Fire On the Mountain (5 page)

‘Yes,' he agreed, trying to sound reassuring, but failing.

‘What will you cook for her, Ram Lal?' she asked, curiously troubled. It was as if she had never made up handsome dinner parties for fifty or seventy guests on Convocation Day, and been praised for the brilliance of the kebabs she served, or the richness of the puddings. So many scraps of paper, she had torn them up and thrown them away. She had lost the ample book with its frills and cuttings from magazines and papers of recipes with which to please and comfort her large family. Now not one idea remained, not one, with which to feed a single small great-granddaughter.

The amount she had jettisoned from her life might take another's breath away.

‘What shall I make, Memsahib?' mumbled Ram Lal, his eyes downcast.

‘I don't know, Ram Lal, I don't know,' she sighed, and suddenly clutched the edge of the table. ‘Tell me. Suggest something.'

As suddenly, he looked up and inspiration gleamed in his bloodshot eyes. ‘Potato chips, Memsahib,' he trumpeted. ‘All children like potato chips.'

‘Do they?' she murmured, and gazed at him with a dazed kind of hope that the potato chips might surfeit the child, lull it into a decent stranger and render it harmless.

‘Yes, potato chips they like, with ketchup.'

‘With . . .'

‘Ketchup, Memsahib, tomato ketchup. I will buy a bottle from the bazaar. I will make it for lunch. Will she be here for lunch?'

‘Yes,' nodded Nanda Kaul sadly, and moved towards the door, trying hard to cling to the vision of potato chips and tomato ketchup as the saving of them all. They sounded so cheerful but also, she had to admit, somehow inadequate.

Ram Lal went back to sorting potatoes and onions with a fresh vigour, but kept a wary eye on the Memsahib as she trailed back to the house over the gravel and pine-needles,
with a new hesitation in her normally sure step. ‘Old, old,' he muttered, when she was out of earshot, in the shade of the apricot trees. ‘She is old, I am old. We are old, old,' he muttered, quickly losing hope.

A bony hen poked its neck in at the door and squawked in a particularly demanding and raucous tone. He flung his filthy market-bag at it in rage and it flew up onto the woodpile and stared at him with a surprised yellow eye.

SHE DID NOT,
after all, walk down to the taxi-stand to meet Raka. She sent Ram Lal instead. She knew she ought to go. She knew if she took the road very slowly, gave it plenty of time, and carried a sunshade, she could do it. But she could not bear the thought of curious eyes that would see her, the loose mouths that would turn to each other and flap questioningly.

She stayed back, going into the guest room again and again to pick at the linen duchess set on the chest of drawers, drag open the cupboard doors and sniff at the damp, green smell of mould, pat the mattress and feel the hairy prickles through the smooth sheet.

She considered filling a vase with flowers and placing it beside the bed. But, when she went to the window and looked out, she saw only such flowers as succeed outdoors, not one that might retain its shape or colour inside.

On her way to the door, she bumped her leg against the bed-post. The bump seemed to knock the air out of her lungs. Gasping, she limped away to her room, feeling slightly sick.

In her room, she pulled up the petticoat to examine her thigh. No, no broken bone protruded, but the pimpled pearl of flesh was already turning into a rainbow-tinted bruise. Blue now, it would be violet tomorrow, green thereafter till it faded to yellow and then back to pearl. The putrid colours of old meat.

She groaned with self-pity and pain, certain that she was alone and no one would hear.

In an hour that privacy would be over. She could never groan aloud again: the child would hear.

Tenderly rubbing the bruise, she tried to distract her mind from the pain by remembering what she could of Raka. But now all the babies in her life ran together in one rainbow muddle – pinks, blues, bruises, bones – she could hardly separate her own from others. Was it Milon who had the ayah that fed him opium at night, under her fingernails, or was it Nikhil? Which of them, clinging to her knees, or lying dreamily with a head in her lap, had insisted ‘When I grow big, you will grow small, and then I will look after you'? Could it have been Asha, the writer of those terrible letters? It could, for Asha had been a small girl with curls all over her head and a round, soft hand with which she had patted her mother when she had approved of her sari and jewels as she dressed before the mirror. ‘When you are dead, I will get all your saris,' she had smugly said. That certainly sounded like Asha. But there were the others – her own and then the grandchildren. Recently it was Tara who had demanded the largest share of her sympathy and attention, with her unhappiness and her breakdowns. But the pregnant Vina, too, needed care. During her first pregnancy she had typhoid. Disaster-prone, during the second she had broken a leg and survived an attack of appendicitis. Asha's children appeared to attract all the tragedy that she herself had skirted with such complacent success. Now there was to be yet another great-grandchild. So how could she be
sure at which point in time Raka had arrived, in which city and hospital?

