Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  Raising her head, holding her hands behind her back, Nanda Kaul began to pace up and down in the garden. She wished Raka would appear, and knew she would not. But a day lily was in bloom and Nanda Kaul went slowly over to congratulate it on its well-formed, clear yellow flower that would be shrivelled by tomorrow.

  As she stood gazing at it, fine green wires gripped the yellow petals, dipping them earthwards, and very cautiously a praying mantis lifted itself onto the flower, abandoning its perfect camouflage to display the brilliant green of its body, face, legs and eyes on the waxy yellow petals. Then, becoming aware of Nanda Kaul’s still, opaline presence, it lifted itself up on its hind legs, as if in self-defence, and raised its tiny hands together under its chin, turning its solemn head from side to side as it studied her with exactly the same serene curiosity that marked her face.

  She put out her ringed hand and gave the lily a little shake so that the creature tumbled off into the leaves. There it would be safe from the birds.

  Chapter 11

  ILA DAS DID not take the Garkhal road that led down the hillside to her village, no. Buoyed up by Nanda Kaul’s friendliness, by the tea, she gave her umbrella a cheerful swing and decided to visit the bazaar. Perhaps she would find something cheap there. If the price of corn meal had come down, she might buy half a kilo – corn meal roti was good, satisfying. Or potatoes – what would they cost now? she wondered. Well, if she couldn’t afford to buy any, she could at least take a look and see what was available that she might purchase the day she got her salary. That glad day!

  The thought of it made her lift her little feet and plod through the summer dust and get past all the staring groups of summer visitors who could not restrain their surprise and sometimes their laughter at the sight of her odd, jerky figure. Thinking of Nanda Kaul, how beautiful she still was, how gracefully she poured the tea, how sympathetically she listened, Ila Das barely noticed them.

  Then a boy rolling along an old bicycle wheel for a hoop, gave an angry shout and shoved her aside, almost into the ditch outside the Pasteur Institute gate. But Ila Das only looked up at the great factory-like edifice and wondered, wished a job could be found for her there. Should she apply to the director? Should she confront him in his office? Ah, but what qualifications could she present, what particular job could she possibly apply for, or even covet? She grimaced at her audacity, biting her lips with her shining dentures. A jeep roared uphill in first gear, covering her with dust from top to toe.

  She stood blinded and choked, and had to take off her spectacles and take out a handkerchief to wipe them before she could replace them crookedly on her nose and see anything. What she saw was a bunch of schoolgirls in bright indigo salwar-kameez, doubling up with laughter to see her blink and ruffle and shake like a little owl that had ventured out at the wrong time of day.

  Ignoring them, Ila Das went on, rather less cheerfully. As she passed the Tibetan shawl sellers who had spread out their bright, cheap woollen ware on the street, she looked at their babies and puppies gambolling together in the middle of the road with a fine carelessness that she envied. There was a zest about them, a warmth of life’s fires burning brightly in their shabby, grubby bodies, fires that had died out in her long ago, leaving this heap of ashes, this pain.

  Down the twisting bazaar lane she hopped and hobbled, but it was so unfortunate how people invariably knocked into her or shoved her aside, burst into guffaws or made jeering remarks, as though her feelings didn’t matter to anyone. Did they think she didn’t feel it? So she lifted her chin high, very high, and her eyes blinked behind the bi-focals uncontrollably, but she gripped her umbrella tightly and went on. No one noticed anything staunch or splendid about her trembling chin, her wobbling top-knot or her hurried walk.

  No one noticed except the grainseller at whose open shop she stopped because it was less crowded than the plastic buckets shop, the shoemaker’s shop, the readymade garments and the hardware shop.

  The grainseller – an elderly, whiskered man in a singlet and very clean, white cotton pyjamas – sat idly sifting pulses through his fingers, occasionally twisting his moustaches as he took in the bustling scene. He looked benevolently at Ila Das bending over the open sacks. He knew Ila Das. Whenever she got her salary, she came to his shop for what were supposed to be her month’s provisions, only the shopkeeper knew they couldn’t possibly last more than a fortnight – not even for such a child-sized and time-shrivelled creature. He would always throw in a free handful of red chillies or some cloves of garlic which was generous of him for they were expensive – only, unfortunately, Ila Das ate neither. She always thanked him effusively, however, and made him feel kindly towards her. His own daughter was club-footed – why should he laugh at this poor creature’s deformities?

