Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  It was against the old lady’s policy to question her but it annoyed her intensely that she should once again be drawn into a position where it was necessary for her to take an interest in another’s activities and be responsible for their effect and outcome.

  When would she be done?

  She wrote a letter to Asha in her very plain, tall writing, in green ink on large sheets of white paper, briefly informing her of Raka’s safe arrival and choosing to say nothing that might give away her resentment, her grievance.

  As she folded the sheets and slipped them into a large envelope, she set her lips together and decided to make it clear to Raka – that Raka was a perceptive child was clear to her – that she was not part of Nanda Kaul’s life, that she had her own place and might stay in it.

  Seeing her emerge from the dark like a soundless moth, or dawdle up the path nursing a hand swollen and red with nettle stings, Nanda Kaul turned her head slightly and called to Ram Lal ‘Is the child’s bath water hot?’ and Raka would slip past her on her way to her bath.

  So they worked out the means by which they would live together and each felt she was doing her best at avoiding the other but found it was not so simple to exist and yet appear not to exist.

  Nanda Kaul could not help finding the child’s long absences as perturbing as her presence was irksome. Occasionally she found herself walking restlessly from room to room or from one end of the garden to the other, not in search – it was not in her to search out another – but because the child’s arrival and disappearance were so disquieting.

  She was like a rabbit conjured up by a magician – drawn unwillingly out of the magic hat, flashing past Nanda Kaul, then vanishing in the dark of a bagful of tricks.

  There was nothing nastier to Nanda Kaul’s mind than magic.

  Why should the calm of her existence be drawn taut, tense by speculation on this child’s wanderings? So, when Raka did turn up, unpunctually, her legs scratched and the pockets of her dress stained with raspberry juice, Nanda Kaul turned a look on her that was reproachful rather than welcoming.

  But Raka ignored her. She ignored her so calmly, so totally that it made Nanda Kaul breathless. She eyed the child with apprehension now, wondering at this total rejection, so natural, instinctive and effortless when compared with her own planned and wilful rejection of the child.

  Seeing Raka bend her head to study a pine cone in her fist, the eyelids slipping down like two mauve shells and the short hair settled like a dusty cap about her scalp, Nanda Kaul saw that she was the finished, perfected model of what Nanda Kaul herself was merely a brave, flawed experiment.

  It made her nostrils flare and her fingers twitch but she had to admit that Raka was not like any other child she had known, not like any of her own children or grandchildren. Amongst them, she appeared a freak by virtue of never making a demand. She appeared to have no needs. Like an insect burrowing through the sandy loam and pine-needles of the hillsides, like her own great-grandmother, Raka wanted only one thing – to be left alone and pursue her own secret life amongst the rocks and pines of Kasauli.

  If Nanda Kaul was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of duty and obligation, her great-granddaughter was a recluse by nature, by instinct. She had not arrived at this condition by a long route of rejection and sacrifice – she was born to it, simply.

  Standing by the railing at the back of the house and watching the child carefully lower herself down the cliff to the kilns and agaves and refuse of the ravine, Nanda Kaul felt a small admiration for her rise and stir.

  Chapter 5

  RAKA DROPPED LOWER and lower down the ravine. The lower she went the hotter it grew. Red dust settled between her toes and sandpapered her sandals. Runnels of sweat trickled from under her arms and behind her knees. The plain below opened wide its yellow mouth and it was its oven breath that billowed up the mountainside and enclosed her.

  But she ignored that great hot plain below. Her eye was on the heart of the agaves, that central dagger guarded by a ring of curved spikes, on the contortions of the charred pine trunks and the paralysed attitudes of the rocks.

  The refuse that the folds of the gorge held and slowly ate and digested was of interest too. There were splotches of blood, there were yellow stains oozing through paper, there were bones and the mealy ashes of bones. Tins of Tulip ham and Kissan jam. Broken china, burnt kettles, rubber tyres and bent wheels.

