Fire On the Mountain (7 page)

‘A cobra?'

‘It was big – this big,' she said, showing him with her arm, ‘And yellow. It was sleeping.'

‘Yellow? This big? Ah,' said Ram Lal, settling his
biri
back between his lips. ‘That was a
daman
. A rat snake. A good snake to have around.'

‘It was quite far down, really.'

‘Don't go that far,' Ram Lal said sharply. ‘I told you not to – it isn't good.'

‘I wanted to see a jackal. I've never seen a jackal. I hear them at night.'

‘Why do you want to see a jackal? Didn't I tell you, they are mad? If they bite you, you will have to go to the Pasteur Institute and get fourteen injections – in the stomach. I did once.'

‘Do jackals bite?'

‘Of course. Jackals are as fierce as cobras. That place there,' he waved into the dust in which the forms of the pine trees were only barely visible now, writhing in the wind, ‘is very bad, not safe. Why don't you go to the club and play with the
babas
there?'

‘I did go. But there were no
babas
there. No one.'

‘You should go in the evening, at the proper time,' he said primly, suddenly recalling better days, spent in service of richer, better homes. ‘You should have an ayah. Then she
could wash you and dress you in clean clothes at four o'clock and take you down to the club. You would meet nice
babas
there. They come in the evenings with their ayahs. They play on the swings and their parents play bridge and tennis. Then they have lemonade and Vimto in the garden. That is what you should do,' he told her, severely.

Raka listened to him create this bright picture of hill-station club life politely rather than curiously. It was a life she had observed from the outside – in Delhi, in Manila, in Madrid – but had never tried to enter. She had always seemed to lack the ticket. ‘Hmm,' she said, picking at a nicely crusty scab on her elbow.

‘Don't do that,' Ram Lal said sharply, still speaking out of that proper and ordered world in the distance to which he had once belonged. ‘You will make it bleed again and it will leave an ugly scar. You get so dirty crawling about on the hillsides.'

‘I will soon bathe,' Raka assured him, and shifted on her bottom with impatience at this new censoriousness of his.

‘Yes, I had better take your bucket in before the dust-storm arrives. Look, look, it is coming,' he shouted, holding down his cap about his ears as the wind tore across.

Raka stood up on the stone to watch the dense yellow haze gather and hurl itself across the plains, blotting out the scattered villages and mango groves, sweep on to the foot of the mountain and then, as if in rage at finding its way blocked, mounting the hillside, lifting higher and higher till it swept over the cliff and engulfed Kasauli, blotting out the view, the sky and the air in a gritty mass.

Ram Lal caught her by the shoulder and pushed her into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them. She went immediately to the window, wiped off the grime and peered out.

A white hen was lifted into the air and tossed past the
window in a frantic, fluttery arc, its squawks snatched out of its beak and shattered like glass.

The sun was bobbing in and out of the dust clouds, lighting them up in a great conflagration – a splendid bonfire that burned in the heart of the yellow clouds. The whole world was livid, inflamed. Only the closest pine trees showed, black silhouettes lashing from side to side.

‘The
hamam
will be knocked over!' Ram Lal yelled. ‘All that boiling water and fire!'

‘Will it set fire to the garden?' shouted Raka. ‘Will it set the hill on fire?'

‘Don't know, don't know,' he muttered worriedly, grinding the palms of his hands together. ‘This is how forest fires do start. I can't tell you how many forest fires we see each year in Kasauli. Some have come up as far as our railing. You can see how many of the trees are burnt, and houses too. Once the house down the hill, South View, was burnt down to the ground before the fire engine arrived.'

‘Could they drive it down the hill to South View?'

‘Yes, they dragged it down by jeeps, but there was no water. There is a water shortage every summer in Kasauli. There was no water to put out the fire and the whole house burnt down, and the cowshed with two buffaloes in it.'

‘I've seen a burnt hut up on top of that hill there, on the upper Mall,' Raka remembered.

