Fire On the Mountain Read online

  Chapter 3

  ‘DARLING,’ SCRECHED ILA Das, ‘darling, what sort of a summer has it been? Why haven’t we met earlier, oftener? My, and we’re neighbours – you in your manorial hall and I in my village hut down below. I’ve so much to tell, Nanda – and you? And you?’

  But Nanda Kaul would not stand at the gate and perform a comedy for the benefit of the urchins – she knew where they hid, watching, behind the agaves and the bushes of Spanish broom. Giving them a withering look, she took Ila firmly by the elbow and turned her towards the house where Raka stood teetering on the edge of the veranda, curious to see the maker, the perpetrator of such unholy sounds.

  Suddenly Ila Das gave the crooked umbrella a merry swing – a swing that belonged to a park on a Sunday afternoon, when the band played, the merry-go-round revolved and flowers sprang to attention in their beds all around – and gave a little hop, then clutched Nanda Kaul’s arm in its long sleeve of silk that buttoned at the wrist with two opals, and said ‘Ooh, look, those lovely apricot trees. Did they bear a good crop, Nanda? Did you make that delicious jam? Mmm, when I think of it . . .’ a naughty pink tongue crept over the lips, licking, then departed with a giggle. ‘How lovely the house looks, Nanda. Dear Carignano. Now if you were to see my castle . . .’ and she went into peals of laughter that rang like a fire engine’s fatal bell so that two doves, amazed, shot out of the trees and vanished, and even Raka took a startled step backwards.

  Ila Das saw the movement of the white dress on the shadowy veranda. Clapping her hand over her mouth, she stood stockstill. ‘My,’ she breathed, pop-eyed. ‘I actually forgot. Only for a moment – but I actually forgot the child, Nanda, in my joy at seeing you again. How could I? How could I?’ Shaking her head so that steel pins showered from her small top-knot, she went on, ‘Nanda’s great-grandchild! Could anyone believe it – looking at you?’ She turned to look. ‘No,’ she decided, ‘positively not.’

  ‘But there she is, my great-grandchild,’ said Nanda Kaul drily, and called ‘Raka.’

  Raka put down the fly-swatter and came, dragging her feet and looking her most mosquito-like.

  Ila Das made a little tripping rush forwards and, reaching out, captured the hand that hung limply at the side and pumped it up and down with a vigour that Nanda Kaul remembered having seen in the person of her father, a little whiskered gentleman in a smoking jacket who used to insist on shaking hands with every little girl that came to Ila Das’s party, making them stumble backwards and titter. Here was Ila Das now, pumping limp Raka’s lifeless hand, crying little shrill cries that made her wince and attempt a retreat.

  ‘My dear, you and I are simply bound to be friends, you know, bound to be. I’ve known your great-grandmother for – oh, how many years is it now? Well, I’m not going to bore you by counting them – I’m not really sure I can count them –’ with a wicked wink magnified to dragonfly proportions by the bi-focal lenses over the eyes –‘but when one’s known anyone that long, you know, one is practically related. Oh, absolutely related, and I insist, I simply insist –’ the grasp on Raka’s shrinking fingers tightened –‘on being great grandaunt to you, my dear, dear little girl!’ Then she leant forward from the waist – she was only about the same height as Raka, scarcely taller – and pecked her rapidly on the cheek. There!’ she beamed and released Raka who fell back into the lilies, slightly gasping and shaking herself as if she felt her fur, or fuzz, rumpled by contact.

  Nanda Kaul stood watching, an ironic twist to her lips. She herself had never grasped Raka’s hand, nor kissed her – how had Ila Das dared? It had been presumptuous of her – Raka’s unconcealed shudder and sudden whitening of the lips showed how presumptuous it had been – and Nanda Kaul both felt for her outrage and exulted in it. At last someone had swung a net over that crafty little mosquito.

  In the background, Ram Lal hovered, waving away flies, putting down tea pot and milk jug, whisking away beaded nets to reveal the fruit of his day’s unusual labour. It was not every day they invited someone to tea. Ram Lal had almost forgotten how to go about it (and Nanda Kaul lifted an eyebrow in surprise at his idea of tea-party fare) but was quickly remembering it all now. It was with quite an air that he drew back the lowest chair for Ila Das and took away her umbrella, leaving them to the repast with one last look at Raka, a rather dubious one, as if he couldn’t be sure how that one would conduct herself.