  Once she came upon a great, thick yellow snake poured in rings upon itself, basking on the sunned top of a flat rock. She watched it for a long while, digging her toes into the slipping red soil, keeping still the long wand of broom she held in her hand. She had seen the tips of snakes’ tails parting the cracks of rocks, she had seen slit eyes watching her from grottoes of shade, she had heard the slither of scales upon the ground, but she had never seen the whole creature before. Here was every part of it, loaded onto the stone, a bagful, a loose soft sackful of snake.

  Leaving it to bask, she slid quietly on downwards, and now sweat ran from her face, too, trickled out between the roots of her hair in springs.

  She shaded her eyes to look up at the swords of the Pasteur Institute chimneys piercing the white sky, lashed about with black whips of smoke. Raka sniffed the air and smelt cinders, smelt serum boiling, smelt chloroform and spirit, smelt the smell of dogs’ brains boiled in vats, of guinea pigs’ guts, of rabbits secreting fear in cages packed with coiled snakes, watched by doctors in white.

  She licked her dry lips and tasted salted flakes of sweat. She dropped her eyes and gazed down at the plains, smothered in dust so that she could not make out cities, rivers or roads. Only the Chandigarh lake gleamed dully, metallically – a snake’s eye, watching. Dust storms tore across the plain, rushing and lifting the yellow clouds higher and higher up the mountainside.

  Raka began to scramble uphill. As she went, storming through soil and gravel, starting small avalanches of pebbles and loud, clanking ones of empty tins, she disturbed the crickets and made them raise their voices in alarm. Like a chorus singing and singing at the back of a stage, they sang in some difficult tongue she had not met before – not in Geneva, nor in New York, nor anywhere in that polyglot world she had once been led through. Was it Sanskrit? Was it Greek? It was complicated, shrill, incessant and Raka shook and shook her head to get the buzz out, half-closed her eyes against the glare and dust and had her thigh slashed by the blade of a fierce agave. Small beads of blood bubbled out of the white streak of the scratch. She doubled over to lick them, then hauled herself up over the lip of the cliff.

  By a slight error in calculation, she came up not in the Carignano garden but into the backyard of the Kasauli club. She halted, stumbled a bit at this dismaying error, then saw that all the doors and windows of the green-roofed building were shut and there was no one about. She skirted the kitchen, allowing herself a glance out of the corner of her eye at its vast blackened oven, its acres of wooden tabletops, its cupboards of damp china and dull silver, all limp and lifeless at this hour. Ducking her head, she edged past the honeysuckle-hung porch, dashed across the garden where salvias and hydrangeas wilted, unwatered, and tumbled out onto the road that led up to Carignano.

  Chapter 6

  RAM LAL HAD stoked up the hamam with splinters of firewood and filled its round brass drum with water for Raka’s bath. Having lit it, he sat down beside it on a flat stone outside the kitchen door, and smoked a quiet biri.

  Then Raka came sliding down the knoll and almost on top of him – a bird fallen out of its nest, a nest fallen out of a tree – with grass sticking out of her hair and thorns stuck into her sandals. Sucking a finger that tended to get stuck in adventures, she sat down beside the hamam, listening to it thrum with heat like a steamboat. When the water was hot, Ram Lal would spin the tap at the side, fill a brass bucket and carry it into her bathroom. The dust and grime would flow in a soapy sludge through the green drain hole into the lily bed outside. Till then, they would sit together.

  ‘I s
aw a snake, Ram Lal,’ she told him.

  He took the biri out of his mouth. ‘Here?’

  ‘No, down in the ravine,’ she said, pointing towards the cliff which was melting into an orange haze now that the sun was dropping westwards through the dustclouds over the plains.

  ‘A cobra?’

  ‘It was big – this big,’ she said, showing him with her arm, ‘And yellow. It was sleeping.’

  ‘Yellow? This big? Ah,’ said Ram Lal, settling his biri back between his lips. ‘That was a daman. A rat snake. A good snake to have around.’

  ‘It was quite far down, really.’

  ‘Don’t go that far,’ Ram Lal said sharply. ‘I told you not to – it isn’t good.’

  ‘I wanted to see a jackal. I’ve never seen a jackal. I hear them at night.’

  ‘Why do you want to see a jackal? Didn’t I tell you, they are mad? If they bite you, you will have to go to the Pasteur Institute and get fourteen injections – in the stomach. I did once.’

