Fire On the Mountain (15 page)

‘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 here were Ila Das and Nanda Kaul, both beaten, silent.

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.

By the time Ila Das had come to the university campus as a lecturer in Home Science, at Nanda Kaul's suggestion and Mr Kaul's invitation, those flowery, tinkling years were already over. Her mother lay rotting in bed with a broken hip that would not mend, and her father was dead of a stroke. The family fortune, divided amongst three drunken, dissolute sons as in a story, and not a penny of it to either of the two clever, thrifty, hard-working daughters, Ila and Rima, was then quickly becoming a thing of the past, no longer retrievable, barely believable. The sons had been sent to foreign universities – to Heidelberg, Cambridge, Harvard – and wherever they were, each had contrived not to attend a single lecture, to drink themselves ill, to find the nearest racecourse and squander their allowances on horses that never won. To begin with, their father had paid their debts, then begun to sell his own horses, his carriage, his house, his land. When he died, not one of them came to the
funeral. They knew there was nothing left for them to inherit. They pestered their mother and two sisters then, for the last of the jewellery, and soon had them driven out into rented rooms and boarding-houses, finally to whatever roof charity would hold over them. Eventually, blessedly, they died. Or disappeared.

Then Nanda Kaul had watched those two horrifically ugly, hideously handicapped girls show the worth of
their
upbringing,
their
character. She had watched as they shingled their hair, queued up for buses and went to work. Rima, whose piano playing was of a different class from her sister's, had given piano lessons, going from house to house and then coming home to nurse the mother with the rotten hip. As for Ila, there was nothing for it but for Nanda Kaul to suggest to her husband, the Vice-Chancellor, that he create a job for her in the Home Science College. He had been gracious and kindly about it, and it was to this comparatively blessed period of her life, secure for a while as a lecturer, sure of her meals and a bed in the hostel, that Ila Das's jolly talk of badminton doubles and lawn parties belonged.

‘I wish,' she sighed now, ‘I wish I had stayed there, Nanda. How often I go back to that time and think it over again, and I know now – I know
now
– I should not have been so hotheaded. Ooh, in my position, a little humility would have been much, much better . . .' and she twisted about to fish the handkerchief out of her bag and sniffle in its folds.

‘There was no call for humility,' said Nanda Kaul crisply. ‘Everybody knew that your experience called for your being made the Principal when Mrs Chatterji retired. Everybody knew the reason you weren't was that the Vice-Chancellor who had appointed you was dead and there was a new Vice-Chancellor to go against his ways and show his strength. How could you stand for that?'

‘I didn't, I didn't,' Ila Das cried. ‘That was why I resigned, Nanda – it was the only honourable thing to do, wasn't it? But ooh, the flesh is weak, and you know how things have gone for me since then, Nanda. You know how I've had to go from pillar to post, trying to earn fifty rupees here and fifty rupees there, with not a room to call my own most of the time, and it's grown worse and worse . . .'

Nanda Kaul nodded. She knew. She had watched that degrading, hopeless search, for Ila Das was already then close to the official age for retirement and no matter how low she pitched her demands, there were always bright, carefree young girls to be employed for even less. As for qualifications, Ila Das's were of the genteel sort that are not put on paper and rubber-stamped, and she was turned away by the employment bureau and any employer that she nerved herself to face.

For a while her sister had kept her, literally dividing each piece of bread in two between them – fortunately the mother died before she starved – and then Nanda Kaul had heard of the course in social service which, if Ila was willing to take it, would definitely lead to a Government job and with it would go the usual emoluments of pension, provident fund and medical aid that now seemed like pieces of gold to her. She had taken the course, triumphantly collected the rubber-stamped document qualifying her to be a social worker, and arrived in the Himalayan foothills to do her duty amongst the peasants, wood-cutters, road labour and goatherds.

Once again she had strayed into Nanda Kaul's domain – only to find that Nanda Kaul did not rule here; Nanda Kaul had retired.

SHE CAME OUT
of retirement to ask, in a low voice, ‘Are you managing, Ila? Can you make ends meet?'

For a while Ila Das snuffled into her handkerchief. Then she folded it up into smaller and ever smaller squares. When it could not be folded any further, she held it tightly in her hand and said ‘Not since Rima's troubles grew so bad. You know how it is – young people don't play the piano any more, even in Christian families they go in for the guitar, for pop music – all a closed book to darling Rima, of course. She's lost pupil after pupil, Nanda, and now this cataract of hers makes her totally helpless. I asked Mrs Wright to help her – you remember Mrs Wright, she was – oh, not a governess but a nanny in our house at one time – and has a little flat in Calcutta. Well, she's given Rima her spare bed in a corner of it. I've been sending a tiny sum for her board and lodging – the barest minimum, but oh,' she began to giggle with little spurting, jerking sounds, ‘the barest minimum was all I had.'

‘But what are you doing about it, Ila? How do you manage?'

‘I'm trying, I'm trying,' sang Ila Das, nodding her head so that the top-knot slipped and sank.

Watching from behind the hydrangea bushes, Raka thought of that ball she had seen in the club one night, of the grotesque figures that had jerked and pranced there. It seemed to her that Ila Das was another such puppet, making her own mad music to jerk and prance to. Nibbling at a brown petal, Raka watched through lowered lashes.

Ila Das began to bounce again, as she piped optimistically, ‘I've been writing around to magazines and journals. I thought if one of them were interested in a column on home science, I could write one every month – or every week – and perhaps earn twenty or thirty rupees above my salary. Thirty rupees –' her eyes boggled behind the bifocal lenses – ‘thirty rupees would cover the cost of feeding me. It would be a
fortune
!' she exploded in a spray of happy spit, and swung her little legs back and forth.

‘Isn't it absurd,' she rattled on, ‘how helpless our upbringing made us, Nanda. We thought we were being equipped with the very best – French lessons, piano lessons, English governesses – my, all that only to find it left us helpless, positively
handicapped.
' She cracked with laughter like an old egg. ‘Now if I were one of the peasants in my village, perhaps I'd manage quite well. Grow a pumpkin vine, keep a goat, pick up kindling in the forest for fire – and perhaps I could cut down those thirty rupees I need to twenty-five, to
twenty
– but
not
, I think, less.' Almost crying, she turned to Nanda Kaul. ‘Do you think I could do with
less
?'