Fire On the Mountain Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Anita Desai

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART I: Nanda Kaul at Carignano

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART II: Raka comes to Carignano

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART III: Ila Das leaves Carignano

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Nanda Kaul is now old. She has chosen to spend her last years alone among the pines and cicadas, high in the mountains in a quiet house, wanting only to be left in peace. However her solitude is broken with the arrival of her great-granddaughter, Raka. Through the long hot summer, hidden dependencies and old wounds are uncovered, until tragedy becomes inevitable.

  About the Author

  Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include adult novels, children’s books and short stories. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and of Girton College at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Writing Program at M.I.T. and divides her time between India, Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. In Custody was recently filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions.

  ALSO BY ANITA DESAI

  Cry, the Peacock

  Voices in the City

  Bye-Bye, Blackbird

  Where Shall We Go This Summer?

  Games at Twilight

  Clear Light of Day

  The Village by the Sea

  In Custody

  Baumbartner’s Bombay

  Journey to Ithaca

  Fasting, Feasting

  Diamond Dust

  Fire on the Mountain

  Anita Desai

  For Ruth and Jhab

  Quotations from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon translated by Ivan Morris 1967 by permission of the Oxford University Press.

  Frontispiece from a drawing by C. S. H. Jhabvala

  PART I

  Nanda Kaul at Carignano

  Chapter 1

  NANDA KAUL PAUSED under the pine trees to take in their scented sibilance and listen to the cicadas fiddling invisibly under the mesh of pine needles when she saw the postman slowly winding his way along the Upper Mall. She had not gone out to watch for him, did not want him to stop at Carignano, had no wish for letters. The sight of him, inexorably closing in with his swollen bag, rolled a fat ball of irritation into the cool cave of her day, blocking it stupidly: bags and letters, messages and demands, requests, promises and queries, she had wanted to be done with them all, at Carignano. She asked to be left to the pines and cicadas alone. She hoped he would not stop.

  Everything she wanted was here, at Carignano, in Kasauli. Here, on the ridge of the mountain, in this quiet house. It was the place, and the time of life, that she had wanted and prepared for all her life – as she realized on her first day at Carignano, with a great, cool flowering of relief – and at last she had it. She wanted no one and nothing else. Whatever else came, or happened here, would be an unwelcome intrusion and distraction.

  This she tried to convey to the plodding postman with a cold and piercing stare from the height of the ridge onto his honest bull back. Unfortunately he did not look up at her on the hill-top but stared stolidly down at the dust piling onto his shoes as he plodded on. A bullock man, an oafish ox, she thought bitterly, and averted her eyes. She stepped backwards into the garden and the wind suddenly billowed up and threw the pine branches about as though to curtain her. She was grey, tall and thin and her silk sari made a sweeping, shivering sound and she fancied she could merge with the pine trees and be mistaken for one. To be a tree, no more and no less, was all she was prepared to undertake.

  What pleased and satisfied her so, here at Carignano, was its barrenness. This was the chief virtue of all Kasauli of course – its starkness. It had rocks, it had pines. It had light and air. In every direction there was a sweeping view – to the north, of the mountains, to the south, of the plains. Occasionally an eagle swam through this clear unobstructed mass of light and air. That was all.

  And Carignano, her home on the ridge, had no more than that. Why should it? The sun shone on its white walls. Its windows were open – the ones facing north opened onto the blue waves of the Himalayas flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched upon the sky, while those that faced south looked down the plunging cliff to the plain stretching out, flat and sere, to the blurred horizon.

  Yes, there were some apricot trees close to the house. There were clumps of iris that had finished blooming. There was the kitchen with a wing of smoke lifting out of its chimney and a stack of wood outside its door. But these were incidental, almost unimportant. Nanda Kaul did not regard them very highly even if she stooped now to pick up a bright apricot from the short, dry grass. It had been squashed by its fall and she flung it away. Immediately, a bright hoopoe, seeing its flight and flash, struck down at it and tore at its bright flesh, then flew off with a lump in its beak. It had its nest in the eaves outside her bedroom window, she knew, but did not stay to watch the nestlings fed. It was a sight that did not fill her with delight. Their screams were shrill and could madden.

  Instead she turned and climbed up the knoll, the topmost height of her garden, where the wind was keenest and the view widest.

  But, on achieving it, she stopped to get her breath and glanced down just as the postman came out of a shadowed fold of the mountain onto the road below her gate. Still plodding on, dismally on, closer to Carignano. Her nostrils pinched and whitened with disapproval.

