Fire On the Mountain (11 page)

‘He was away in Tibet – oh, for years, years. He went every step of the way on horseback, or on foot. The Mustagh Pass, the Baltoro glacier, the Aghil Pass . . . a terribly hard, dangerous route.'

As the rain softened, her voice rose, unnaturally. ‘He travelled all over Tibet, had the strangest experiences. He spent nights in tiger-infested bamboo forests where the
people used to burn green bamboos that would burst at the joints with such loud explosions as to frighten off wild animals for miles. He joined in their famous archery competitions – you know, there are legendary archers in Tibet who can shoot arrows for longer distances than anyone believes possible. He went hunting with them, sometimes with falcons and sometimes with packs of dogs that were as large as asses, for musk deer whose musk is sold to traders for silver. Can you believe it, agents come all the way from Paris in search of musk for their perfumeries, and have bought as much as a million ounces of silver worth at a time.

‘He saw them dredge gold from their rivers and salt from their salt springs. This is dried and shaped into cakes that are almost as precious as gold. In fact, forty or sixty cakes of salt could buy a saggio of gold. Then they love jewellery there – turquoise and coral, silver and gold. The women are loaded with them as the men with furs – ermine and sable.

‘In certain areas there were clove trees – rather like laurel, he said – and ginger and cassia. On river banks, he saw them hunt for crocodiles by planting spikes in the ground on which they walked so that they were cut up alive: their bile was used in medicine for mad dogs' bite, carbuncles and pustules, and their flesh was eaten. Oh, he ate it too, and drank hot rice wine with them.

‘He bought Tibetan horses with clipped tails and rode them as they did – with stirrups long enough to stand up in so he could shoot his arrows from horseback. Horsemanship was most highly regarded all over Tibet, and then sports of the chase. Fortunately, he was good at both.

‘He went to Lhasa, saw the Potala. There he collected scrolls, bronzes, carpets –' she touched the silent Buddha with a long finger –' ‘and there he ran into the strangest people of all, lamas and sorcerers . . .'

Raka, her chin cupped in her hand, devoured her words in silence, oblivious now of the rain.

‘Sorcerers with the strangest powers. They could do magic: they could make idols speak, turn day into night . . .'

‘How!' burst out Raka, in exclamation rather than questioning.

‘How? Oh, how could I tell you that? Even he couldn't explain it. But he told us he saw how dafkness could fall at midday, the sky turn ashen, the sun disappear, all birds and animals fall silent as the earth lay in a vast shadow till the sorcerer lifted his hand, spoke magic words and made it vanish.

‘Stranger still, they could cause tempests to rise out of a clear, sunlit day. Sudden winds would blow, strong enough to rip tents out by their pegs and break the horses' tetherings, and lightning would flash and thunder roll. It was a sport to the sorcerers, nothing more, but the people would fall flat on their faces and pray, in fear. My father watched it all, you know, he told us about it . . .'

‘Did he write a book?'

‘A book?' she laughed. ‘Oh no, he was not an academic person at all, not like my husband. He was an explorer, a discoverer. He travelled, hunted, collected exquisite things that he eventually brought home to us.' She stared at the bare walls of Carignano. ‘It is a pity I have none, or only so few, of his belongings. We were a large family – they were scattered. One of my brothers went to Mauritius, you know, another to Ceylon. And my sisters were all great collectors – in their homes you would see
tankhas
, human hip-bone trumpets, carpets and furs. All I have kept is – this.'

Both gazed at the Buddha, sole survivor of that splendour, looking as though the holocaust around him was less than the dust to him.

THEN NANDA KAUL
went on, raising her voice above the drumming of the rain on the roof and the booming and echoing of thunder in the hills that followed the rain like hunting horns.

‘The house I had in the plains was crowded, too crowded – my parents' things, my husband's things, his family's. There were Persian carpets his father had bought in Iran when he was with the Ambassador there. There was glass his mother had bought in Venice. There were the Moghul miniatures my husband collected.' She covered her eyes, as though dazzled, and bent her head.

The thunder galloped across the roof, chasing the fleecy clouds and the lightening rain.