  ‘Do jackals bite?’

  ‘Of course. Jackals are as fierce as cobras. That place there,’ he waved into the dust in which the forms of the pine trees were only barely visible now, writhing in the wind, ‘is very bad, not safe. Why don’t you go to the club and play with the babas there?’

  ‘I did go. But there were no babas there. No one.’

  ‘You should go in the evening, at the proper time,’ he said primly, suddenly recalling better days, spent in service of richer, better homes. ‘You should have an ayah. Then she could wash you and dress you in clean clothes at four o’clock and take you down to the club. You would meet nice babas there. They come in the evenings with their ayahs. They play on the swings and their parents play bridge and tennis. Then they have lemonade and Vimto in the garden. That is what you should do,’ he told her, severely.

  Raka listened to him create this bright picture of hill-station club life politely rather than curiously. It was a life she had observed from the outside – in Delhi, in Manila, in Madrid – but had never tried to enter. She had always seemed to lack the ticket. ‘Hmm,’ she said, picking at a nicely crusty scab on her elbow.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Ram Lal said sharply, still speaking out of that proper and ordered world in the distance to which he had once belonged. ‘You will make it bleed again and it will leave an ugly scar. You get so dirty crawling about on the hillsides.’

  ‘I will soon bathe,’ Raka assured him, and shifted on her bottom with impatience at this new censoriousness of his.

  ‘Yes, I had better take your bucket in before the dust-storm arrives. Look, look, it is coming,’ he shouted, holding down his cap about his ears as the wind tore across.

  Raka stood up on the stone to watch the dense yellow haze gather and hurl itself across the plains, blotting out the scattered villages and mango groves, sweep on to the foot of the mountain and then, as if in rage at finding its way blocked, mounting the hillside, lifting higher and higher till it swept over the cliff and engulfed Kasauli, blotting out the view, the sky and the air in a gritty mass.

  Ram Lal caught her by the shoulder and pushed her into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them. She went immediately to the window, wiped off the grime and peered out.

  A white hen was lifted into the air and tossed past the window in a frantic, fluttery arc, its squawks snatched out of its beak and shattered like glass.

  The sun was bobbing in and out of the dust clouds, lighting them up in a great conflagration – a splendid bonfire that burned in the heart of the yellow clouds. The whole world was livid, inflamed. Only the closest pine trees showed, black silhouettes lashing from side to side.

  ‘The hamam will be knocked over!’ Ram Lal yelled. ‘All that boiling water and fire!’

  ‘Will it set fire to the garden?’ shouted Raka. ‘Will it set the hill on fire?’

  ‘Don’t know, don’t know,’ he muttered worriedly, grinding the palms of his hands together. ‘This is how forest fires do start. I can’t tell you how many forest fires we see each year in Kasauli. Some have come up as far as our railing. You can see how many of the trees are burnt, and houses too. Once the house down the hill, South View, was burnt down to the ground before the fire engine arrived.’

  ‘Could they drive it down the hill to South View?’

  ‘Yes, they dragged it down by jeeps, but there was no water. There is a water shortage every summer in Kasauli. There was no water to put out the fire and the whole house burnt down, and the cowshed with two buffaloes in it.’

  ‘I’ve seen a burnt hut up on top of that hill there, on the upper Mall,’ Raka remembered.

  ‘Hut? It was a beautiful cottage. An English Mem lived there. It was burnt down in a forest fire and she went mad and was taken to the lunatic asylum with her arms and legs tied with rope. They say all her hair was burnt off, even her eyelashes, when she went in to save her cat. The watchman says he can still hear the cat howling in the ruins at night.’

  ‘Can he? Can you? Have you? At midnight?’

  But Ram Lal was too worried about his hamam of boiling water to tell her ghost stories now. He came to the window and stared out, trying to make out its brass shape in the broiling dust. They could hear the grit and gravel flying and dashing against the stone walls and tin roofs, raucous poltergeists of the storm.

  ‘If it falls over, all that dry grass will be set on fire,’ he worried. ‘And I’m old,’ he groaned suddenly, sticking one finger in an ear and giving his head a shake. ‘I can’t run to the fire brigade. I can’t run to fetch water. My knees hurt.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Raka cried. ‘I can run, Ram Lal – fast, fast.’