‘Hut? It was a beautiful cottage. An English Mem lived there. It was burnt down in a forest fire and she went mad and was taken to the lunatic asylum with her arms and legs tied with rope. They say all her hair was burnt off, even her eyelashes, when she went in to save her cat. The watchman says he can still hear the cat howling in the ruins at night.'

‘Can he? Can you? Have you? At midnight?'

But Ram Lal was too worried about his
hamam
of boiling water to tell her ghost stories now. He came to the window and stared out, trying to make out its brass shape in the
broiling dust. They could hear the grit and gravel flying and dashing against the stone walls and tin roofs, raucous poltergeists of the storm.

‘If it falls over, all that dry grass will be set on fire,' he worried. ‘And I'm old,' he groaned suddenly, sticking one finger in an ear and giving his head a shake. ‘I can't run to the fire brigade. I can't run to fetch water. My knees hurt.'

‘I'll do it,' Raka cried. ‘I can run, Ram Lal – fast, fast.'

But the dust was subsiding, so was the roar of the wind. They could hear each other without shouting. The dense mass parted and thinned, began to tuck and tidy itself away like a tantrum that was spent. The air was pale, subdued.

Ram Lal opened the door and hurried over to his
hamam
. Raka followed.

The still air was cool now, edged with chill. The heat of the sun was gone like an angry crab put to flight, leaving its dull white shell behind – stranded, harmless.

The hills were chastened and austere in the chilly light.

Dizzy parrots, in a phosphorescent flock, burst out of the pines and spurted away, leaving their shrieks behind.

Ram Lal patted the solid flanks of the old
hamam
. ‘A good thing we brought this up to Kasauli with us,' he said proudly. ‘You don't get solid brass like this any more. Come along, the water's just right for your bath and I must go and sweep up all the dust in the house,' and he spun the little tap, gay with relief, filled a big bucket and carried it across the backyard to the green backdoor of her bathroom, Raka skipping behind him like a pet insect.

Striking an identical note of gay relief, a cuckoo called on the knoll.

Nanda Kaul, standing behind a closed window, watched them cross the yard – Ram Lal with the brass bucket from which bright drops spilt and flew as he lurched under its weight, Raka's spindly legs snapping at his heels like a pair of scissors.

Her hand shot out of the folds of silk and slapped at a pair of bumbling flies on the pane. They fell together on the windowsill, buzzing in alarm.

CAREFULLY RETURNING HER
tea-cup to the tray, Raka rose and made a furtive sideways movement that always preceded her liquid, unobtrusive slipping away.

Very quickly Nanda Kaul, too, put down her cup and made a bustling movement with her knees that shook the table-top and made things rattle.

‘I think I'll come with you today,' she said, very precisely, with an authoritative lift of her chin. ‘For a walk.'

Raka stood still, dismayed. It was quite clear she was dismayed. Nanda Kaul saw that she did not care for her company. What she did not know was that the child always rose hungry from the tea-table and that her evening rambles about the hills were also forages for food, that she searched for berries and pine nuts along the paths to allay the hunger that grew and growled inside her small flat belly. She was never able to eat enough at a meal to last her till the next. Nor could she bear to ask for a biscuit. So she went hungry till dinner, unless she found a bush with ripe berries still popping out of its thorns or a bunch of sour oxalis leaves to chew.

Held back by her great-grandmother's sudden, unwelcome whim, she stood swaying on the top step of the veranda and looked uncertain.

‘Wait a minute,' said Nanda Kaul briskly. ‘I'll change into my walking shoes.'

Raka sighed and slipped down on the step beside a pot of fuchsias and swung the purple tasselled bells with her finger, despondently. Listening to her great-grandmother moving about in the bedroom, she felt as if she heard the sounds of collar and chain. She had not a dog's slavishness to companionship, and bit her lip with vexation.

It occurred to her that the old lady's idea of a walk might be a stroll through the bazaar amongst the holiday crowds, or down to the club for a lemonade and a chat with summer visitors around a table in the garden, and she grew more apprehensive.

But Nanda Kaul appeared in cracked grey gym shoes and a hefty walking-stick in her hand. ‘Shall we go all the way to Monkey Point today?' she asked pleasantly, slightly swinging the stick.

