Fire On the Mountain (14 page)

Strange to think there was an infant once who, when lisping the nanny-goat-and-pinafore rhymes that western and westernized babies speak, curdled the blood of the adults who dandled her on their knees. But one could imagine – Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes as she stared down at the bald white scalp, bent to the task of struggling uphill in the afternoon heat – Ila Das as an infant in an afternoon frock of blue ribbons and white lace, screeching the most unimaginably horrid sounds that sent shivers down the spines of guests and relatives invited to hear her recite her nursery rhymes.

Nanda Kaul could not only imagine it, she could remember the time. She and Ila Das had played together as children, children's games like Oranges-and-Lemons and cooking dolls' meals under the
gol-mohur
trees, with scarlet blossoms and yellow pods for food.

They had gone to school together, solemnly cycling down the quiet roads to the convent, while the happily illiterate urchins cheered them, yelling ‘Parr-ot, parr-ot, sing to us!' Ila Das would be primly silent on her splendid silver Raleigh, biting her lip in terror of being knocked down in the road.

In school, alas, she had to speak. Teachers shivered, their teeth on edge, as if a child had squeaked a pencil on a slate or slid a nail down a glass-pane, while children clapped their hands over their mouths, making giggles burst forth the more rudely when Ila Das stood up, almost prancing on her
tiptoes, to recite The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck. Hurriedly teachers hushed her, begged her to give others, with normal growls and mutters for voices, a chance. And poor Ila had learnt the whole poem through, wanted so much to recite it all. Yet she had to bottle up that voice with a hiccup and sit down, fizzing and burbling impotently, her hands in her lap, while others muttered and floundered through a parody, a pretence of the verse.

In distress, her parents bought her a piano and engaged a new governess, one who could teach Ila to play. Perhaps they hoped to silence the child at parties by giving her pieces to play rather than recite. Nanda Kaul's hands rose involuntarily to her ears under the loops of white hair, as she recalled those tea-parties and the appalling, the unendurable sounds made by little Ila Das, pigtails bouncing jollily on her back, as she tinkled on the piano keys as if rummaging amongst a bagful of china, hogs' tusks and clapping dentures, her voice raised like a tom-cat's in battle, yowling

Here she came, Ila Das, still little Ila Das, with what remained of the pigtail wound on top of her head like a tea-cosy, an egg-cosy, yellowed rather than whitened by age, and Nanda Kaul looked down from her height, having invited her to tea, having failed to put her away out of sight and mind. Here she was, that last little broken bit of a crazy life, fluttering up over the gravel like a bit of crumpled paper.

‘Ila,' she sighed, bending to swing open the unwilling gate, ‘come'.

And Ila, screwing up her little button eyes with delight at seeing Nanda Kaul – for all through her ragged life Nanda Kaul had been there, standing at a height, like a beacon, like an ideal – and stepping eagerly in, flung herself upon her
friend and pecked and pecked her cold, flat cheek, crying little hideous cries of delight and love into the cringing ears.

‘DARLING,' SCRECHED ILA
Das, ‘darling, what sort of a summer has it been? Why haven't we met earlier, oftener? My, and we're neighbours – you in your manorial hall and I in my village hut down below. I've so much to
tell
, Nanda – and you? And you?'

But Nanda Kaul would not stand at the gate and perform a comedy for the benefit of the urchins – she knew where they hid, watching, behind the agaves and the bushes of Spanish broom. Giving them a withering look, she took Ila firmly by the elbow and turned her towards the house where Raka stood teetering on the edge of the veranda, curious to see the maker, the perpetrator of such unholy sounds.

Suddenly Ila Das gave the crooked umbrella a merry swing – a swing that belonged to a park on a Sunday afternoon, when the band played, the merry-go-round revolved and flowers sprang to attention in their beds all around – and gave a little hop, then clutched Nanda Kaul's arm in its long sleeve of silk that buttoned at the wrist with two opals, and said ‘Ooh, look, those lovely apricot trees. Did they bear a good crop, Nanda? Did you make that delicious jam? Mmm, when I think of it . . .' a naughty pink tongue crept over the lips, licking, then departed with a giggle. ‘How lovely the house looks, Nanda.
Dear
Carignano. Now if you were to see
my
castle . . .' and she went into peals of laughter that rang like a fire engine's fatal bell
so that two doves, amazed, shot out of the trees and vanished, and even Raka took a startled step backwards.