‘It was too much, you know, Raka. I am not a collector myself. I had to break free of it. So I came to Carignano without any of it.'

‘Left it behind?'

‘No, no, I gave up the house – it went to the next Vice-Chancellor. No, I distributed it all – to your grandmother, her sister and brothers. I haven't even seen any of it for years,' she wound up quickly, seeing Raka twist restlessly on her stool, her interest lost in this talk of belongings rather than happenings. Opening out her hands as though willingly releasing the child, she got up brusquely and went to the window. ‘There, it's slowing down,' she said, and Raka jumped up and joined her.

‘Look at the hydrangeas, beaten down by the rain,' said Nanda Kaul, her voice natural once more, and rounded
with relief and pleasure. ‘Look how the rain brings out their colour. They're blue again.'

In a little while they went out onto the veranda – on the way, Nanda Kaul picked up
The Travels of Marco Polo
and slid it back onto a bookshelf – and saw the last raindrops slanting down in the sudden, washed sunlight.

The storm was over. The clouds disappeared: one wisp after another was folded up and whisked away into the blue, and a lovely evening emerged, lucid and peerless, the hills fresh and moist and wooded, blue and green like coils of paint out of a tube. Away in the north the rock-scarred snow range glittered. To the south many hundreds of miles of the plain were visible, streaked with streams and pitted with bright pools of rain.

Going down into the garden, Nanda Kaul said, in a voice that was incredibly altered, that was hoarse with a true remembrance, ‘How funny, Raka, I just remembered how your mother, when she visited me here as a little girl, used to sing “Rainy days are lily days! Rainy days are lily days!”'

‘Lily days?' said Raka, puzzled. ‘What did she mean?'

‘You'll see,' Nanda Kaul said, and her face twisted oddly at the thought of the blue letter folded up inside her desk. ‘Go now, go for your walk,' she said, harshly.

NEXT MORNING RAKA
saw what her mother, as a child, had meant as soon as she woke up and looked out of the window. At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crêpe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at
the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.

At breakfast they met over a big milk-jug that Ram Lal had filled with these lilies and set on the table. They were still slick with rain and brought in with them a sharp odour of moist earth. Vividly pink, their heads stood stiffly on the crimson stalks crammed into the milk-jug's neck. Saffron pollen sprinkled the white tablecloth. A child might have drawn them, with pink and yellow wax crayons.

Nibbling toast, Raka asked ‘Did my mother often come here when she was little?'

‘No,' answered Nanda Kaul, slowly. ‘Not often. Your grandmother took her mostly to Simla or Mussoorie – livelier places, you see.'

‘Didn't she like it here?'

‘Your mother? I think she did,' Nanda Kaul said carefully, not liking to admit that she could scarcely tell one grandchild from the other: the incident of the lilies after rain was the sole one she could remember in connection with Raka's mother. She tried to recall if Tara had gone out to collect lilies, like Ram Lal. She could not. She could only remember the child dashing out of the house after the rain, crying with delight.

‘A letter came,' Raka said suddenly, cracking the piece of toast in two. ‘Was it from her?'

‘No,' said the old lady, her face growing narrower, greyer. ‘It was from your grandmother.'

‘Did she say anything about Mama?' Raka asked, cautiously casual.

‘She's ill again,' Nanda Kaul had to reply, briefly, as she pushed away her cup of coffee. ‘She's in a nursing home again, in Geneva.'

In the silence that followed, Nanda Kaul bitterly cursed
her failure to comfort children, her total inability to place herself in another's position and act accordingly. Fantasy and fairy tales had their place in life, she knew it so well. Why then did she tell the child the truth? Who wanted truth? Who could stand it? Nobody. Not even herself. So how could Raka?

But Raka did not say anything more. Her face was pale, but composed. She might have been indifferent, although deliberately so. After all, she had known her mother ill for most of her life, mysteriously ill, mostly in bed, under a loose pink blanket that smelled of damp, like the lilies. It was no new shock. Her voice had something flat about it, Nanda Kaul noted, when she got up, saying ‘I think I'll go out now, Nani.'

The old lady nodded, partly in relief and partly in disappointment.