  But the dust was subsiding, so was the roar of the wind. They could hear each other without shouting. The dense mass parted and thinned, began to tuck and tidy itself away like a tantrum that was spent. The air was pale, subdued.

  Ram Lal opened the door and hurried over to his hamam. Raka followed.

  The still air was cool now, edged with chill. The heat of the sun was gone like an angry crab put to flight, leaving its dull white shell behind – stranded, harmless.

  The hills were chastened and austere in the chilly light.

  Dizzy parrots, in a phosphorescent flock, burst out of the pines and spurted away, leaving their shrieks behind.

  Ram Lal patted the solid flanks of the old hamam. ‘A good thing we brought this up to Kasauli with us,’ he said proudly. ‘You don’t get solid brass like this any more. Come along, the water’s just right for your bath and I must go and sweep up all the dust in the house,’ and he spun the little tap, gay with relief, filled a big bucket and carried it across the backyard to the green backdoor of her bathroom, Raka skipping behind him like a pet insect.

  Striking an identical note of gay relief, a cuckoo called on the knoll.

  Nanda Kaul, standing behind a closed window, watched them cross the yard – Ram Lal with the brass bucket from which bright drops spilt and flew as he lurched under its weight, Raka’s spindly legs snapping at his heels like a pair of scissors.

  Her hand shot out of the folds of silk and slapped at a pair of bumbling flies on the pane. They fell together on the windowsill, buzzing in alarm.

  Chapter 7

  CAREFULLY RETURNING HER tea-cup to the tray, Raka rose and made a furtive sideways movement that always preceded her liquid, unobtrusive slipping away.

  Very quickly Nanda Kaul, too, put down her cup and made a bustling movement with her knees that shook the table-top and made things rattle.

  ‘I think I’ll come with you today,’ she said, very precisely, with an authoritative lift of her chin. ‘For a walk.’

  Raka stood still, dismayed. It was quite clear she was dismayed. Nanda Kaul saw that she did not care for her company. What she did not know was that the child always rose hungry from the tea-table and that her evening rambles about the hills were also forages for food, that she searched for berries and pine nuts along the paths to allay the hunger that grew and growled
inside her small flat belly. She was never able to eat enough at a meal to last her till the next. Nor could she bear to ask for a biscuit. So she went hungry till dinner, unless she found a bush with ripe berries still popping out of its thorns or a bunch of sour oxalis leaves to chew.

  Held back by her great-grandmother’s sudden, unwelcome whim, she stood swaying on the top step of the veranda and looked uncertain.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Nanda Kaul briskly. ‘I’ll change into my walking shoes.’

  Raka sighed and slipped down on the step beside a pot of fuchsias and swung the purple tasselled bells with her finger, despondently. Listening to her great-grandmother moving about in the bedroom, she felt as if she heard the sounds of collar and chain. She had not a dog’s slavishness to companionship, and bit her lip with vexation.

  It occurred to her that the old lady’s idea of a walk might be a stroll through the bazaar amongst the holiday crowds, or down to the club for a lemonade and a chat with summer visitors around a table in the garden, and she grew more apprehensive.

  But Nanda Kaul appeared in cracked grey gym shoes and a hefty walking-stick in her hand. ‘Shall we go all the way to Monkey Point today?’ she asked pleasantly, slightly swinging the stick.

  They had never walked together before and made an awkward pair, now bumping into each other and politely apologizing, then wandering so far apart that they no longer seemed to belong to each other. Both walked stiffly, held themselves very upright, not letting themselves go with a natural stride.

  It was a subdued afternoon, the hills sere, slashed everywhere by the charred trunks of burnt pines, jagged by the shapes of tumbled rocks and static boulders. The sun and summer dust fused into a dull mealy mass in which no light quickened but for the glisten of pine-needles when the wind ruffled them.

  Now and then Nanda Kaul paused, her face rather pinched and her breathing quick, but it was not to catch her breath, she made clear, only to lift her stick and point out something of interest to Raka.