Fire On the Mountain (2 page)

The maiden lady who was the next occupant of the house, a Miss Appleby who had been governess in Lady Stuart's household and been left enough money to buy Carignano and so avoid the English climate for the rest of her life, certainly smelt that tobacco. Being used to the finest cheroots in the fine Stuart household, it would make her jump up and stamp her foot and yell with rage. The worst was that the ghost himself never appeared or Miss Appleby would surely have flung her entire willow pattern dinner set at him: her temper was famous. She once not only thrashed the gardener for planting marigolds which she hated – again, it was the smell she could not bear – but climbed onto
his back and whipped him around the garden, yelling ‘No marigolds, understand? No marigolds in my garden!'

She was the first in the long line of maiden ladies who inhabited Carignano – all English of course for in those days all the houses along the Mall were owned by English people and Indians were not so much as allowed to walk on the Mall but were expected to keep to the footpaths on the hillsides and respectfully cast their eyes down when the English sahibs and memsahibs cantered by on their horses. There was a legend attached to each of these maiden ladies and the postman knew a few of them.

There was a Miss Lawrence who had ridden across the Thar desert wearing a linen hat and veil and perhaps fancying it was the Sahara. The two Misses Hughes – known locally, and aptly, as the Misses Huges – had merely played bridge at the club and made apricot jam that was famous from Lawrence School at Sanawar to the military cantonment at Sabathu. They filled the house with chintz sofa-covers and great china ewers and basins on which pink and blue carnations mingled and that still minced and curtsied about in the dank and mildewed bathrooms of Carignano. They also planted a yellow rose creeper to clinib the railing that kept the house from rolling over the cliff down to the plains. All year this creeper was a furry grey mass, stirring and rustling as if it housed a colony of mice, but in April it would exhale a billowing cloud of pale yellow roses – an extravagance, a flamboyance, a largesse of roses, of creamy yellow, of the scent of damp tea-leaves. Every year Nanda Kaul stared at it in astonishment, wondering where all this lacy, frilly prettiness came from in her hard, stony garden, gale-blown and dour. It crept over the outdoor kitchen, over the woodhouse, and trailed upon every rail, gate and fence, sleeping and sighing all year but for that one month when it was re-born like a sweet, angelic infant in pastel
frills and flounces. Then Nanda Kaul stopped to muse upon the Misses Hughes for a while.

After them, Miss Jane Shrewsbury brewed a more notorious stuff out of the things she grew or dug out of this garden – she said it cured scorpion bites and claimed to have saved many a stung villager carried up to her house, howling in agony. She also poked a fork into her cook's neck when he was choking on a mutton bone in the belief it would make an aperture for him to breathe through. Unfortunately he died and there was much scandal before Dr Hardy, the local medical lion, gave out that it was definitely the mutton bone that killed him and not the fork as suggested by the local scandal-mongers. That was in 1935 and two years later the lady herself was buried in the Kasauli graveyard under a tall cypress, and war broke out immediately thereafter.

During those war years a vivacious Miss Weaver and a reputedly promiscuous Miss Polson fluttered about Carignano in flowered dresses and picture hats, entertaining the Tommies to tea and sherry parties. They organized jumble sales and Saturday night dances at the club just below Carignano and it was the gayest time ever known in Kasauli, the closest Kasauli ever came to being Simla. Memsahibs sent up for the summer and Tommies sent to recuperate from the battlefields jigged and romped with an unknown abandon.

Suddenly it was all over. It was 1947. Maiden ladies were not thought to be safe here any more. Quickly, quickly, before the fateful declaration of independence, they were packed onto the last boats and shipped back to England – virginity intact, honour saved, natives kept at bay. A hefty sigh went up – of relief, of regret. A commonplace remark amongst them had been how like Kasauli was to English country towns of memory. Back in those English country towns, so unexpectedly and prematurely, they sighed and
said no, these were nothing like Kasauli, let alone Simla. But there was nothing to be done, no going back. Carignano was up for sale and Nanda Kaul bought it. The little town went native.