  He slowed down, drawing out her irritation, keeping behind a small schoolboy who had materialized out of the hillside and was dawdling school wards without much sense of purpose or direction for he would stop now to pick up a flat stone, now to shy it at a chipmunk, then climb halfway up a hill for a thorny snatchful of raspberries, then slide down on his bottom into the ditch and search for a golden beetle. The postman seemed unable to overtake him – hypnotized by the boy’s whimsical progress, he stopped and kept behind while Nanda Kaul, slit-eyed, burned on the knoll.

  Hurry, man, she mentally snapped – get it over with.

  Then, not being able to bear watching any more of such fantastic indecision, she turned around and gazed at her house instead, simple and white and shining on the bleached ridge. On the north side the wall was washed by the blue shadows of the low, dense apricot trees. On
the east wall, the sun glared, scoured and sharp. It seemed so exactly right as a house for her, it satisfied her heart completely. How could it ever have belonged to anyone else? What could it possibly have been like before Nanda Kaul came to it? She could not imagine.

  Chapter 2

  THE POSTMAN COULD imagine nothing but he knew a few things. He had known the house before it was Nanda Kaul’s.

  Not throughout its history, no, for it had been built in 1843, by a Colonel Macdougall, for his wife who could not bear the heat in the military cantonment at Ambala in the plains and hoped to save her ominously pale children by taking them to the mountains in the summer. So it says in his memoirs, which he had privately published and distributed but which are no longer available. He ended his account of his active life and the many military manoeuvres in which he had taken part with a description of this house he called Carignano and of how he and his wife Alice would sit by the window of an evening – she wrapped in a cashmere shawl for she was sickly and he with his pipe and tobacco – and gaze out across the valley to Sabathu where, amongst the white flecks of the gravestones in the military cemetery, their own seven children came to be buried, one by one.

  The house stood empty for some years after the colonel and his wife Alice were themselves carried over the hills to the cemetery in Sabathu and, one day, during a terrific thunderstorm, nearly came to an end. The entire roof – sheets of corrugated iron that Colonel Macdougall had had painted green but that had eventually faded to its natural rusty grey – was lifted off the square stone walls and hurled down the hill as far as Garkhal where its sharp edge sliced the head off a coolie who was trying to shelter beside a load of stacked wood on the roadside.

  Eventually the roof was replaced – but not the coolie’s head – and the house taken by the pastor of Kasauli’s one church. He found it sad that its exposed situation on the ridge made it impossible to plant the cottage garden he would have liked but he did plant three apricot trees where the house sheltered them from the worst gales, and they flourished in the stony soil and bore fruit. In his delight he bought a marble bird bath at a sale held at the Garden House whose owners, the aged sisters Abbott, died within a week of each other and whose goods were auctioned off, and placed it under the trees. It was his joy to watch the bul-buls and hoopoes come to feast on the apricots and flutter down into the bird bath and plunge and preen and scatter the water in spray.

  His joy would have been complete if his wife had made him apricot jam. But she would not. She hated him too much to cook jam for him. The longer their marriage the more she hated him and almost daily she made an attempt to murder him. But he survived. When she had her back turned he would pour out the tea she had brewed for him into a pot of geraniums beside his chair and silently watch them droop and die. He woke to see her the second before she plunged the kitchen knife into him and learnt to sleep with one eye open till he went blind – but that was after Mavis died: slipping on her way to the outdoor kitchen, she plunged down the cliff and split her head open on a rock, and so he lived on safely and died ‘peacefully’, as they say, in a bed in Lady Linlithgow’s sanatorium for the tubercular. His ghost was said to haunt the house, or at least his pipe did, for at a certain moment of the evening the veranda would be wafted over by the rich, ripe odour of invisible tobacco freshly kindled.

  The maiden lady who was the next occupant of the house, a Miss Appleby who had been governess in Lady Stuart’s household and been left enough money to buy Carignano and so avoid the English climate for the rest of her life, certainly smelt that tobacco. Being used to the finest cheroots in the fine Stuart household, it would make her jump up and stamp her foot and yell with rage. The worst was that the ghost himself never appeared or Miss Appleby would surely have flung her entire willow pattern dinner set at him: her temper was famous. She once not only thrashed the gardener for planting marigolds which she hated – again, it was the smell she could not bear – but climbed onto his back and whipped him around the garden, yelling ‘No marigolds, understand? No marigolds in my garden!’

  She was the first in the long line of maiden ladies who inhabited Carignano – all English of course for in those days all the houses along the Mall were owned by English people and Indians were not so much as allowed to walk on the Mall but were expected to keep to the footpaths on the hillsides and respectfully cast their eyes down when the English sahibs and memsahibs cantered by on their horses. There was a legend attached to each of these maiden ladies and the postman knew a few of them.

