Fire On the Mountain

by Anita Desai

  Then Ram Lal ran to the hamam and beat its side with a stick of kindling – tum-tum-tum-tum, it rang out a warning. Littleherdsboys, those natural enemies of the langurs, swarmed up the hillside immediately, stones in their hands, panting to join the fray. ‘Hroo, hroo, hroo,’ they yelled till the langures collected in a band and made off with giant leaps and swings, down the hillside and across the Mall into the valley. Only one portly mother was left behind, in the pine tree by the gate, her young one clinging to her belly with careful fingers, its face pinched and anxious. Ram Lal picked up a stone to hurl it at her but found Raka holding onto his arm with all her might, swinging from it like an anxious monkey herself.

  ‘Leave her, leave her,’ she begged.

  ‘Hroo, hroo! Leave her to break our trees and steal our potatoes – what for?’ growled Ram Lal but dropped the stone and, clapping his hands together, yelled ‘Get off, you she-devil, you churail, you black-faced hubshee!’ The langur bared her teeth at him, then groped her way down the tree-trunk with belly-rolling, bottom-swaying slowness specially to insult, climbed casually over the gate and loped away, the infant still clinging to her belly and peeping round it with bead-bright eyes.

  There was a sudden stone-like stillness following the clamour of their arrival and dispersal. Nanda Kaul rose to her feet on the veranda and said coldly ‘Ram Lal, you might clear those herdsboys off our garden now.’

  What had pained her most was seeing Raka run after Ram Lal and swing from his arm. She had not even called to her Nani to come and see the langurs.

  Chapter 14

  WHEN A LETTER came to inform them that Raka’s mother Tara had had another breakdown and was in a nursing-home in Geneva and that Raka’s grandmother Asha, having seen another grandchild safely into the world, was flying to Switzerland to be with her, Nanda Kaul pursed her lips, folded up the blue sheets of paper with that distasteful sprawl across them, and hid them in her desk.

  If Raka had secrets from her, she intended to have secrets from her, too.

  But it gave her an increased sense of Raka’s dependence on her, Nanda Kaul. She was not sure if it was poignant, ironical or merely irritating that Raka herself remained totally unaware of her dependence, was indeed as independent and solitary as ever. Watching her wandering amongst the rocks and agaves of the ravine, tossing a horse chestnut rhythmically from hand to hand, Nanda Kaul wondered if she at all realized how solitary she was. She certainly never asked nor bothered to see if there were a letter for her, or news. Solitude never disturbed her. She was the only child Nanda Kaul had ever known who preferred to stand apart and go off and disappear to being loved, cared for and made the centre of attention. The children Nanda Kaul had known had wanted only to be such centres: Raka alone did not.

  She even saw herself to bed each night, as no other child she knew had done, silently, and slept alone. Nanda Kaul would sit up in her chair, very stiffly, turning the pages of her book – at present The Travels of Marco Polo – and pretending not to see when the child got up and went out and down the passage to her room. Habit would rear its head inside her, make her prepare to follow, tell her to tuck the child in, read her a story and lead her safely into sleep. But she did not go – she sank back and sat still. She would not go. She had not come to Carignano to enslave herself again. She had come to Carignano to be alone. Stubbornly, to be alone.

  Then she lay awake in her bed herself. It was not the demented jackals howling in the ravine that kept her awake. Nor the sudden clatter of pine cones on the roof or the soft hooting of the owls. It was the thought of Raka in the next room, here in her house.

  She had not been asked to Carignano. Yet here she was, fitted in quietly and unobtrusively as an uninvited mouse or cricket.

  Would she own it herself one day, Carignano? Nanda Kaul wondered, lashing her fingers together over her chest. Ought she to leave it to Raka? Certainly it belonged to no one else, had no meaning for anyone else. Raka alone understood Carignano, knew what Carignano stood for – she alone valued that, Nanda Kaul knew.

  She thought of making a will. The thought was distasteful. It meant asking the lawyer over and she wished no one to come.

  She wished no one to go either – certainly not Raka.

