Fire On the Mountain Read online

  ‘Look, from here you have a perfect view of the plains on a clear day. If it weren’t for the dust, you could see all the way to Ambala.

  ‘Up on the hill there, Raka, you will see the burnt black shell of a house. It was burnt down in a terrible forest fire one summer when there wasn’t a drop of water to fight it with. An old lady lived there alone and they say she went mad and was put away. Poor woman, I wonder if she would not have preferred to die in the fire.’ The walking-stick tapped the pebbles about her feet before she lifted it and waved it again. ‘It looks dreadful, as if it is about to fall apart, but one shower of rain will bring out hundreds of flowers – lilies, dahlias – that she must have planted. You’ll see them one day.

  ‘D’you see that pleasant cottage there? The doctors of the Pasteur Institute have taken it over, several of them. A pity, it used to be so beautifully kept at one time, and look at it now. It still has a tennis court but it’s used as a chicken run now. And the Garden House across the road – you can scarcely believe it now, but it once had the most beautiful garden in Kasauli. Now used as an army billet. The army’s everywhere.

  ‘I see they’re up that hill, too. What is that peculiar instrument on top? Frightening. Like an atomic reactor. Or some such scientific monstrosity. And so much barbed wire around. A shame.’

  They walked silently along the sere, silent hillsides on which boulders seemed to have been arrested in downward motion, precariously, and nothing grew on the pine-needle-spread earth but a few tangles of wild raspberries, hairy with thorn, and giant agaves in curious contorted shapes. Tourists and passers-by often scratched their names into the succulent blades and there they remained – names and dates, incongruous and obtrusive as the barbed wire.

  ‘Too many tourists. Too much army. How they are ruining this – this quiet place,’ Nanda Kaul said bitterly, her breath coming faster and her step fumbling. ‘It really is – is saddening. One would have liked to keep it as it was, a – a haven, you know. When I first came here, I used to think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem – do you know it? I used to be reminded of it constantly:

  ‘I have desired to go

  Where springs not fail,

  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

  And a few lilies blow.

  ‘And I have asked to be

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

  And out of the swing of the sea.’

  ‘Of course it was not written about a place, any place, but about a vocation – a nun’s vocation, as it happens – but, all the same, it seemed to apply.’

  Her voice strengthened on this last line, grew brisk and lightened. Suddenly she laughed aloud. ‘Look, Raka,’ she cried, and did not need to point with her stick for the turbulence in a grove of chestnut trees was suddenly and vividly visible and audible. The swinging and leaping of branches, the crashing through leaves and showering of horse chestnuts showed clearly enough the source of her amusement – a wild horde of black-faced langurs, those fierce, lithe panthers of the monkey world, more feline than simian. Raka, too, threw her head back on her shoulders and laughed with her great-grandmother at the face an old langur made at them from the top of the tree, baring its teeth and gibbering, then jumping up and down on its bottom in anger and derision. Both admired with swift-flowing extravagance the still, silvery calm of a mother langur that sat stretching its long legs out along a branch and cradling an infant with a crumpled face in its elegant arm. The infant looked strangely aged, as if by worries and anxieties beyond its age, its little face black and wrinkled, its tear-drop eyes glistening with sadness. Others were clowns and bounced and swung with boastful grace, playing Tarzan in the trees. Clapping their hands to their mouths, they hallooed like cinema heroes of the wilds, then leapt all in a bunch onto the tin roof of a half-ruined house with such a bang and a bombardment that children ran out of the house and servants from the kitchen, all shouting, all shooing till the herd took to its heels and vanished over the lip of the hill.

  Raka and Nanda Kaul went downhill, laughing, at a quicker pace – refreshed.

  ‘That old house is used as a summer holiday home for Delhi schoolchildren, you know,’ Raka was sorry to hear her great-grandmother resume the guided tour patter. ‘You wouldn’t think it a safe place for children, would you? There are hardly any windowpanes left and the wood’s rotten. But they do seem to have a happy time, I must say. I see them going for walks and picnics, even to church on Sundays, with their Indian Christian matron.

