Fire On the Mountain (10 page)

Occasionally a great cloud of illuminated smoke rose into the air and burst. Lower down the hill were only pinpricks, fireflies of light, constantly moving, gathering, dispersing.

Holding her ear to the cold pane closely, she thought she heard the cries of animals and birds burning in that fire. But when she removed her ear from the pane, she heard only the crepitation of silence. Once, the soft hooting of an owl.

The disturbed sky, livid with firelight, kept her awake: it was too light. If she fell asleep, she felt the fire might creep
up and catch her unawares. It had the quality of a dream – disaster, dream-spectres that follow one, trap one.

But she went back and forth so often that eventually she tired and fell onto the sofa and was found there, asleep in her nightie, by Ram Lal next morning.

She woke to find the hills blotted out by smoke and summer haze. The fire was blotted out, too. The north wind brought with it a cindery smell and a layer of ashes that it deposited on Kasauli like a grey pelt. Raka went about thoughtfully drawing lines in it with her finger.

ONE WOULD HAVE
thought Raka searched Ram Lal out. Certainly she neither followed nor waited for anyone else, thought Nanda Kaul, sourly, as she watched from the veranda while Raka hung about the kitchen for Ram Lal to finish his work there and come out to light the
hamam
for her bath. She noticed how, every evening – briefly, to be sure – the two would sit together by the
hamam
in the coppery light of those June evenings. Sitting together on their heels, watching the eagles soar and glide soundlessly in the gorge and out over the plains, they talked dreamily. Ram Lal could arouse Raka's interest and hold it as Nanda Kaul could not. Interest her, but at the same time give her reassurance of safety. Nanda Kaul knew that a child needed to have the two elements combined, but she could not, or would not, be bothered to try, while Ram Lal did it naturally and comfortably, for Raka. The low pitch of their voices conveyed the comfort in these conversations that she could not hear, only observe.

‘I saw you go down there last night,' Ram Lal said, drawing at his
biri
through his fist. ‘That was bad.'

‘Why? The moon was shining, I could see so clearly.'

‘But you could be seen too.'

‘There was no one to see.'

Ram Lal shook his head, knowingly. ‘The
churails
were there. They see you.'

‘Who?'

‘
Churails
. Didn't you know they lived in that gorge there? They always live amongst the dead. They live off their flesh. They feast on the corpses the Institute doctors throw down after they have cut up the mad dogs and boiled their brains. If at night you hear sudden sounds, like shots, it is the
churails
cracking bones.'

Raka's eyes grew black hoops around them. She put one hand on his knee and asked ‘What are they like?'

‘Very big. Bigger than any man. Dressed in black so they can't be seen in the dark. Only their red eyes glow like coals. And their feet are turned backwards. That is the surest way to tell a
churail
– its feet are turned backwards.'

‘But how will I see their feet in the dark?'

Now Ram Lal's eyes grew great black hoops. ‘Don't,' he said. ‘Don't look down at their feet. If you see red eyes glowing in the dark, just turn and run. I know a woman who turned to stone because she saw a
churail
's feet. She was walking down to Garkhal at twelve o'clock on a moonlit night, and met a
churail
. I can show you the stone at the side of the road if you come with me.'

‘Will you? Will you?' Raka cried.

She was answered by a sudden clamour as if the
churails
had arrived in one swoop, black-bat females, to avenge themselves – whooping and whistling, tearing through the air and thundering across the roof: a band of
langurs
had arrived. Pierrots in black and white, clowns and bandits at once – bawdy, raucous and marauding. Suddenly every tree
was full of them – their whip tails and jewel eyes, their mask faces and spider arms, black and grey and silver. They swung from the branches of the pines to the apricots and from there to the roof and sprinted across the corrugated iron sheets. They ran nimble-footed along the railing, dived through windows and shot through doors. Even as Ram Lal and Raka ran into their midst, yelling and waving their arms, they tore leaves off the apricot trees in search of fruit, plucked hydrangeas to bits, dashed into the kitchen and grabbed at potatoes, baring their teeth and gibbering at whoever came in the way. Robbers, bandits, they never forgot to be clowns and stun their spectators with acrobatics out of a jungle dream.

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
.

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.

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 villages 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.