  Chapter 15

  A HIGH WIND whined through the pine trees all afternoon, lashing the branches and scattering the cones. Up on the knoll, Raka sat hugging her knees, watching the long-tailed rose-ringed parakeets that clung to the cones, biting out their sweet nuts, letting go with frantic shrieks as the wind knocked into them and tore away the cones, tossing them down the hill. Small white butterflies were being blown about like scraps of paper over the bleached grass, but the pairs would not be separated, they always found each other again and fluttered together, two by two.

  When Nanda Kaul came out into the garden after her afternoon nap, to call Raka to tea, the greyness along the horizon had curdled into white and grey lumps that the wind was driving lower and lower across the Simla Hills. They stood together, watching.

  ‘It’s a storm from the north. How strange, at this time of year. We have dust-storms from the south, in June, and the monsoon follows them. We get north winds later in the year usually,’ the old lady mused. The wind was whipping at her sari and cracking the silk folds against each other so she retreated to the veranda.

  Over their tea they watched the clouds drop from the sky, swollen and heavy with cold, like a great polar bear crouching, hurrying over the hill-tops, its white fur settling on rooftops, brushing the hillsides, enclosing the pines. Then it was upon them. With it, the rain.

  What rain! The house shook, the roof crackled, long raindrops slanted in. They rose, picked up the tea-tray and retreated to the drawing-room. It was dark here. A light was lit. The room took on the appearance of a shelter, warm, glowing. The downpour drummed on the taut tin roof, deafening. The coolness and wetness of the air refreshed, exhilarated – it was iced wine dashed in the face.

  Raka could not sit still. She went to the window to watch, rubbing the pane with her nose. Or wandered about the room, touching things. She normally touched nothing in the house.

  Nanda Kaul poured out another and another cup of tea, recklessly. She, too, felt a kind of restlessness, a release.

  ‘We could be shipwrecked,’ she said with a smile so unaccustomed that it was stiff and cracked. ‘Water, water everywhere. What a storm.’

  The wind flung the rain at the windowpane. Raka backed away, came and sat on a stool, put out a finger and stroked a little bronze Buddha that sat inscrutably smiling and stilly counting its beads on the tabletop.

  Nanda Kaul looked down at the scratched brown finger with a dirty nail stroking the smooth bronze head. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful piece?’ she said suddenly in a high, musical voice that did not sound as if it belonged to her. ‘It comes all the way from Tibet, you know. My father brought it.’

  Raka, her chin cupped in her hand, looked at the old lady in some surprise. No one had told her of her great-great-grandfather, or anyone else, ever having visited Tibet. But perhaps they had, and she had not listened. She was very selective about her listening. Now she did.

  ‘That was long, long ago at a time when hardly anyone had even thought of trying to go to Tibet. Only the government could arrange such an expedition, and then it was with a great deal of military aid. Traders went, of course, for the sake largely of musk, that precious scent that is so highly prized all over the world. They would bring back other things, too – turquoise, gold and silver, carved idols and brocades. But my father did not go either as an official or a trader. He went as an explorer, out of curiosity.’ She rubbed the tips of her long, fine fingers together, nervously, as she talked, and gazed, not at Raka, but at the small, quiet Buddha. ‘We had spent the summer in Kashmir, of course. At the end of it, in early autumn, he took us all with him as far as the Zoji-La Pass. It was a time when the orchards were all in their autumn colours – scarlet, crimson and rust. Leaving them below, and the little village
s with their carved wooden houses, we went up into the forests of walnuts and maples, sycamores and chestnuts. Then through the pine and birch belt to the bare rocks and ice above. It seemed we were travelling in paradise with him. But one morning, when we had camped beside a river of green ice water in a meadow that seemed untouched by a single footprint, and the sky seemed the purest, cleanest sky there’s ever been, he got onto his horse, Suleiman, dressed in fur and leather, and rode away over the pass, leaving us behind.’ Her voice dropped to a murmur that Raka had to strain to overhear. It seemed to have died away altogether for the only sound was of rain, dashing against the windowpane and drumming on the roof.

