Read Fire On the Mountain Online

Authors: Anita Desai

Fire On the Mountain (3 page)

BOOK: Fire On the Mountain
6.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘But there is one problem I can't help Tara with' (the letter ran on just as Nanda Kaul had known it would, and she tensed her knees under the silk folds of her sari) ‘and the problem is, of course, Raka. Now, Mama, you know I have to dash off to Bombay at the end of the month to help Vina with her confinement – you see how old grandmothers have to rush about these days, it's almost as bad as having another set of babies oneself – and Tara thought I could take Raka with me. But that is quite out of the question. Poor little Raka looks like a ghost and hasn't quite got over her typhoid yet. She is very weak and the heat and humidity of Bombay will do her no good. Everyone who sees her says
she should go to the hills to recuperate. So Tara and I have decided it will be best to send her to you for the summer. Later, when Tara is settled in Geneva and has set up house, she will send for Raka. At the moment it is not possible for the child to travel or live in an hotel. We can't think of a better way for her to recuperate than spend a quiet summer with you in Kasauli. And I know how happy it will make you to have your great-grandchild for company in that lonely house' (here Asha's writing, bloated with self-confidence, doubled in size and fairly swelled up out of the blue paper at Nanda Kaul). ‘Now Rakesh's brother has very kindly agreed to take Raka with him as far as Kalka – he's taking his family to Simla for a short holiday and Raka can travel with them as far as Kalka. There, he will put her in a taxi and send her up to Kasauli. It should be quite safe. She will be with you on . . .'

Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes as she went over the details of her great-grandchild's journey. Then she folded the blue sheets firmly, as if suppressing the hurry and rush of her daughter's excited plans, and slipped them back into the envelope. Placing it on her lap again, she looked out into the apricot trees, down the path to the gate, the cloudy hydrangeas, the pines scattering and hissing in the breeze, to the red roofs of Lawrence School on Sanawar's green hill-top. One long finger moved like a searching insect over the letter on her lap, moved involuntarily as she struggled to suppress her anger, her disappointment and her total loathing of her daughter's meddling, busybody ways, her granddaughter's abject helplessness, and her great-granddaughter's impending arrival here at Carignano.

She tried to divert her mind from these thoughts and concentrate on this well known and perpetually soothing scene. She tried to look on it as she had before the letter arrived, with pleasure and satisfaction. But she was too distracted now.

All she wanted was to be alone, to have Carignano to herself, in this period of her life when stillness and calm were all that she wished to entertain.

Chapter 5

GETTING UP AT
last, she went slowly round to the back of the house and leant on the wooden railing on which the yellow rose creeper had blossomed so youthfully last month but was now reduced to an exhausted mass of grey creaks and groans again. She gazed down the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves, to the Punjab plains – a silver haze in the summer heat – stretching out to a dim yellow horizon, and said Is it wrong? Have I not done enough and had enough? I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing? But there was no answer and of course she expected none.

Looking down, over all those years she had survived and borne, she saw them, not bare and shining as the plains below, but like the gorge, cluttered, choked and blackened with the heads of children and grandchildren, servants and guests, all restlessly surging, clamouring about her.

She thought of the veranda of their house in the small university town in Punjab, the Vice-Chancellor's house over which she had presided with such an air as to strike awe into visitors who came to call and leave them slightly gaping. She had had her cane chair there, too, and she had sat there, not still and emptily, but mending clothes, sewing on strings and buttons and letting out hems, at her feet a small charcoal brazier on which a pot of
kheer
bubbled, snipping threads and instructing the servant girl to stir, stir, don't
stop stirring or it'll burn, and then someone had to be called to hold the smallest child from falling into the bubbling pot and carry it away, screaming worse than if it were scalded. Into this din, a tonga had driven up and disgorged a flurry of guests in their visiting saris, all to flap their palm-leaf hand-fans as they sat in a ring about her – the wives and daughters of the lecturers and professors over whom her husband ruled. She thought of that hubbub and of how she had managed and how everyone had said, pretending to think she couldn't hear but really wanting her to, ‘Isn't she splendid? Isn't she like a queen? Really, Vice-Chancellor is lucky to have a wife who can run everything as she does,' and her eyes had flashed when she heard, like a pair of black blades, wanting to cut them, despising them, crawling grey bugs about her fastidious feet. That was the look no one had dared catch or return.