She had, in her time, embroidered so many muslin vests and cotton nightgowns, she could not recall if it was with a blue duck or a pink mouse that she had greeted Raka, whether she had sent a coral bracelet or a silver mug. It was not possible, groaned Nanda Kaul, when there were so many of them and they were as alike as human beings always are alike. She could not summon Raka out of the common blur. She was no more than a particularly dark and irksome spot on the hazy landscape – a mosquito, a cricket, or a grain of sand in the eye.

Hanging her head miserably, it seemed too much to her that she should now have to meet Raka, discover her as an individual and, worse, as a relation, a dependant. She would have to urge her to eat eggs and spinach, caution her against lifting stones in the garden under which scorpions might lie asleep, see her to bed at night and lie in the next room, wondering if the child slept, straining to catch a sound from the bedroom, their opposing thoughts colliding in the dark like jittery bats in flight.

She would never be able to sleep, Nanda Kaul moaned to herself how could she sleep with someone else in the house? She was so unused to it, it would upset her so.

And she would have to order proper meals even though she herself wanted nothing but a piece of toast, apricots from the garden, that was all. Perhaps the child would be bored and need to be entertained? How would she do that? Once she had known nursery rhymes, word games, possessed skills with paper and cloth, pins and scissors – but they were all gone, buried under layers of dust, she had not the vitality to delve for them. Should she take the child for walks then? To the club? Should she invite other children to play? But she knew no one, certainly no children, in Kasauli. She had held herself religiously aloof, jealous
of this privacy achieved only at the very end of her life.

There was only Ila Das who had followed her out of the past and still came to see her. Should Ila Das be invited to meet the child?

The very thought wrung a snort of disgust from Nanda Kaul. Then she dropped her petticoat, stood, looked vaguely about the room and limped out to the veranda.

It was very still. Ram Lal had left for the taxi-stand. Raka would soon be here.

On the knoll and at the gate the wind ruffled the pine-needles so that they glistened silver in the sunlight. A cuckoo sang in the chestnut tree down by the road, with its low, domestic call.

RAKA
– WHAT AN
utter misnomer, thought Nanda Kaul, standing under the apricot trees with her hands pressed together before her and watching the child come in through the gate where the pine trees stood bending and twisting extravagantly in the wind as though miming welcome in a modern satiric ballet.

Raka meant the moon, but this child was not round-faced, calm or radiant. As she shuffled up the garden path, silently following Ram Lal, with a sling bag weighing down one thin, sloping shoulder and her feet in old sandals heavy with dust, Nanda Kaul thought she looked like one of those dark crickets that leap up in fright but do not sing, or a mosquito, minute and fine, on thin, precarious legs.

But ‘Raka' she nevertheless said, hoping somehow to relate the name to the child and wondering if she would ever get used to seeing this stranger in her garden.

Raka slowed down, dragged her foot, then came towards her great-grandmother with something despairing in her attitude, saying nothing. She sucked at the loose, curly elastic of an old, broken straw hat that drooped over her closely cropped head like a straw bag. She turned a pair of extravagantly large and somewhat bulging eyes about in a way that made the old lady feel more than ever her resemblance to an insect.

Turning those eyes about, Raka watched Ram Lal go up the veranda steps into the house with her case, his outsized tennis shoes alternately flopping and squeaking on the stone tiles. Turning slightly, she saw a scraggy-necked hen
pecking beneath a bush of blue hydrangeas at some pieces of broken white china.

Then she raised her small, shorn head on its very thin and delicate neck and regarded the apricot trees, the veranda, Carignano. She listened to the wind in the pines and the cicadas all shrilling incessantly in the sun with her unfortunately large and protruding ears, and thought she had never before heard the voice of silence.