Ila Das saw the movement of the white dress on the shadowy veranda. Clapping her hand over her mouth, she stood stockstill. ‘My,' she breathed, pop-eyed. ‘I actually forgot. Only for a moment – but I actually forgot the child, Nanda, in my joy at seeing you again. How could I? How could I?' Shaking her head so that steel pins showered from her small top-knot, she went on, ‘Nanda's great-grandchild! Could anyone believe it – looking at you?' She turned to look. ‘No,' she decided, ‘positively not.'

‘But there she is, my great-grandchild,' said Nanda Kaul drily, and called ‘Raka.'

Raka put down the fly-swatter and came, dragging her feet and looking her most mosquito-like.

Ila Das made a little tripping rush forwards and, reaching out, captured the hand that hung limply at the side and pumped it up and down with a vigour that Nanda Kaul remembered having seen in the person of her father, a little whiskered gentleman in a smoking jacket who used to insist on shaking hands with every little girl that came to Ila Das's party, making them stumble backwards and titter. Here was Ila Das now, pumping limp Raka's lifeless hand, crying little shrill cries that made her wince and attempt a retreat.

‘My dear, you and I are simply bound to be friends, you know,
bound
to be. I've known your great-grandmother for – oh, how many years is it now? Well, I'm not going to bore you by counting them – I'm not really sure I
can
count them –' with a wicked wink magnified to dragonfly proportions by the bi-focal lenses over the eyes –‘but when one's known anyone
that
long, you know, one is practically related. Oh,
absolutely
related, and I insist, I simply insist –' the grasp on Raka's shrinking fingers tightened –‘on being great grandaunt to
you
, my dear, dear little girl!' Then she leant forward from the waist – she was only about the same height as
Raka, scarcely taller – and pecked her rapidly on the cheek. There!' she beamed and released Raka who fell back into the lilies, slightly gasping and shaking herself as if she felt her fur, or fuzz, rumpled by contact.

Nanda Kaul stood watching, an ironic twist to her lips. She herself had never grasped Raka's hand, nor kissed her – how had Ila Das dared? It had been presumptuous of her – Raka's unconcealed shudder and sudden whitening of the lips showed how presumptuous it had been – and Nanda Kaul both felt for her outrage and exulted in it. At last someone had swung a net over that crafty little mosquito.

In the background, Ram Lal hovered, waving away flies, putting down tea pot and milk jug, whisking away beaded nets to reveal the fruit of his day's unusual labour. It was not every day they invited someone to tea. Ram Lal had almost forgotten how to go about it (and Nanda Kaul lifted an eyebrow in surprise at his idea of tea-party fare) but was quickly remembering it all now. It was with quite an air that he drew back the lowest chair for Ila Das and took away her umbrella, leaving them to the repast with one last look at Raka, a rather dubious one, as if he couldn't be sure how
that
one would conduct herself.

Raka quite clearly had no notion how to conduct herself at a party. She hung about. She hovered over her chair only to find Ila Das plopping down upon it with a kind of schoolboy abandon, a schoolboy way of throwing herself backwards so that her feet flew up in the air, and there they swung. Even Raka's low chair was too high for those short legs. An inch or two above the ground those cracked old court shoes swung to and fro, happily, as if five years old and at a party once more.

There was some fuss and bother about the cloth shoulder bag – it was taken off but where was it to be put? Ought it to be hung? At last a sigh went up and Ila Das let forth again with a sound that made the hoopoes on the bit of grass take
off and flee the garden and the crickets draw in their heads and hide.

‘MUM-MUM-MUM,'
her lips mumbled together, then flapped open across the silky dentures. ‘Oh, how this all reminds me of
home
, Nanda. I mean childhood of course, when we had honey for tea and badminton on the lawn after.'

Nanda Kaul lifted that elegant eyebrow again, together with the teapot that had been bought in the bazaar by Ram Lal and was thick, white and cheap. ‘I wonder what, in all of Carignano, could remind you of that, Ila,' she said.