Looking down at her knuckles, two rows of yellow bones on the railing, she thought of her sons and daughters, of her confinements, some in great discomfort at home and others at the small filthy missionary-run hospital in the bazaar, and the different nurses and doctors who had wanted to help her but never could, and the slovenly, neurotic ayahs she had had to have because there was such a deal of washing and ironing to do and Mr Kaul had wanted her always in silk, at the head of the long rosewood table in the dining-room, entertaining his guests.

Mentally she stalked through the rooms of that house – his house, never hers – very carefully closing the wire-screen doors behind her to keep out the flies, looking sharply to see if the dark furniture, all rosewood, had been polished and the doors of the gigantic cupboards properly shut. She sniffed to make sure the cook was not smoking
biris
in the kitchen and to verify that all the metalware smelt freshly of Brasso.

She seemed to hear poignant shrieks from the canna beds
in the garden – a child had tumbled off the swing, another had been stung by a wasp, a third slapped by the fourth – and gone out on the veranda to see them come wailing up the steps with cut lips, bruised knees, broken teeth and tears, and bent over them with that still, ironic bow to duty that no one had noticed or defined.

Now, to bow again, to let that noose slip once more round her neck that she had thought was freed fully, finally. Now to have those wails and bawls shatter and rip her still house to pieces, to clutter the bare rooms and the cool tiles with the mountainous paraphernalia that each child seems to require or anyway demand. Now to converse again when it was silence she wished, to question and follow up and make sure of another's life and comfort and order, to involve oneself, to involve another.

It seemed hard, it seemed unfair, when all she wanted was the sound of the cicadas and the pines, the sight of this gorge plunging, blood-red, down to the silver plain.

An eagle swept over it, far below her, a thousand feet below, its wings outspread, gliding on currents of air without once moving its great muscular wings which remained in repose, in control. She had wished, it occurred to her, to imitate that eagle – gliding, with eyes closed.

Then a cuckoo called, quite close, here in her garden, very softly, very musically, but definitely calling – she recognized its domestic tone.

She gave that ironic bow again, very, very slightly, and went to the kitchen to see what Ram Lal had for her lunch and tell him about the great-grandchild's visit.

He blinked rather nervously, she thought.

Chapter 6

WHEN SHE WAS
back on her cane chair on the veranda, watching the sunlight spread over the tiles like a bright lacquer – too bright, too dry – the telephone rang. It rang so seldom, at Carignano, that its ringing sounded extraordinary, ominous.

Sitting bolt upright in her chair and trembling slightly, Nanda Kaul pressed the palms of her hands together and wondered whether to punish it by letting it ring itself to death or end her agony by answering it quickly. Its persistent shrilling was so painful that she was obliged to do the latter which seemed to her like a weakness, offending her still further.

She held the black ear-phone awkwardly, resenting its uncomfortable pressure on the small bones of her ear, picked surlily at the pages of the telephone directory and stared out of the window at a large hen scratching under the hydrangea. The look on her face was one no one had ever caught on it – she had allowed no one to, ever.

A burst of crackling and hissing, as of suddenly awakened geese, a brief silence, then a voice issued from it that made her gasp and shrivel, balling up her fingers tightly. The voice was not merely shrill, not merely strident, it was shrill and strident as no other voice ever was but Ila Das's.

Moving the ear-phone a few safe inches away from her ear, Nanda Kaul sighed resignedly. She knew this voice was Ila Das's tragedy in life and wondered, as always when she heard it, if Ila Das herself knew it. They had been together in school and college and from that time to this there had been
no hint that Ila Das might harbour such a devastating suspicion about herself.

The shock of that hideous voice made it impossible to follow what was being said for a minute or two.

‘Where are you speaking from, Ila?' she asked when there was a small pause in the piping, shrilling screech that was poor Ila's speech, like a long nail frantically scratching at a glass pane, or a small child gone berserk and prattling on and on in a voice no one could hear without cringing.