  ‘Would you like to go to school in Kasauli, Raka? Perhaps as a boarder at Sanawar?’

  Raka was so shocked, she could only shake her head dumbly, hating this craftiness, rejecting outright the very thought of school, of hostels, of discipline, order and obedience.

  Quickening her pace, she outstripped Nanda Kaul and went downhill at a run, looking down at her toes pushed beyond the scuffed lip of her sandals, pressing into the dust and the dry pine-needles, painfully.

  At the bottom of the hill, she stopped and waited for her great-grandmother to catch up which she did in a little while – panting, dusty and not a little ruffled by the child’s abrupt and total rejection of what had been an invitation – a unique invitation, did she only know it – to stay on in these hills, with Nanda Kaul, and make them her home.

  Chapter 8

  THEY HAD COME to a small grove of old, twisted, flowerless crêpe myrtles at the foot of Monkey Point. The municipal corporation had built some benches and some concrete shelters, like bus-stands, under the trees. It had the shabby, desolate air of a deserted bus-stop. Nevertheless, Nanda Kaul sank down onto one of the benches. Above them rose the jagged peak of Monkey Point, very high above them in the lucid radiance of the evening sky.

  ‘I really don’t think I can manage that climb, Raka,’ she said, and her voice trembled a little with fatigue. ‘If you feel like it, do go up on your own and I’ll wait for you and watch.’

  So she sat, resting, and watched with both alarm and admiration as Raka went hurtling away, grabbing at rocks and tufts of bleached grass, scrambling up the almost sheer face of the hill, doubled up with her knees often just under her chin, then stretched out as far as they would go, then suddenly popping up onto a higher ledge. Unseeing, she almost ran into a goat, then a kid, then a whole herd that came springing down, leapt over her back and flew like birds, landing at Nanda Kaul’s feet and tripping nimbly homewards, the small goatsherd casually whistling and sauntering after them.

  In no time at all, it seemed, the child had reached the top of the hill and stood bracing herself against the wind as it tried to lift her and blow her away.

  She had not wanted to come here with her great-grandmother. She had planned to come to Monkey Point alone, on a solitary afternoon expedition, without anyone’s knowing. Secrecy was to have been the essence of it, she relished it so – Raka had all the jealous, guarded instincts of an explorer, a discoverer, she hated her great-grandmother intently watching her ascent, clenching her hands with tension when the goats nearly knocked her off her feet or when she slipped on the loose pebbles. As she scrambled up, her resentment at the mention of boarding-school at Sanawar was still inside her chest, tight as a stone. But now it blew away with the wind, leaving her light and exhilarated, airborne as a seed or a blade of grass.

  The wind swung her about and threatened to throw her onto her knees. But she held her hair down about her ears and held onto a rock with her toes, hearing it whip at her dress, and was sure that if she let go, if she spread out her arms and rose on her toes, she would fly, fly off the hill-top and down, down on currents of air, like the eagles that circled slowly, regally below her.

  She was higher than the eagles, higher than Kasauli and Sanawar and all the other hills: they were as low and soft as banks of golden moss far below. To the south the plain stretched endlessly out and away, no longer hot and livid under the summer sun but calm and still and cat-grey in the dusk, raked by the s
hining flow of Punjab’s five rivers and Chandigarh’s lake set in its breast like a dull silver brooch – not set so much as floating a little above the flatness, suspended in the dusk. There was a breadth of space, a vast, sweeping depth to the scene. Raka thought it like an ancient scroll unrolled at her feet for her to survey.

  To the north, the soft, downy hills flowed, wave upon wave, gold and blue and violet and indigo, like the sea. The sound of the wind rushing up through the pines and then receding was the sound of the sea.

  I’m shipwrecked, Raka exulted, I’m shipwrecked and alone. She clung to a rock – my boat, alone in my boat on the sea, she sang.

  So she stood, rocking, her feet placed wide-apart, her ear-drums thrumming with the roar of the waves and the wind, till she began to get an ear-ache, grew aware of the darkness gathering, remembered the old lady waiting on the bench below, and began to make her way reluctantly downhill, finding it simplest just to sit down and slide roughly down on her bottom.