  There was a Miss Lawrence who had ridden across the Thar desert wearing a linen hat and veil and perhaps fancying it was the Sahara. The two Misses Hughes – known locally, and aptly, as the Misses Huges – had merely played bridge at the club and made apricot jam that was famous from Lawrence School at Sanawar to the military cantonment at Sabathu. They filled the house with chintz sofa-covers and great china ewers and basins on which pink and blue carnations mingled and that still minced and curtsied about in the dank and mildewed bathrooms of Carignano. They also planted a yellow rose creeper to clinib the railing that kept the house from rolling over the cliff down to the plains. All year this creeper was a furry grey mass, stirring and rustling as if it housed a colony of mice, but in April it would exhale a billowing cloud of pale yellow roses – an extravagance, a flamboyance, a largesse of roses, of creamy yellow, of the scent of damp tea-leaves. Every year Nanda Kaul stared at it in astonishment, wondering where all this lacy, frilly prettiness came from in her hard, stony garden, gale-blown and dour. It crept over the outdoor kitchen, over the woodhouse, and trailed upon every rail, gate and fence, sleeping and sighing all year but for that one month when it was re-born like a sweet, angelic infant in pastel frills and flounces. Then Nanda Kaul stopped to muse upon the Misses Hughes for a while.

  After them, Miss Jane Shrewsbury brewed a more notorious stuff out of the things she grew or dug out of this garden – she said it cured scorpion bites and claimed to have saved many a stung villager carried up to her house, howling in agony. She also poked a fork into her cook’s neck when he was choking on a mutton bone in the belief it would make an aperture for him to breathe through. Unfortunately he died and there was much scandal before Dr Hardy, the local medical lion, gave out that it was definitely the mutton bone that killed him and not the fork as suggested by the local scandal-mongers. That was in 1935 and two years later the lady herself was buried in the Kasauli graveyard under a tall cypress, and war broke out immediately thereafter.

  During those war years a vivacious Miss Weaver and a reputedly promiscuous Miss Polson fluttered about Carignano in flowered dresses and picture hats, entertaining the Tommies to tea and sherry parties. They organized jumble sales and Saturday night dances at the club just below Carignano and it was the gayest time ever known in Kasauli, the closest Kasauli ever came to being Simla. Memsahibs sent up for the summer and Tommies sent to recuperate from the battlefields jigged and romped with an unknown abandon.

  Suddenly it was all over. It was 1947. Maiden ladies were not thought to be safe here any more. Quickly, quickly, before the fateful declaration of independence, they were packed onto the last boats and shipped back to England – virginity intact, honour saved, natives kept at bay. A hefty sigh went up – of relief, of regret. A commonplace remark amongst them had been how like Kasauli was to English country towns of memory. Back in those English country towns, so unexpectedly and prematurely, they sighed and said no, these were nothing like Kasauli, let alone Simla. But there was nothing to be done, no going back. Carignano was up for sale and Nanda Kaul bought it. The little town went native.

  Chapter 3

  WHEN HE CAME to the chestnut tree at the foot of the hill to which was nailed a signboard with CARIGNANO written on it in brass letters the postman suddenly came out of hypnosis, lost patience and gave an angry yell.

  ‘Get on with you,’ he shouted, raising his hand in threat. ‘Past ten o’clock and you’re still footling along the road.’

/>   The boy gave a start and fled – instinctively, by reflex action. Having run part of the way downhill in surprise, he braked, stopped and, stooping quickly, picked a blade of grass, held it to his lips and gave a rude blast on it to show the postman what he thought of his sudden interference. Then, whistling pleasantly, he hopped erratically on, his large khaki shorts lolloping about his thin hips and his dusty hair flopping up and down on his small head.

  Coming up the hill from the direction of the bazaar was Ram Lal, the Carignano cook, carrying a market bag in which a marrow, a loaf of bread and a minced mass of mutton were squashed together in the heat. Ram Lal walked slowly, staring at his tennis shoes which were a size too large for him and sank into the white dust, making a chain of craters for idle dogs to investigate.

  Seeing him approach, the postman sank down on a bit of wall under the leafy chestnut tree. He would walk up the steep hill to the house with Ram Lal for company. He shifted the bag of letters on his shoulder. It was the first really hot day in May and he was sweating. He could have handed the single letter to Ram Lal to take up to the house, but he wiped his forehead with his finger and resolved not to do so, hot as he was. The postman had served in the army for fifteen years before he was discharged and entered the postal service, and he lived rigidly according to rule, as though there were still a sergeant-major behind him, shouting orders whenever he stopped, getting him to move on, punctually and obediently. The postman’s ideal was the donkey and he lived like one and sat and waited for Ram Lal to come flopping from crater to crater along the dusty road. At least he would have him for company up that last backbreaking bit to Carignano.

  Not that Ram Lal was much company. He was as stiff, almost, as the postman and every bit as dour. When he found the postman waiting for him in the shade of the chestnut tree, all he did was grunt and pause long enough to move the market bag from his right hand to his left.