  Then her voice joined in the rain, in the rush. ‘He wore leather boots up to his knees as he rode away, and the two flaps of his fur caps showed like ears, for a long way. His dog, a black Bhotiya we called Demon, followed him. They all splashed through the icy river and disappeared on the rocks. We returned to Srinager.

  ‘He was away in Tibet – oh, for years, years. He went every step of the way on horseback, or on foot. The Mustagh Pass, the Baltoro glacier, the Aghil Pass . . . a terribly hard, dangerous route.’

  As the rain softened, her voice rose, unnaturally. ‘He travelled all over Tibet, had the strangest experiences. He spent nights in tiger-infested bamboo forests where the people used to burn green bamboos that would burst at the joints with such loud explosions as to frighten off wild animals for miles. He joined in their famous archery competitions – you know, there are legendary archers in Tibet who can shoot arrows for longer distances than anyone believes possible. He went hunting with them, sometimes with falcons and sometimes with packs of dogs that were as large as asses, for musk deer whose musk is sold to traders for silver. Can you believe it, agents come all the way from Paris in search of musk for their perfumeries, and have bought as much as a million ounces of silver worth at a time.

  ‘He saw them dredge gold from their rivers and salt from their salt springs. This is dried and shaped into cakes that are almost as precious as gold. In fact, forty or sixty cakes of salt could buy a saggio of gold. Then they love jewellery there – turquoise and coral, silver and gold. The women are loaded with them as the men with furs – ermine and sable.

  ‘In certain areas there were clove trees – rather like laurel, he said – and ginger and cassia. On river banks, he saw them hunt for crocodiles by planting spikes in the ground on which they walked so that they were cut up alive: their bile was used in medicine for mad dogs’ bite, carbuncles and pustules, and their flesh was eaten. Oh, he ate it too, and drank hot rice wine with them.

  ‘He bought Tibetan horses with clipped tails and rode them as they did – with stirrups long enough to stand up in so he could shoot his arrows from horseback. Horsemanship was most highly regarded all over Tibet, and then sports of the chase. Fortunately, he was good at both.

  ‘He went to Lhasa, saw the Potala. There he collected scrolls, bronzes, carpets –’ she touched the silent Buddha with a long finger –’ ‘and there he ran into the strangest people of all, lamas and sorcerers . . .’

  Raka, her chin cupped in her hand, devoured her words in silence, oblivious now of the rain.

  ‘Sorcerers with the strangest powers. They could do magic: they could make idols speak, turn day into night . . .’

  ‘How!’ burst out Raka, in exclamation rather than questioning.

  ‘How? Oh, how could I tell you that? Even he couldn’t explain it. But he told us he saw how dafkness could fall at midday, the sky turn ashen, the sun disappear, all birds and animals fall silent as the earth lay in a vast shadow till the sorcerer lifted his hand, spoke magic words and made it vanish.

  ‘Stranger still, they could cause tempests to rise out of a clear, sunlit day. Sudden winds would blow, strong enough to rip tents out by their pegs and break the horses’ tetherings, and lightning would flash and thunder roll. It was a sport to the sorcerers, nothing more, but the people would fall flat on their faces and pray, in fear. My father watched it all, you know, he told us about it . . .’

  ‘Did he write a book?’

  ‘A book?’ she laughed. ‘Oh no, he was not an academic person at all, not like my husband. He was an explorer, a discoverer. He travelled, hunted, collected exquisite things that he eventually brought home to us.’ She stared at the bare walls of Carignano. ‘It is a pity I have none, or only so few, of his belongings. We were a large family – they were scattered. One of my brothers went to Mauritius, you know, another to Ceylon. And my sisters were all great collectors – in their homes you would see tankhas, human hip-bone trumpets, carpets and furs. All I have kept is – this.’

  Both gazed at the Buddha, sole survivor of that splendour, looking as though the holocaust around him was less than the dust to him.

  Chapter 16

  THEN NANDA KAUL went on, raising her voice above the drumming of the rain on the roof and the booming and echoing of thunder in the hills that followed the rain like hunting horns.