  It was quite dark at the foot of the hill, in the crêpe myrtle grove. The old lady rose to meet Raka in agitation. When she saw the child was whole, her bones intact, she made some scolding sounds in relief, and they walked homewards in a great silence which was rent now and then by the clear, ringing call of some invisible bird that defied night.

  When they reached Carignano the lights were on. The hills were black waves in the night, with the lights of the villages and towns so many lighted ships out at sea.

  A nightjar began to cackle. Ram Lal came hurrying to open the gate for them.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ cried Raka, running forwards.

  Chapter 9

  THE WALK TO Monkey Point had not been a success after all for Nanda Kaul did not suggest another. Over tea, she would open a book and read – she had three or four on a table at her side, always: Gogol’s Dead Souls, Waley’s translation of Chinese poems, a book on Indian birds by Salim Ali – and when Raka rose and furtively slipped off the veranda by herself, she would turn a leaf and frown with greater concentration.

  As soon as Raka was out of sight, however, she would put down her book and hurry up the knoll from where she could survey a great length of the Upper Mall as it snaked around the hills. Here ladies and gentlemen on holiday perambulated sedately and their children took turns at riding Kasauli’s two ponies, Rani and Rolo, almost equally sedately.

  But Raka rarely walked on the Mall, Upper or Lower. As soon as she could do so without being seen, she slipped under the railing that kept pedestrians and horses from plunging off the road and down the precipice, and disappeared down the paths that were barely marked on the crisp grass and pine-needles and that only goats and villagers ever used. Keeping to these paths, she knew a Kasauli that neither summer visitors nor upright citizens of the town ever knew. She did not shirk the rubbish chutes or the servants’ latrines constructed of tin amongst the nettles. She visited villages down in the valleys and saw the wheat being threshed by mechanically treading cattle, and corn and pumpkins being dried on rooftops. The village women and children glanced at her but never spoke. Once she saw the red fur of a fox momentarily lit by a trick of sunlight before it disappeared between immense rocks. Once she heard a shot and then saw a boy saunter past with a gun over his shoulder and a pheasant dangling from his hand. She averted her eyes from him and plunged off the path into the raspberries and broom. Mostly she saw no one. She had the gift of avoiding what she regarded as dispensable.

  Sensing this, Nanda Kaul was perturbed. She could not tell why she wanted to bring Raka out into the open. It was not how she herself chose to live. She did not really wish to impose herself, or her ways, on Raka. Yet she could not leave her alone.

  Raka’s genius. Raka’s daemon. It disturbed.

  At tea, she asked Raka, ‘Why don’t you go down to the club sometimes?’

  Raka was as alarmed by this as by the suggestion that she go to boarding-school at Sanawar.

  ‘Didn’t your mother and father take you to clubs, to parties?’ Nanda Kaul probed, uncharacteristically, and her very nose seemed to stretch longer as she leaned forward.

  Raka shook her head, untruthfully. Her father had made attempts, sporadically, ‘to bring her out of her shell’ as he called it, by taking her to tea at a restaurant and insisting, in Madrid, that her mother invite children to tea on her birthday. These had been painful occasions – as painful for Raka as for her broken, twittering mother. They had not been repeated. Her long illness in Delhi and her weak, exhausted state thereafter had absolved her of any further need to ‘socialize’. It had seemed months that she had been in bed, her hair shorn down to the scalp, feeling the stale air stirred by the revolving blades of the electric fan, her eyes shut while her mother read to her in a sepulchral voice that never changed its pitch and never disturbed her out of her deep, secret thoughts. One might have thought she still moved about in a kind of dream, set to the sound of cicadas and the wind in the pines instead of her mother’s martyred voice and the revolving electric fan.

  Looking down at her foot where a mosquito had raised a small red bump on the little toe, Raka said in a stifled voice, ‘But you never go to the club either, Nani.’

  Nanda Kaul’s foot gave an astonished little jerk inside the grey silk tent of her sari. Then she gave a snort of laughter. Bending down so that her face was at a level with the hunched child’s and her nose tapered softly-forwards, she said ‘Raka, you really are a great-grandchild of mine, aren’t you? You are more like me than any of my children or grandchildren. You are exactly like me, Raka.’