  Raka quite clearly had no notion how to conduct herself at a party. She hung about. She hovered over her chair only to find Ila Das plopping down upon it with a kind of schoolboy abandon, a schoolboy way of throwing herself backwards so that her feet flew up in the air, and there they swung. Even Raka’s low chair was too high for those short legs. An inch or two above the ground those cracked old court shoes swung to and fro, happily, as if five years old and at a party once more.

  There was some fuss and bother about the cloth shoulder bag – it was taken off but where was it to be put? Ought it to be hung? At last a sigh went up and Ila Das let forth again with a sound that made the hoopoes on the bit of grass take off and flee the garden and the crickets draw in their heads and hide.

  Chapter 4

  ‘MUM-MUM-MUM,’ her lips mumbled together, then flapped open across the silky dentures. ‘Oh, how this all reminds me of home, Nanda. I mean childhood of course, when we had honey for tea and badminton on the lawn after.’

  Nanda Kaul lifted that elegant eyebrow again, together with the teapot that had been bought in the bazaar by Ram Lal and was thick, white and cheap. ‘I wonder what, in all of Carignano, could remind you of that, Ila,’ she said.

  ‘Ooh,’ burst Ila Das right into a cupful of hot tea so that it flew up in a spray. ‘Ooh, Nanda, the very air, the atmosphere about you brings it all back to me. Why, I see your lovely mother with that beautiful Kashmiri complexion of hers, and the red Brahmin thread looped through her ears, pouring out tea for us and all the little dogs at her feet – how they loved her. We all did. And then your father would come in from the orchard, holding one special peach he had plucked for her, and his pockets full of nuts for us, and he’d call us to him and say . . .’

  Raka wilted. She hung her arms between her knees and drooped her head on its thin stalk. It seemed the old ladies were going to play, all afternoon, that game of old age – that reconstructing, block by gilded block, of the castle of childhood, so ramshackle and precarious, and of stuffing it with that dolls’ house furniture, those impossibly gilded red velvet sofas and painted bedsteads, that always smelt of dust and mice and that she had never cared to play with. She very much wanted to eat her tea, for once to have something to eat at tea, but it seemed she would have to pay for it. She gazed at a small ant under the table, crawling off with a crystal of sugar loaded onto its back, and sighed.

  Ila Das heard her sigh and gave a quick bounce on her chair, turned her megaphone upon the child and shrieked ‘How you would have loved that house, my dear! It was a children’s paradise, you know, a veritable paradise. The minute you stepped in and closed the high gate behind you –’ she clapped her hands together with a wooden smack – ‘you felt yourself in fairyland. Why, you might be taken to pick green chillies in the garden to feed the parrot – very carefully, you know, it nipped horribly – or you might decide to ride your bicycles down the drive, or climb the fig tree and swing in its branches like a band of monkeys. Oh, anything, everything was permitted –’

  But still the child’s head lolled drearily and the wisps of hair dried to a stiff shade of brown, their tips ending in reddish sparks, swung on either side of the doleful face.

  ‘And particularly the piano!’ cried Ila Das, clasping her hands together just under her chin and looking from side to side as though she were peeping at mountains of presents on either side of her. ‘After the party games, and the big tea, the piano,’ and to Raka’s astonishment and Nanda Kaul’s horror, Ila Das flung back the lid of an imaginary piano with a flourish as of a magician whisking a silk handkerchief off the magic rab
bit, and then plunged into the imaginary keys with both hands splayed, at the same time pumping the imaginary pedals with her little feet and throwing back her head to bellow ‘Darling, I am growing o-o-old!’

  Nanda Kaul froze into a state of pale concrete. The entire weight of the overloaded past seemed to pour onto her like liquid cement that immediately set solid, incarcerating her in its stiff gloom. She sat with her lips tightly set and her eyes wide open, hardly able to believe in this raucous apparition now ripping into Honeysuckle Rose in a voice like an arrow that pierced Nanda Kaul’s temple and penetrated her jaws, setting her teeth tingling.

