and as bothersome as flies. Nanda Kaul brushed them aside.

  She looked over the dazed, hazy hilltops to Sanawar that lay as trim and neat as ever in its green treetops. Closer to her, the hoopoe promenaded under the apricot trees, smartly furling and unfurling the striped fan on top of its head. Its young had flown and it appeared to be celebrating, even flaunting its independence, its new youth and freedom. It pounced upon a grasshopper and stabbed it to death with its victorious beak.

  Nanda Kaul sank lower upon her cane chair. Her heart still bumped inside her as though a string were jerking it. She thought it would be better to have the telephone removed than risk another shock. Strip the house, clear out the telephone, its looped black wires and unforgivable shrieks. Clear the house, leave it bare, silent and restful, thought Nanda Kaul.

  A pulse beat in her temple, purple and bulbous. She thought of how she had filled, not this house but the other, earlier ones, for Raka’s amusement – with furniture, treasures, trophies, even, dear God, with a zoo. She shrivelled up in her chair with horror at the thought and relaxed only when she recalled, with dignity, that she had not done that to Carignano. Even when at her most desperate to beguile Raka, she had not used, or misused, Carignano, for that shameful purpose. Carignano she had kept clean, true, open for the wind to blow through.

  Her eyelids drooped. Through her lashes-she saw the pine-needles glisten in the sunlight, glisten and glimmer on top of the knoll, shimmer and scintillate over the garden gate.

  Clear the house. Clear it of Raka? No, not that. Of herself? Yes, soon, soon enough.

  PART III

  Ila Das leaves Carignano

  Chapter 1

  TEA WAS LAID on the veranda table. On circles and hollows of china, it lay perspiring under cloths weighed down
with embroidery and with beads. The thwarted flies buzzed in dismay, nuzzled the fine cloth for a spot of jam, a flake of cake. Raka sat on her stool with a green plastic fly-swatter and chewed her lip over the problem of whether to swat and flatten a bun or not to swat and let the creatures’ snorkels pierce a pastry.

  Her great-grandmother paced the waved tiles, hands behind her back, murmuring angrily ‘She’ll be late of course, and I do want my tea. She might think how much I want my tea. But she’ll be late, Ila, when was she not?’

  For once Ram Lal was watchful, too, squatting outside the kitchen door, watching the path that wound through the chestnut trees to the gate, listening to his black kettle whistle and bump on the fire, prepared to seize it and pour it out onto the crisp tea-leaves the minute he saw the visitor trip up the Mall in the white dust.

  Commotion preceded her like a band of langurs. Only it took the form of schoolboys who were unfortunately let out from school at just the same time as Ila Das was proceeding towards Carignano with her uneven, rushing step, in her ancient white court shoes, prodding the tip of her great brown umbrella into the dust with an air of faked determination. Like langurs, the boys swung about her, long-armed, careless, insulting. They hooted at her little grey top-knot that wobbled on top of her head, at her spectacles that slipped down to the tip of her nose and were only prevented from falling off by an ancient purple ribbon looped over her ears, at the grey rag of the petticoat that gaped dismally beneath the lace hem of her sari – at everything, in short, that was Ila Das. Whooping and hooting, munching and mooing, they ran to the right and left of her, suddenly stopping, suddenly swerving to bump into her small, brittle person, to send her crocheted and motheaten shoulder bag flying or her umbrella spinning. Retrieving it, she shook it at them and made the mistake of opening her mouth. She said only harmless things like ‘I’ll tell your teacher – I know your Principal, he’s a friend of mine – I’ll tell him about you . . .’ but no matter what she had said, it would have made them bellow – that was the way her voice acted upon everyone.

  ‘Memsahib going to a party,’ chanted one flop-haired monkey with a catapult.

  ‘Lace-y and tart-y,’ bawled another whose weapon was a marble as large as a horse chestnut.

  ‘Silence, you bandars,’ screamed Ila Das, and suddenly opened out her umbrella and made to charge through them with it held before her, a torn silk barricade with, she thought, appropriately sharp spikes.

  Alas, the spikes were broken. The umbrella squeaked in protest. Boys fell upon it, brought it down into the dust and it bowled along the gravel, kicked helpfully on by them to the side of the road. If there hadn’t been a fence there, it would have gone over the edge and rolled down, down, down to the bitter bottom of the khud – a sad balloon inflated with Ila Das’s dreary past. Roaring in joyous expectation, the boys tried to help it through the rails but it stuck fast, protesting like a lady in hoop-skirts at their uncouth sport.

  Ila Das squeaked and shrilled like an agitated shrew, her little eyes blinking tearfully behind the spectacles. ‘Hooligans,’ she hiccuped, her voice breaking. ‘I’ll go straight to the Principal. I’ll report to the police . . .

  At this there was a roar and the band parted and fell aside, leaving the old umbrella stuck helplessly between two rails from which undignified position it was rescued by Ram Lal, who had come marching down the path in policeman-sized strides, sent by Nanda Kaul who stood at the top of the hill by the gate, watching the scene with a frown of disgust.

  ‘Badmash! Badtameez!’ roared Ram Lal in thundering tones and, extricating the umbrella now as maimed and crooked as a hunchback, a witch of olden times tied and readied for the fatal dip in the pond, flourished it at their quickly retreating, torn, patched and impertinent behinds, Once safely down the road, the boys began to whoop and whistle again, doubling up and playing leap-frog in delight.

  But neither Ram Lal nor Ila Das glanced at their high jinks. Rolling up the tired and rusty umbrella, Ram Lal handed it to Ila Das with some disdain.