‘I'm lunching at the sanatorium with the matron, my dear,' screamed Ila Das, ‘and I thought, how nice, now I can make a few phone calls and get in touch with my friends. You know, I hardly ever get away from my village – it keeps me
sooo
busy, I never get a minute . . .' she babbled on and Nanda Kaul turned her head this way and that in an effort to escape. She watched the white hen drag out a worm inch by resisting inch from the ground till it snapped in two. She felt like the worm herself, she winced at its mutilation.

‘And when can I come and see you?' screeched Ila Das. ‘We haven't met for
ages
, dear, and I've so much to tell, I've been so busy, I must tell you all . . .'

‘Yes,' sighed Nanda Kaul into the phone, her voice as pale as her face, ‘but my great-granddaughter is coming to stay at the end of the week. I'm a bit busy myself, getting a room ready for her and so on . . .'

‘But, Nanda, how
marvellous
,' the voice shrilled, achieving a new pitch, and it was not impossible, thought Nanda Kaul, that Ila was jumping up and down on her two feet in excitement. ‘Your
great
-granddaughter did you say, Nanda? How marvellous, how – I must come and see her. At once! May I? May I, Nanda?'

Nanda Kaul's face seemed about to crack. It was cut from end to end with black furrows of desperation. She pressed her hand to her forehead and found it clammy. Her voice
dropped lower and lower as she dropped words like small, cold pebbles into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes, Ila, you must come – but wait a bit – when the child is settled, I'll let you know, I'll write you a note,' and quickly she put the phone down.

Still staring at the hen which was greedily gulping down bits of worm, she thought of her husband's face and the way he would plait his fingers across his stomach and slip heavy lids down over his eyes whenever Ila Das came, bobbing and bouncing, in button boots, her umbrella wildly swirling, to tea. The memory of his face, his expression, made her lips twist almost into a smile.

At the other end, Ila Das put down the sudden silence to nothing more unusual than an accidental cutting of the line, but she also wondered if there really had been a total lack of joy in Nanda Kaul's voice when she spoke of her great-grandchild's visit, if there really had been nothing in her voice beyond annoyance and apprehension, or if she had only imagined it. Fingering a yellowed curl, Ila Das hummed and wondered for a minute.

Chapter 7

THE SUNLIGHT THICKENED.
No longer lacquer, it turned to glue. Flies, too lazy for flight, were caught in its midday web and buzzed languorously, voluptuously, slowly unsticking their feet and crawling across the ceilings, the windowpanes, the varnished furniture. Inside, the flies. Outside, the cicadas. Everything hummed, shrilled, buzzed and fiddled till the strange rasping music seemed to materialize out of the air itself, or the heat.

Nanda Kaul lay on her bed, absolutely still, composing
her hands upon her chest, shutting her eyes to the brightness of the window, waiting for the first cool stir of breeze in the late afternoon to revive her. Till it came, she would lie still, still – she would be a charred tree trunk in the forest, a broken pillar of marble in the desert, a lizard on a stone wall. A tree trunk could not harbour irritation, nor a pillar annoyance. She would imitate death, like a lizard. No one would dare rouse her. Who would dare?

The parrots dared. A sudden quarrel broke out in the tree-tops, for a moment they all screamed and scolded together, then shot off like rockets, scattering pine nuts, disappearing into the light, disintegrating in the heat.

Then the stillness drew together, like glue drying in the sun, congealed, gathered weight, became lead. The heat had actual weight, she felt it on her chest, rising and falling with her slow breath. She groaned under it, very softly, and kept her eyes shut.

She had practised this stillness, this composure, for years, for an hour every afternoon: it was an art, not easily acquired. The most difficult had been those years in that busy house where doors were never shut, and feet flew, or tramped, without ceasing. She remembered how she had tried to shut out sound by shutting out light, how she had spent the sleepless hour making out the direction from which a shout came, or a burst of giggles, an ominous growling from the dogs, the spray of gravel under bicycle wheels on the drive, a contest of squirrels over the guavas in the orchard, the dry rattle of eucalyptus leaves in the sun, a drop, then spray and rush of water from a tap. All was subdued, but nothing was ever still.

BOOK: Fire On the Mountain
6.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Ten-Mile Trials by Elizabeth Gunn
Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece by Donald Kagan, Gregory F. Viggiano
Mr Forster's Fortune by Church, Lizzie
A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev
Spicy (Palate #1) by Wildwood, Octavia
The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston
Bayne by Buckley, Misa