  The arrow withdrew, silence seeped in. But Ila Das’s fingers remained splayed across the keyboard, horribly knotted and yellowed, and her feet remained pressed on the pedals. She swayed her head gently on a stalk as though a breeze were rustling by, her button eyes acquired the glaze of old trinkets, and opening her mouth in a round O, she began to quaver

  ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon,

  How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair . . .’

  All the pine trees on the knoll shivered and cast their glistening needles in a hushed shower. The cicadas crept under the roasting stones and wept with little susurrating sounds. Pebbles suddenly released their hold on the hillside and went sliding down the ravine in a weeping rush.

  On the veranda Raka and her great-grandmother sat stockstill and gaping at Ila Das crooning over the imaginary piano with round glass tears popping out of her little eyes and bouncing across her cheeks and off the tip of her nose.

  ‘How can ye chant, ye little birds,

  And I sae weary fu’ o’ care!’

  Then she had to search in her cloth bag for a handkerchief. Whipping it out, she trumpeted into it – a horrendous sound for such a small, shrunken creature to make – and sat back in the low chair, wiping her eyes, hiccuping through the hankie, swinging her legs and smiling ‘Aren’t I awful – ooh, aren’t I just awful!’

  Straightening her back centimetre by regal centimetre, Nanda Kaul asked crisply ‘Milk or lemon, Ila?’

  Chapter 5

  STUFFING THE HANDKERCHIEF back into the bag and attacking a plate of hot buttered toast with rapacity, Ila Das threw Raka an arch look and said ‘Don’t mind me, dear – I’m like that when I get on to music. It played such a role in our lives, didn’t it, Nanda? I’m afraid it’s all out of fashion now – those sweet songs, those musical soirees at which the family would gather around the piano and sing. A tragedy, I feel, a tragedy,’ she proclaimed, and smashed a great piece of toast to bits with her dentures.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nanda Kaul, still very rigid and royal. ‘I never cared for music myself. It makes me fidget. I greatly prefer silence.’

  Ila Das preferred not to hear. She absolutely refused to hear. Sweeping another piece of toast off the platter and into her mouth, she went on through the cement-mixer action of crunching toast, ‘No such thing could happen in your house, of course, Nanda. That was a tradition you carried on. Oh, the Vice-Chancellor’s house –’ and she closed her eyes into little bright slits of pleasure – ‘that home away from home for me. All the old customs, the old ways, they got a new lease on life in the Vice-Chancellor’s house.’ Her eyes opened and blazed with admiration, the admiration that Nanda Kaul always struck from her like sparks. ‘The last of the gracious old homes, Nanda . . .’

  Raka, putting her plate back on the table, the snacks uneaten, gave a little agonized twist of despair, then sat still, limp, faded. It seemed there was no end to this tiresome teatime game of old ladies, no way out of its cobweb maze. Lately her great-grandmother had bored her with it, played it with such theatrical ardour as to make it as unreal as theatre. It made her ache for the empty house on the charred hill, the empty summer-stricken view of the plains below, the ravine with its snakes, bones and smoking kilns – all silent, and a forest fire to wipe it all away, leaving ashes and silence.

  ‘More tea?’ Nanda Kaul murmured to her under cover of Ila Das’s waterfall of speech.

  She shook her head and glanced at her great-grandmother. She saw tiredness like a grey web across that aged face. It seemed Nanda Kaul herself had tired of her game. She was leaving it to Ila Das.

  Ila Das didn’t mind. She didn’t notice.

  ‘Do you remember what a pest I was, Nanda? How gladly I’d leave my little room in the teachers’ hostel – ooh, the noise there, the noise! It still rings in my poor ears – and cycle down that beautiful avenue all lined with eucalyptus trees, to the Vice-Chancellor’s house. It was so delicious to know I had a welcome waiting for me there. Delicious to put away all those books, papers and corrections, just put them away and set off on my cycle to the house that was never, never shut. I could always be sure of finding you on the veranda – tea waiting in winter, lemonade in the summer – pets running free everywhere, the children and their friends playing cricket on the lawn, and all cares could be forgotten for an evening.