  But Raka retreated pell-mell from this outspoken advance. It was too blatant, too obvious for her who loved secrecy above all. Her small face blanched and she pinched her lips together in distaste.

  Nanda Kaul was equally shocked. Quickly straightening her back, she sat back in her chair, stiffly. By the manner in which she tensed herself and drew strict lines down her face and folded her hands in her lap stilly, it was clear she was trying to repair her authority, her composure, her distance in age.

  They averted their faces from each other.

  Nanda Kaul surveyed the woollen hills. Raka stared up at the hoopoe’s nest in the eaves, concealed from sight and giving itself away only by the whirring and whistling of the nestlings whenever the mother arrived with a mouthful for them. They were silent except when she arrived and stirred them up into a clamour. She spent her day flying back and forth, catching insects for them, her beak snapping upon dragonflies and moths with sharp clicks. Till lately there had been ripe apricots at her doorstep and there was hardly an apricot Raka picked up from the grass that didn’t bear the mark of her long beak. Raka had come out into the wet grass early in the mornings to eat apricots before breakfast and the hoopoe had watched jealously from the trees as she wandered about barefoot, looking for the sweetest and the ripest. But there were few left now that Ram Lal had cooked jam and stored it in great jars of honey-coloured conserve on the pantry shelves, and the hoopoe had had to make up the loss by catching moths in mid-air and dragging worms out of the earth. Sometimes the father bird helped. Sometimes they fought tremendous battles with the cocky little crested bul-buls, yellow-bibbed, yellow-bottomed and outrageously cheeky. Now that Raka and her great-grandmother were sitting on the veranda, looking for a way to break apart and move away, the hoopoes sat disconsolately in the apricot tree, looking baffled and distressed.

  At last Raka burst out ‘If we don’t go away, they won’t be able to feed their babies.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Nanda Kaul, looking around with suspicion.

  ‘The hoopoes over there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nanda Kaul. ‘I wondered who you meant. Babies – hmm,’ her voice was disdainful. ‘Well, run along, you’ll be wanting your evening walk.’

  Chapter 10

  SHE DID GO to the club after all, found herself there to her own surprise. Not in the afternoon, with the little shrill girls from New Delhi in their frilly frocks and new shoes, not to have lemonade or w
atch, giggling, the billiard players in the back room, but in the dark of the night when the big party of the summer season was held.

  Ram Lal had talked to her about it.

  ‘Of course it is not like the old days any more,’ he said, puffing at his biri beside the quiet hamam, ‘when the Angrez Sahibs and Memsahibs had dances, but the army is something like them. They also have the band come from the cantonment for the evening, and drink whisky and dance.’

  ‘How is it different then?’ Raka asked, squatting on her heels beside him and tugging at a square of quartz embedded in the mosaic of less attractive pebbles in the ground. She continued the conversation only because Ram Lal had nothing more interesting to say that evening.

  ‘They used to roast whole sheep over a spit,’ Ram Lal said, widening his rheumy eyes so that they flared red. ‘Whole sheep. And hundreds of bottles of spirits were drunk, hundreds.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now,’ Ram Lal contemptuously spat out, ‘now it is nothing like that.’ But he could not say in what way times had fallen, how they had worsened or lessened. He really had no intercourse with the club cooks and too little information. He could only indicate it by scornful gestures and the spitting out of shreds of tobacco.

  So, when at night she heard the band strike up on the other side of the knoll, curiosity made her put on a sweater over her pyjamas and climb out of the window. She tumbled quietly out into the darkness, very thick in Kasauli where lights were few and widely separated, and silent now that the breeze had dropped, except for the grieving wails of the jackals down in the ravine and the equally lugubrious hammer and howl of the band at which the nightjars laughed, harshly and raucously, out of the trees and bushes of the night.

  It was too dark to see but Raka could feel her way up the knoll at speed and then she slid down the hillside almost onto the kitchen roof that thrummed and bellowed with noise, activity and the heat from many fires and many ill-tempered cooks.