  ‘The house I had in the plains was crowded, too crowded – my parents’ things, my husband’s things, his family’s. There were Persian carpets his father had bought in Iran when he was with the Ambassador there. There was glass his mother had bought in Venice. There were the Moghul miniatures my husband collected.’ She covered her eyes, as though dazzled, and bent her head.

  The thunder galloped across the roof, chasing the fleecy clouds and the lightening rain.

  ‘It was too much, you know, Raka. I am not a collector myself. I had to break free of it. So I came to Carignano without any of it.’

  ‘Left it behind?’

  ‘No, no, I gave up the house – it went to the next Vice-Chancellor. No, I distributed it all – to your grandmother, her sister and brothers. I haven’t even seen any of it for years,’ she wound up quickly, seeing Raka twist restlessly on her stool, her interest lost in this talk of belongings rather than happenings. Opening out her hands as though willingly releasing the child, she got up brusquely and went to the window. ‘There, it’s slowing down,’ she said, and Raka jumped up and joined her.

  ‘Look at the hydrangeas, beaten down by the rain,’ said Nanda Kaul, her voice natural once more, and rounded with relief and pleasure. ‘Look how the rain brings out their colour. They’re blue again.’

  In a little while they went out onto the veranda – on the way, Nanda Kaul picked up The Travels of Marco Polo and slid it back onto a bookshelf – and saw the last raindrops slanting down in the sudden, washed sunlight.

  The storm was over. The clouds disappeared: one wisp after another was folded up and whisked away into the blue, and a lovely evening emerged, lucid and peerless, the hills fresh and moist and wooded, blue and green like coils of paint out of a tube. Away in the north the rock-scarred snow range glittered. To the south many hundreds of miles of the plain were visible, streaked with streams and pitted with bright pools of rain.

  Going down into the garden, Nanda Kaul said, in a voice that was incredibly altered, that was hoarse with a true remembrance, ‘How funny, Raka, I just remembered how your mother, when she visited me here as a little girl, used to sing “Rainy days are lily days! Rainy days are lily days!”’

  ‘Lily days?’ said Raka, puzzled. ‘What did she mean?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ Nanda Kaul said, and her face twisted oddly at the thought of the blue letter folded up inside her desk. ‘Go now, go for your walk,’ she said, harshly.

  Chapter 17

  NEXT MORNING RAKA saw what her mother, as a child, had meant as soon as she woke up and looked out of the window. At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crêpe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother’s words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.

  At breakfast they met over a big milk-jug that Ram Lal had filled with these lilies and set on
the table. They were still slick with rain and brought in with them a sharp odour of moist earth. Vividly pink, their heads stood stiffly on the crimson stalks crammed into the milk-jug’s neck. Saffron pollen sprinkled the white tablecloth. A child might have drawn them, with pink and yellow wax crayons.

  Nibbling toast, Raka asked ‘Did my mother often come here when she was little?’

  ‘No,’ answered Nanda Kaul, slowly. ‘Not often. Your grandmother took her mostly to Simla or Mussoorie – livelier places, you see.’

  ‘Didn’t she like it here?’

  ‘Your mother? I think she did,’ Nanda Kaul said carefully, not liking to admit that she could scarcely tell one grandchild from the other: the incident of the lilies after rain was the sole one she could remember in connection with Raka’s mother. She tried to recall if Tara had gone out to collect lilies, like Ram Lal. She could not. She could only remember the child dashing out of the house after the rain, crying with delight.

  ‘A letter came,’ Raka said suddenly, cracking the piece of toast in two. ‘Was it from her?’

  ‘No,’ said the old lady, her face growing narrower, greyer. ‘It was from your grandmother.’

  ‘Did she say anything about Mama?’ Raka asked, cautiously casual.

  ‘She’s ill again,’ Nanda Kaul had to reply, briefly, as she pushed away her cup of coffee. ‘She’s in a nursing home again, in Geneva.’

  In the silence that followed, Nanda Kaul bitterly cursed her failure to comfort children, her total inability to place herself in another’s position and act accordingly. Fantasy and fairy tales had their place in life, she knew it so well. Why then did she tell the child the truth? Who wanted truth? Who could stand it? Nobody. Not even herself. So how could Raka?