  ‘You know, it wasn’t easy at that time. To start teaching at the age of forty, Nanda dear, really wasn’t so easy. I couldn’t seem to control the girls. The teachers seemed – ooh, you know, of a different class, Nanda, do you understand me? And my eyes were giving way. And all the family troubles –’ a sigh burst from her like air from a slashed balloon and the little body crumpled on its chair. ‘But,’ she cried out – and a startled bul-bul exploded from the apricot tree – ‘there was always the Vice-Chancellor’s house, and good use I made of it, didn’t I?

  ‘Ooh,’ she quavered, swivelling about to focus on that sullen, unresponsive child, hoping to liven her up for surely the young should be lively; wasn’t Ila Das still lively – in spite of everything, still lively? ‘You wouldn’t believe it, my dear, but I was quite capable of running out on the lawn and taking a cricket bat out of the boys’ hands and playing myself.’ She beamed over the memory at Raka as if over a lollipop. Raka shuddered at its stickiness. ‘In winter, we’d stay indoors and there’d be music. All the girls studied music, your grandmother amongst them,’ she twinkled at Raka. ‘The piano, the flute, the veena, the sitar – and so many voices singing, in so many languages. Those are memories to treasure,’ she hummed as if it were a line from a song – and perhaps it was. ‘And your great-grandmother always a picture. No matter how simple the occasion, she was always in silk, always in pearls and emeralds. I wish you knew what a picture she was, dear.’

  Nanda Kaul sat back in her upright chair and gazed straight at her, in silence. She was not going to help Ila Das play this game. No, it was too shameful. She had decided that it was shameful and that, in any case, it had no appeal for Raka, the child who never played games.

  ‘But the summers were best,’ Ila Das burbled on. ‘In spite of the heat and dust, summers were best. Those enormous melons that grew in your garden – the children would split them and eat them on the veranda steps. The lichee trees would be loaded, oh loaded, with bunches of ripe pink fruit. And the jamun tree – mum, mum,’ she gobbled. ‘And after the heat of the day, the lovely evenings out on the freshly watered lawn.

  ‘Oh, and the badminton court. What evenings we spent on the badminton court. How all the teachers waited for an invitation to play badminton at the Vice-Chancellor’s house. He used to organize matches, you know – your great-grandfather, my dear. We’d play mixed doubles. I remember playing with one of your great-uncles, my dear, against the Vice-Chancellor and Miss David. Miss David was an ace player – ooh, she was good – and they beat us hollow . . .’

  But the line was cut suddenly as a thread is cut – snip – completely. She was silent.

  Raka looked up, hardly able to believe her ears. She saw her great-grandmother carefully build a cage with her long fingers, a cage of white bones, cracking apart. She saw Ila Das sitting silent, her mouth hanging open foolishly – speech had been snatched out of it and whisked away. What sharp, swift scissors had descended on that endless tangle of her game? The badminton court – mixed doubles – Miss David – and h
ere were Ila Das and Nanda Kaul, both beaten, silent.

  Chapter 6

  NOW NANDA KAUL rose and showed the worth of her background, her upbringing. Now was the moment to rise and put all in its place, like the goddess of a naughty land returned to deal with chaos. She had allowed things to get out of hand, to skip and dance and posture too vainly, too grotesquely. Now was the time to silence it, to smooth it away and show her character – how it was made, what made it, how it had lasted. For it had lasted.

  ‘Raka, will you call Ram Lal, please, to take away the tea. The flies are a nuisance,’ she said in a clear, crisp tone like the heart of a plant, the icy white centre of it. ‘And you must tell me, Ila, what you have been doing with yourself. How is your village work getting on?’

  As Raka jumped and ran, stumbling with relief and fear at being caught again, the two women turned to each other with suffering, sobered faces, and when Ila Das spoke again, the acid of truth ran in it, giving her voice a bitter, burnt edge.

  Now the pink lichees, the badminton games and piano tunes fled from Ila Das’s side, leaving behind a shrivelled, shaking thing. Little by little, all those sweetnesses, those softnesses died or departed, leaving her every minute drier, dustier and more desperate.

  Nanda Kaul knew: she had followed this depairing progress from not too great a distance. So Ila Das could turn to her with a harsh honesty that was as real as her memory-making had been, and Nanda Kaul knew how real each was in its turn, how they came together, one bitter, corroded edge joining the other, making up this wretched whole.