RAKA SPRANG FROM
the house as if shot out by a gun. She was going to the burnt house on the hill – she would go, she would go alone, no one would stop her, no one would come with her. She sped along the Upper Mall.

Then scrambled up the steep hill, letting loose small avalanches of pebbles and gravel under her toes, making newts dash, lizards slip and tree-crickets crackle. She struggled through the wild rose tangle, their grasping hips and briars, skirted the nettles and the agaves with their sharp sawtooth spines, and flew over the clumps of pink zephyranthes that waved everywhere, risen from the stones like miracles, triumphant for the day.

At the top of the hill was the burnt house she had come to visit. It was only the charred shell of a small stone cottage. The veranda roof was already torn off and flung onto the hillside, the paving stones of the floor were cracked and gaping. The doors swung rotten, the window-frames hung askew, shattered glass lay amongst the cinders. The stairs were a tumble of rocks and weeds. She climbed over them and stood still in the scorched, empty room, gazing up at the sagging roof that dipped lower every day, and listened to the murmuring, sickening silence with the taut expression of one waiting for an explosion.

Further up the ridge, on another knoll, was a house for which stones had been bought and heaped but which had never been built, so that they lay stacked under the wind-stripped pines, lichen creeping over them like a shroud. It was said that the owners of the land had been frightened off by the forest fire that had razed the small cottage and so abandoned the building of it. No one ever came here but Raka and the cuckoos that sang and sang invisibly. These were not the dutiful domestic birds that called Nanda Kaul to attention at Carignano. They were the demented birds that raved and beckoned Raka on to a land where there was no sound, only silence, no light, only shade, and skeletons kept in beds of ash on which the footprints of jackals flowered in grey.

This hill, with its one destroyed house and one unbuilt one, on the ridge under the fire-singed pines, appealed to Raka with the strength of a strong sea-current – pulling, dragging. There was something about it – illegitimate, uncompromising and lawless – that made her tingle. The scene of devastation and failure somehow drew her, inspired her.

Not so the nurseries and bedrooms of her infancy, with their sickly-sweet smells of illness, sadness, drink, medication, milk and tension. Not so the clubs and parks of the
cities in which she had lived but to which no one had given her the necessary pass, the key.

Carignano had much to offer – yes, she admitted that readily, nodding her head like a berry – it was the best of places she'd lived in ever. Yet it had in its orderly austerity something she found confining, restricting. It was as dry and clean as a nut but she burst from its shell like an impatient kernel, small and explosive.

It was the ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces in Kasauli that drew her: the ravine where yellow snakes slept under grey rocks and agaves growing out of the dust and rubble, the skeletal pines that rattled in the wind, the wind-levelled hill-tops and the seared remains of the safe, cosy, civilized world in which Raka had no part and to which she owed no attachment.

Here she stood, in the blackened shell of a house that the next storm would bring down, looking down the ravine to the tawny plains that crackled in the heat, so much more intense after the rain, and where Chandigarh's lake lay like molten lead in a groove. She raised herself onto the tips of her toes – tall, tall as a pine – stretched out her arms till she felt the yellow light strike a spark down her fingertips and along her arms till she was alight, ablaze.

Then she broke loose, raced out onto the hillside, up the ridge, through the pines, in blazing silence.

‘Cuck-oo – cuck-oo,' sang the wild, mad birds from nowhere.

The caretaker of the burnt house, coming out of a tin shed with a tin mug in his hand, saw her running. ‘The crazy one,' he muttered. ‘The crazy one from Carignano.'

THE PINK LILIES
folded up and disappeared. The plains were swallowed up by the yellow dust again. The sun frizzled the grasses and blazed on the rocks of Kasauli. All was either bleached or blackened by heat and glare.

‘People wonder sometimes,' said Nanda Kaul in that unusually high-pitched voice that made Raka feel strangely itchy, ‘what I see in this dry, dusty, dull little place. Kashmir, where I lived as a child, was so different, you know.' She didn't look at Raka but knew the child had lifted her face and was listening. ‘It is the water that makes the difference – the streams lined with poplars, gushing white over cold stones, the lakes reflecting the willows, the rivers with houseboats lined along their banks. Everywhere, water. It rules the lives of those who live in Kashmir.'