  ‘Thank you, Ram Lal,’ she piped and, hitching up the sair above her stockinged ankles, began to climb the steep, gravelly path between the chestnut trees to Carignano. Following her, Ram Lal could hear the rapid, shallow breathing, like an old animal that has been made to run before the hounds. Carefully turning his head, he spat into the raspberry bushes. She’d need her tea, he’d better hurry, he thought.

  Chapter 2

  BUT ILA DAS was accustomed to such scenes: she could no more have gone down the road to post a letter without being pursued, or obstructed, by just such a jeering mob as had escorted her to Carignano today, than royalty could have proceeded in a golden carriage without crowds to wave it and cheer it on its way. All her life mobs had taunted and derided her. Why, thought Nanda Kaul, impatiently waiting beneath the smiling, scoffing pine trees, when Ila Das was a baby in a pram, exactly such a mob must have surrounded her, snatched away her rattle and made her squeak and shrill just as she had on the dusty road to Carignano.

  It was hard to picture Ila as an infant, true. In an attempt to do so, Nanda Kaul saw the shrivelled old lady in miniature, propped up against lace-edged pillows in a sky-blue pram, just as she was now only without the shining porcelain dentures.

  About the pram and the laces she was certain. Nanda Kaul’s family had known Ila Das’s in the days when some of the glory of the British Empire was allowed to reflect on a few favoured natives. Such families lived in large bungalows on quiet roads. In their houses, sherry was served before lunch, port after. Their servants wore white cotton gloves. The ladies went for evening drives along the river, at first in creaking carriages, later in pompously purring automobiles. So of course there had been a sky-blue perambulator, too, and an ayah to push it importantly along under the jacaranda trees, and a skirted nanny to time its promenade on a great china-saucer watch presented to her by her employers.

  This was the contradiction in Ila Das’s life that irked Nanda Kaul – it was the piece of gravel that insisted on slipping into her shoe and out of it. Ila Das’s life was simply not all of a piece – Nanda Kaul had seen so many pieces of it, littered over the northern plains, and here was the last broken bit, spiked by an agave beside the path leading to Carignano.

  Ram Lal hurried to help the old lady off the pointed spike, putting her into a flutter of shrill thanks that carried all the way up to the gate like the cackle of an agitated parrot.

  It was this cackle, this scream of hers, Nanda Kaul thought, that held all the assorted pieces of her life together like a string or chain. It was the motif of her life, unmistakably. Such a voice no human being ought to have had: it was anti-social to possess, to emit such sounds as poor Ila Das made by way of communication.

  Strange to think there was an infant once who, when lisping the nanny-goat-and-pinafore rhymes that western and westernized babies speak, curdled the blood of the adults who dandled her on their knees. But one could imagine – Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes as she stared down at the bald white scalp, bent to the task of struggling uphill in the afternoon heat – Ila Das as an infant in an afternoon frock of blue ribbons and white lace, screeching the most unimaginably horrid sounds that sent shivers down the spines of guests and relatives invited to hear her recite her nursery rhymes.

  Nanda Kaul could not only imagine it, she could remember the time. She and Ila Das had played together as children, children’s games like Oranges-and-Lemons and cooking dolls’ meals under the gol-mohur trees, with scarlet blossoms and yellow pods for food.

  They had gone to school together, solemnly cycling down the quiet roads to the convent, while the happily illiterate urchins cheered them, yelling ‘Parr-ot, parr-ot, sing to us!’ Ila Das would be primly silent on her splendid silver Raleigh, biting her lip in terror of being knocked down in the road.

  In school, alas, she had to speak. Teachers shivered, their teeth on edge, as if a child had squeaked a pencil on a slate or slid a nail down a glass-pane, while children clapped the
ir hands over their mouths, making giggles burst forth the more rudely when Ila Das stood up, almost prancing on her tiptoes, to recite The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck. Hurriedly teachers hushed her, begged her to give others, with normal growls and mutters for voices, a chance. And poor Ila had learnt the whole poem through, wanted so much to recite it all. Yet she had to bottle up that voice with a hiccup and sit down, fizzing and burbling impotently, her hands in her lap, while others muttered and floundered through a parody, a pretence of the verse.

  In distress, her parents bought her a piano and engaged a new governess, one who could teach Ila to play. Perhaps they hoped to silence the child at parties by giving her pieces to play rather than recite. Nanda Kaul’s hands rose involuntarily to her ears under the loops of white hair, as she recalled those tea-parties and the appalling, the unendurable sounds made by little Ila Das, pigtails bouncing jollily on her back, as she tinkled on the piano keys as if rummaging amongst a bagful of china, hogs’ tusks and clapping dentures, her voice raised like a tom-cat’s in battle, yowling

  ‘Darling, I am growing old!

  Silver threads among the gold . . .’

  Here she came, Ila Das, still little Ila Das, with what remained of the pigtail wound on top of her head like a tea-cosy, an egg-cosy, yellowed rather than whitened by age, and Nanda Kaul looked down from her height, having invited her to tea, having failed to put her away out of sight and mind. Here she was, that last little broken bit of a crazy life, fluttering up over the gravel like a bit of crumpled paper.

  ‘Ila,’ she sighed, bending to swing open the unwilling gate, ‘come’.

  And Ila, screwing up her little button eyes with delight at seeing Nanda Kaul – for all through her ragged life Nanda Kaul had been there, standing at a height, like a beacon, like an ideal – and stepping eagerly in, flung herself upon her friend and pecked and pecked her cold, flat cheek, crying little hideous cries of delight and love into the cringing ears.