  As if to flaunt her singular deformity, Ila Das brayed aloud ‘The corn meal here – has the price come down at last?’

  He leant across and scooped some up in a metal scoop that he held out for her to examine. ‘Four rupees a kilo only,’ he said.

  Ila Das’s spectacles slipped off her nose in horror. She quickly picked them up and collected herself, and the cool way in which she shook her head and moved on to the bins full of potatoes and onions would not have done discredit to her elegant mother.

  But what could she buy here for her dinner? she wondered, again clutching her lower lip with those gleaming dentures. She thought of the few coins at the bottom of the cloth bag and shifted it on her shoulder and decided not to spend them. They had to last her quite a while. Perhaps, when she went home, she would find something on the kitchen shelf or in the dark corner where she hadn’t looked properly. Bursting into a casual little hum, she turned around and said ‘Achha, I’ll come again’ to the shopkeeper, in a gay and careless way, and made to go.

  He said suddenly, ‘Are you going home now, Memsahib?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprised, stopping to look at him.

  ‘You shouldn’t go so late,’ he said, and his face was troubled behind the profusion of whiskers. ‘It is not good for a memsahib to walk alone in the dark.’

  ‘Why?’ she laughed, her teeth gleaming, her voice raw because she was touched at his concern. ‘I am always alone. I am never afraid.’

  He did not say anything more, only shook his head and kept an eye on her as she made her way back through the bazaar with her empty bag, skirting the pai dogs that barked and tumbled in a muddy knot, past the crowds outside the sweetmeat shop where great pans of milk steamed and flies rose and settled in clouds on pyramids of pink and yellow and green sweets and the discarded papers and leaf-cups in the open drain.

  He thought of Preet Singh who lived in the same village as Ila Das and had passed the time of morning with him earlier today and spoken of Ila Das, how she was trying to stop him marrying off his daughter to a rich landowner who had made a good offer for her. Preet Singh had spat and cursed Ila Das, using coarse, obscene words that made the grainseller fall silent in disapproval. He himself knew a Memsahib when he saw one. Such obscenity upset him as a badly cooked meal might. Watching Ila Das clumsily pick her way through a marble game in the road, he frowned with uneasiness. It was growing dark.

  Made conscious of the dark by the grainseller, Ila Das hurried out of the bazaar and past the shops on the Mall in a kind of panic that made her chin jerk up and down and her cheeks flop in and out. It had been a mistake not to go home immediately, to waste time at the bazaar. What a fool to go shopping when she had no money! Vexed with herself, she shook her head violently. The top-knot tumbled down her neck.

  Summer visitors at the Alasia Hotel, looking down from the terrace where they sat with their drinks, thought her the crazy woman, walking jerkily and talking to herself, that every holiday resort seems to have at least one of, for their pity or amusement. They turned to each other and smiled, dipped their heads and drank.

  Once under the chestnut trees of the Lower Mall, Ila Das tried to tease herself out of her panic. Why was she afraid? Of whom? Sh
e was not in debt to anyone in the bazaar. No, Ila Das would never take a loan, never. Ooh, what would her father have thought if she had? She gave a little spurting giggle at the thought of her father, in his fawn waistcoat with the gold watch-chain cascading out of a pocket, knowing his daughter, groomed by a long line of governesses and ayahs, to be in debt to some hairy, half-dressed shopkeeper.

  But here she stopped herself. Why did she think of that kindly concerned man in the grainshop as hairy, half-dressed? Now when would she ever get over that pompous education of hers, leave it all behind and learn to deal with the world, now her world, as it was?

  Well, she was trying. Just stopping herself from stepping into a cowpat, Ila Das hurried on through the cold, fretted shade of the chestnut trees, only half-hearing the hoots of laughter from the children on the hillside who had seen her skip, goat-like, over the cowpat. She knew they would have loved to see her fall into it. Ooh dear, she couldn’t tell who she feared more – jeering urchins or the marauding langurs that sometimes waylaid her and terrified her by baring their teeth and chattering insults at her. The way was full of hazards, full of hazards. The grainseller was right. She trembled.