Then it was not possible to postpone the meeting any longer and both moved a step closer to each other and embraced because they felt they must. There was a sound of bones colliding. Each felt how bony, angular and unaccommodating the other was and they quickly separated.

‘Child, how ill you have been!' Nanda Kaul exclaimed involuntarily, leaving her hand for a moment on the straight hard shield of the thin shoulder. ‘How ill. How thin it's made you.'

Raka pulled at the slack elastic with some embarrassment and rolled her eyes around to follow the flight of the hoopoe that suddenly darted out of the tree. She saw the old lady who murmured at her as another pine tree, the grey sari a rock – all components of the bareness and stillness of the Carignano garden.

To Nanda Kaul she was still an intruder, an outsider, a mosquito flown up from the plains to tease and worry. With a blatant lack of warmth, she sighed ‘Well, better come in,' and led her across the wavy tiles of the veranda to her room.

LEFT TO HERSELF
in the afternoon, Raka felt over the room with her bare feet. She walked about as the newly caged, the
newly tamed wild ones do, sliding from wall to wall on silent, investigating pads. She patted a cheek of wood here, smoothed a ridge of plaster there. She met a spider that groomed its hairs in a corner, saw lizard's eyes blinking out of a dark groove. She probed the depth of dust on shelves and ledges, licked a windowpane to cool her tongue-tip. She sagged across the bed on her stomach, hung her head over its edge, but the sun caught her eye, slipped in its yellow wedge and would not allow her to close it.

It summoned her to the window, dragged her the length of a ray and drew her to the ledge where she laid her head on its comfortable guillotine.

Below the window she saw stones in a heap, flowers that held no interest, a snail's discarded shell. Not much.

But a few feet further on, under the hopeless wooden railing, lay the lip of the cliff and the sudden drop down the red, rock-spattered ravine to the plain that lay stretched out and heavy, the dusty pelt of a yellow animal panting in the sun. Raka blinked at it. She knew it – that plain, that pelt, that yellow summer dust.

Slipping one leg over the window sill, she climbed out into the bed of day lilies and went quietly to lean over the railing and look down. She knew her great-grandmother's window overlooked the same scene. She was careful not to crunch the pebbles under her feet. Crouching by the rail, she made out the details that gave the hazy scene edges, angles and interest.

Shoals of rusted tins, bundles of stained newspaper, peels, rags and bones, all snuggling in grooves, hollows, cracks, and sometimes spilling. Pine trees with charred trunks and contorted branches, striking melodramatic attitudes as on stage. Rocks arrested in mid-roll, rearing up, dropping. Occasional tin rooftops, glinting.

Looking down the length of the jagged ledge, Raka saw it lined with other back walls and servants' quarters, tin sheds
and cook-houses. Around the bend, these grew in size, rose and billowed into the enormous concrete walls of what looked like a factory, for sharp chimneys thrust out cushions and scarves of smoke, black on the milky blue of the afternoon sky. Chutes emerging from its back wall seemed built to disgorge factory waste into the ravine and immediately below them were small, squat structures that looked like brick kilns amongst the spiked, curved blades of the giant agaves that were, besides the pines, the only vegetation of that blighted gorge.

Puzzled, Raka turned her head on its stalk, gently. Her father and grandmother had extolled the beauties and delights of a Himalayan hill-station to her, but said nothing of factories. Here was such an enormous one that Raka wondered at their ignorance of it. To her, it seemed to dominate the landscape – a square dragon, boxed, bricked and stoked.

Lizard-like, she clung to the rail and slid along its length to the outdoor kitchen and looked in to see if Ram Lal were there and could enlighten her. But the place was empty, a blackened, fire-blasted cave in which one fiery, inflamed eye glowed and smouldered by itself. A white hen that had insinuated itself into the kitchen unnoticed, saw the flutter of her white dress, squawked out loud and shot past her, making her step aside in surprise.

In the room next to the kitchen, still smaller but somewhat brightened by the myriad magazine and calendar pictures stuck to the smoky walls. Ram Lal lay on his string cot, his limbs flung out to its four corners, his cap on his nose, lifting and falling with the low growls and sudden snorts that came and went beneath it.