They had never walked together before and made an awkward pair, now bumping into each other and politely apologizing, then wandering so far apart that they no longer seemed to belong to each other. Both walked stiffly, held themselves very upright, not letting themselves go with a natural stride.

It was a subdued afternoon, the hills sere, slashed everywhere by the charred trunks of burnt pines, jagged by the shapes of tumbled rocks and static boulders. The sun and summer dust fused into a dull mealy mass in which no light quickened but for the glisten of pine-needles when the wind ruffled them.

Now and then Nanda Kaul paused, her face rather pinched and her breathing quick, but it was not to catch her breath, she made clear, only to lift her stick and point out something of interest to Raka.

‘Look, from here you have a perfect view of the plains on a clear day. If it weren't for the dust, you could see all the way to Ambala.

‘Up on the hill there, Raka, you will see the burnt black
shell of a house. It was burnt down in a terrible forest fire one summer when there wasn't a drop of water to fight it with. An old lady lived there alone and they say she went mad and was put away. Poor woman, I wonder if she would not have preferred to die in the fire.' The walking-stick tapped the pebbles about her feet before she lifted it and waved it again. ‘It looks dreadful, as if it is about to fall apart, but one shower of rain will bring out hundreds of flowers – lilies, dahlias – that she must have planted. You'll see them one day.

‘D'you see that pleasant cottage there? The doctors of the Pasteur Institute have taken it over, several of them. A pity, it used to be so beautifully kept at one time, and look at it now. It still has a tennis court but it's used as a chicken run now. And the Garden House across the road – you can scarcely believe it now, but it once had the most beautiful garden in Kasauli. Now used as an army billet. The army's everywhere.

‘I see they're up that hill, too. What is that peculiar instrument on top? Frightening. Like an atomic reactor. Or some such scientific monstrosity. And so much barbed wire around. A shame.'

They walked silently along the sere, silent hillsides on which boulders seemed to have been arrested in downward motion, precariously, and nothing grew on the pine-needle-spread earth but a few tangles of wild raspberries, hairy with thorn, and giant agaves in curious contorted shapes. Tourists and passers-by often scratched their names into the succulent blades and there they remained – names and dates, incongruous and obtrusive as the barbed wire.

‘Too many tourists. Too much army. How they are ruining this – this quiet place,' Nanda Kaul said bitterly, her breath coming faster and her step fumbling. ‘It really is – is saddening. One would have liked to keep it as it was, a – a haven, you know. When I first came here, I used to think of
Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem – do you know it? I used to be reminded of it constantly:

‘Of course it was not written about a place, any place, but about a vocation – a nun's vocation, as it happens – but, all the same, it seemed to apply.'

Her voice strengthened on this last line, grew brisk and lightened. Suddenly she laughed aloud. ‘Look, Raka,' she cried, and did not need to point with her stick for the turbulence in a grove of chestnut trees was suddenly and vividly visible and audible. The swinging and leaping of branches, the crashing through leaves and showering of horse chestnuts showed clearly enough the source of her amusement – a wild horde of black-faced
langurs
, those fierce, lithe panthers of the monkey world, more feline than simian. Raka, too, threw her head back on her shoulders and laughed with her great-grandmother at the face an old
langur
made at them from the top of the tree, baring its teeth and gibbering, then jumping up and down on its bottom in anger and derision. Both admired with swift-flowing extravagance the still, silvery calm of a mother
langur
that sat stretching its long legs out along a branch and cradling an infant with a crumpled face in its elegant arm. The infant looked strangely aged, as if by worries and anxieties beyond its age, its little face black and wrinkled, its tear-drop eyes glistening with sadness. Others were clowns and bounced
and swung with boastful grace, playing Tarzan in the trees. Clapping their hands to their mouths, they hallooed like cinema heroes of the wilds, then leapt all in a bunch onto the tin roof of a half-ruined house with such a bang and a bombardment that children ran out of the house and servants from the kitchen, all shouting, all shooing till the herd took to its heels and vanished over the lip of the hill.