  She came to the fork and hurriedly, without stopping, took the steeply plunging footpath that would take her down, down the hillside to her village.

  Chapter 12

  LEAVING BEHIND THE last of the shabby, rundown houses and dried up, untended gardens of the town, Ila Das began to hop, skip and slide down the footpath to her village, already lost in the evening shadow of the mountains. She hoped to be home before night.

  There were only a few more farmhouses on the way – solid, square houses built of Kasauli fieldstone, with pumpkins and corn drying on their roofs, goats tied to the door-posts, women noisily dipping brass pots into barrels of water. Dogs barked to see her go. Some of the women called in jeering but not unfriendly voices, as to a funny child. She waved her umbrella at them – she had visited them just that morning to explain the benefits of vaccination to them – and then went down, down the steep path between great rocks and black, windwhipped pine trees.

  The last of the light had left the valley. It was already a deep violet and only the Kasauli ridge, where Carignano stood invisibly, was still bright with sunlight, russet and auburn, copper and brass. An eagle took off from the peak of Monkey Point, lit up like a torch in the sky, and dropped slowly down into the valley, lower and lower, till it was no more than a sere leaf, a scrap of burnt paper, drifting on currents of air, silently.

  Although it had been hot all day, now there was a chill like a white mist beginning to creep out of the shadows of the great jagged rocks and filter through the pine trees and set Ila Das, in her frayed, worn laces and silks, shivering. The day gone, the light gone, the warmth of life gone, it was like wandering lost in a Chinese landscape – an austere pen and ink scroll, of rocks and pines and mountain peaks, all muted by mist, by darkness.

  So sad, so triste, thought Ila Das, her teeth chattering as she clutched her umbrella to her chest and stumbled over pebbles and rocks. To be alone, to be old, to have to walk this long, sad distance down this desolate hillside, it was more than she could bear. Oh, she could bear it just now, she said, clenching her lower lip with her teeth, but how much longer? how much longer?

  The last of the rooks had left the sky, had stopped circling and searching above the pines, and settled for the night. There was no sign of life, no sound. Only little Ila Das scuttling through the Chinese landscape, a little frightened spider in this vast, chilly web. How she hurried, hurried to escape it. How she wished she had asked – had forced herself to ask – Nanda Kaul to give her a room at Carignano, allow her to stay with her, or at least begged the kind grainseller for half a kilo of corn meal for her dinner. But, because of her absurd pride in being her father’s daughter, her ridiculous failure ever to forget it, she had not asked, had not begged, and so she was stumbling through the rocks alone, climbing over the charred, twisted tree-trunks that lay across the path, to the crumbling hut of mud and thatch near the earthen heap of the hamlet, to search on the empty shelf for a scrap of food and to lie awake through the night on a flea-ridden string cot.

  But that was all she had. That was what she was scurrying towards. Lord, it was late. Mist – now, in summer? And so cold? She held the umbrella against her thin chest and edged past a particularly large and murderous agave, then climbed down a slippery pile of pebbles spattered with goat droppings.

  Now at last she came to the final fold of the hill. Once around it, she would be home. Almost running, almost throwing herself at that last big rock in her way, Ila Das could see it – the hamlet – just below her. There was the farmhouse, long and low and built of stone, red-roofed, with all the tumbling outhouses about it, thatch-roofed, with saffron ears of corn drying in bunches from their eaves. There it was – the hamlet – perched above a long skirt of terraced fields in which the ripe, ready wheat stood blond and brittle and potato vines spread themselves over the loamy earth. There was the big tank of rainwater in which frogs plopped and rkk-rkk-rkked aloud, under the pomegranate trees with their little tight scarlet pom-poms of bloom. There were the cows coming down the upper path, their bells lugubriously tolling, their sweet smell of warm, chewed straw carrying over to her. At their heels came barking and lolloping the handsome red dog with the plumed tail that Nanda Kaul had seen snuffing along the Upper Mall. No lamps had been lit yet – the people were poor and frugal – but, in a little while, the first pinprick, would start into the dark, then three or four. Ila Das, too, would light her lamp in which there was still a little kerosene.