‘Ooh,' burst Ila Das right into a cupful of hot tea so that it flew up in a spray. ‘Ooh, Nanda, the very air, the atmosphere about you brings it all back to me. Why, I see your lovely mother with that beautiful Kashmiri complexion of hers, and the red Brahmin thread looped through her ears, pouring out tea for us and all the little dogs at her feet – how they loved her. We
all
did. And then your father would come in from the orchard, holding one special peach he had plucked for her, and his pockets full of nuts for us, and he'd call us to him and say . . .'

Raka wilted. She hung her arms between her knees and drooped her head on its thin stalk. It seemed the old ladies were going to play, all afternoon, that game of old age – that reconstructing, block by gilded block, of the castle of childhood, so ramshackle and precarious, and of stuffing it with that dolls' house furniture, those impossibly gilded red velvet sofas and painted bedsteads, that always smelt of dust
and mice and that she had never cared to play with. She very much wanted to eat her tea, for once to have something to eat at tea, but it seemed she would have to pay for it. She gazed at a small ant under the table, crawling off with a crystal of sugar loaded onto its back, and sighed.

Ila Das heard her sigh and gave a quick bounce on her chair, turned her megaphone upon the child and shrieked ‘How you would have loved that house, my dear! It was a children's paradise, you know, a veritable paradise. The minute you stepped in and closed the high gate behind you –' she clapped her hands together with a wooden smack – ‘you felt yourself in fairyland. Why, you might be taken to pick green chillies in the garden to feed the parrot – very carefully, you know, it nipped horribly – or you might decide to ride your bicycles down the drive, or climb the fig tree and swing in its branches like a band of monkeys. Oh, anything, everything was permitted –'

But still the child's head lolled drearily and the wisps of hair dried to a stiff shade of brown, their tips ending in reddish sparks, swung on either side of the doleful face.

‘And particularly the piano!' cried Ila Das, clasping her hands together just under her chin and looking from side to side as though she were peeping at mountains of presents on either side of her. ‘After the party games, and the big tea, the piano,' and to Raka's astonishment and Nanda Kaul's horror, Ila Das flung back the lid of an imaginary piano with a flourish as of a magician whisking a silk handkerchief off the magic rabbit, and then plunged into the imaginary keys with both hands splayed, at the same time pumping the imaginary pedals with her little feet and throwing back her head to bellow ‘Darling, I am growing o-o-old!'

Nanda Kaul froze into a state of pale concrete. The entire weight of the overloaded past seemed to pour onto her like liquid cement that immediately set solid, incarcerating her in its stiff gloom. She sat with her lips tightly set and her
eyes wide open, hardly able to believe in this raucous apparition now ripping into Honeysuckle Rose in a voice like an arrow that pierced Nanda Kaul's temple and penetrated her jaws, setting her teeth tingling.

The arrow withdrew, silence seeped in. But Ila Das's fingers remained splayed across the keyboard, horribly knotted and yellowed, and her feet remained pressed on the pedals. She swayed her head gently on a stalk as though a breeze were rustling by, her button eyes acquired the glaze of old trinkets, and opening her mouth in a round O, she began to quaver

All the pine trees on the knoll shivered and cast their glistening needles in a hushed shower. The cicadas crept under the roasting stones and wept with little susurrating sounds. Pebbles suddenly released their hold on the hillside and went sliding down the ravine in a weeping rush.

On the veranda Raka and her great-grandmother sat stockstill and gaping at Ila Das crooning over the imaginary piano with round glass tears popping out of her little eyes and bouncing across her cheeks and off the tip of her nose.

Then she had to search in her cloth bag for a handkerchief. Whipping it out, she trumpeted into it – a horrendous sound for such a small, shrunken creature to make – and sat back in the low chair, wiping her eyes, hiccuping through the hankie, swinging her legs and smiling ‘Aren't I awful – ooh, aren't I just awful!'

Straightening her back centimetre by regal centimetre, Nanda Kaul asked crisply ‘Milk or lemon, Ila?'

STUFFING THE HANDKERCHIEF
back into the bag and attacking a plate of hot buttered toast with rapacity, Ila Das threw Raka an arch look and said ‘Don't mind me, dear – I'm like that when I get on to music. It played such a role in our lives, didn't it, Nanda? I'm afraid it's all out of fashion now – those sweet songs, those musical soirees at which the family would gather around the piano and sing. A tragedy, I feel, a tragedy,' she proclaimed, and smashed a great piece of toast to bits with her dentures.