  At the thought of the lamp flowering into light in her dark hut, at the thought of the cows comfortably mooing and chewing in the lean-to next to her, she stopped under the looming rock, caught her breath and narrowed her little eyes with pleasure, with relief.

  Just then a black shape detached itself from the jagged pile of the rock, that last rock between her and the hamlet, and sprang soundlessly at her. She staggered under its weight with a gasp that ripped through her chest. It had her by the throat. She struggled, choking, trying to stretch and stretch and stretch that gasp till it became a shout, a shout that the villagers would hear, the red dog would hear, a shout for help. But the fingers tightened. Now she tore her mouth open for breath, now she opened her eyes till they boggled, and popped, and stood out of her head as she saw, in the cold shadow, that it was Preet Singh, his lips lifted back from his teeth, his eyes blazing down at her in rage, in a passion of rage. She lifted her hands to dislodge his from her throat and she did dislodge them. They fell away, but only to tear at the cotton scarf that hung about his neck, only to wrap that about her throat, tighter, tighter, tighter, so that the last gasp rattled inside her, choked and rattled and was still. Her eyes still swivelled in their sockets, two alarmed marbles of black and white, and quickly he left the ends of the scarf, tore at her clothes, tore them off her, in long, screeching rips, till he came to her, to the dry, shrivelled, starved stick inside the wrappings, and raped her, pinned her down into the dust and the goat droppings, and raped her. Crushed back, crushed down into the earth, she lay raped, broken, still and finished. Now it was dark.

  Chapter 13

  WHEN THE SHARP, long sliver of the telephone’s call cut through the dusk, Nanda Kaul stopped, clapping her hands together in anger. The telephone again – no! But it couldn’t be Ila Das. Ila Das had only left an hour or so ago, it could not be her again. Perhaps it was a wrong number. She would not go in. It was still so lovely here – the blue shadows of night spilling across the garden like cool water, the crickets putting out their song one by one, the lights beginning to flower on the distant hilltops, hazily. Let it ring. Ring, ring, ring.

  Then Ram Lal came out of the kitchen, strode across the yard in steps the shadows made even longer, till he was in the house and had silenced, decapitated the telephone.

  She relaxed. She walked on, disturbing a silver-dusted moth on a fuchsia t
hat swung free and fluttered away. Let Ram Lal answer the phone, let others answer such demands, such intrusions. She wanted only to be alone in the garden in the dark.

  But Ram Lal came out onto the veranda and replaced the shrill peremptoriness of the ‘phone by his deep voice calling ‘Memsahib,’phone for you.’

  She gave her ringed fingers a little twist of irritation. Could she not be left alone? After this dreadful, tangled afternoon with Ila Das screaming and braying into her ear by the hour, could she not be given a quiet hour in which to recover, to take in the pine-tinged evening air and recover?

  She swept up the flagstones of the path like an aroused snake, mounted the veranda steps and went up to the table where the telephone lay, in two divided halves, black, beside the open window from which the sky looked in, pale and muted. Sitting down on the little stool, she picked up the receiver and said ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is P. K. Shukla, madam, police officer in charge, Garkhal thana,’ said a brisk, quick voice that brushed aside her sighs, her innuendoes. ‘You know Miss Ila Das, welfare officer of the Garkhal division?’

  ‘Yes,’ frowned Nanda Kaul, lifting one hand to her temple. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your name and telephone number were found on a piece of paper in her bag. Kindly come to the police station at the earliest to identify her body.’

  Nanda Kaul’s head twisted back, back. She lowered her hand from her temple to her throat and clutched it. ‘Ila?’ she murmured. ‘Ila Das?’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ the sure voice repeated, slightly impatient of her histrionics. ‘Her body was found on the path to the village Timarpur. She was found by the villagers. She has been strangled. The doctor is here. He claims she has been raped. She is dead. Kindly come to the police station at the earliest to identify . . .’