WHEN HE CAME
to the chestnut tree at the foot of the hill to which was nailed a signboard with CARIGNANO written on it in brass letters the postman suddenly came out of hypnosis, lost patience and gave an angry yell.

‘Get on with you,' he shouted, raising his hand in threat. ‘Past ten o'clock and you're still footling along the road.'

The boy gave a start and fled – instinctively, by reflex action. Having run part of the way downhill in surprise, he braked, stopped and, stooping quickly, picked a blade of grass, held it to his lips and gave a rude blast on it to show the postman what he thought of his sudden interference. Then, whistling pleasantly, he hopped erratically on, his large khaki shorts lolloping about his thin hips and his dusty hair flopping up and down on his small head.

Coming up the hill from the direction of the bazaar was Ram Lal, the Carignano cook, carrying a market bag in which a marrow, a loaf of bread and a minced mass of mutton were squashed together in the heat. Ram Lal walked slowly, staring at his tennis shoes which were a size too large for him and sank into the white dust, making a chain of craters for idle dogs to investigate.

Seeing him approach, the postman sank down on a bit of wall under the leafy chestnut tree. He would walk up the steep hill to the house with Ram Lal for company. He
shifted the bag of letters on his shoulder. It was the first really hot day in May and he was sweating. He could have handed the single letter to Ram Lal to take up to the house, but he wiped his forehead with his finger and resolved not to do so, hot as he was. The postman had served in the army for fifteen years before he was discharged and entered the postal service, and he lived rigidly according to rule, as though there were still a sergeant-major behind him, shouting orders whenever he stopped, getting him to move on, punctually and obediently. The postman's ideal was the donkey and he lived like one and sat and waited for Ram Lal to come flopping from crater to crater along the dusty road. At least he would have him for company up that last backbreaking bit to Carignano.

Not that Ram Lal was much company. He was as stiff, almost, as the postman and every bit as dour. When he found the postman waiting for him in the shade of the chestnut tree, all he did was grunt and pause long enough to move the market bag from his right hand to his left.

The postman grunted in answer and got up, heaving his postbag over his shoulder once more.

The pony man went by in a comfortable clatter, leading his pony by the head, a small blonde child from the hotel on its back, and waved his arm and hallooed to the two men. They gave him identical looks of grudging recognition and disapproval of his carefree, clattering ways, grunted in unison and began the climb. The pony man went whistling on, waving a wand he had cut from a bush of Spanish broom. The blonde child nodded involuntarily, sun-struck.

Together, bent-backed, they toiled up the steep path, stones slipping from under their feet, in a way that wildly irritated Nanda Kaul who had come down from the knoll to wait for the postman at the gate, for she always made a point of keeping her back as straight as a rod when walking up that path.

Sighting her, grey and only faintly stirring under the three pine trees that stood by the gate in their exaggerated attitudes as of men going up in flames with their arms outstretched, charred, too, about the trunks, the postman felt something ominous hover in the heavy summer light and mumbled to Ram Lal, ‘No visitors yet?'

Ram Lal merely shook his head.

The postman gave a snorting laugh. Ram Lal turned to stare at him with his small, red-streaked eyes. The postman immediately looked apologetic. ‘Every house in Kasauli is bursting now,' he explained. ‘It is the season.'

‘We have none,' said Ram Lal, firmly.

At the gate, they parted. The postman stood shuffling through his letters and Ram Lal, slightly ducking his capped head to Nanda Kaul, went past her to the kitchen where great, bony, dusty chickens sprang down from the stack of wood by the door to greet him. He flapped at them with his market bag and they croaked back in alarm but crowded closer. They were said to be the descendants of Miss Jane Shrewsbury's original poultry and certainly looked antique, hardy. When he had disappeared into the smoky gloom of the kitchen, they crowded about the door, scraping the floor with their crooked toes in an excited scrabble for attention. In a while he started flinging chopped vegetable heads at them, each one accompanied by a word of filthy abuse.

In the meantime, the postman had detached one letter from the rest and silently handed it over to Nanda Kaul who said clearly but in a voice of suffering, ‘Thank you.' Holding it with her fingers, at a little distance from her side, she walked slowly up the flagstone path along which day lilies bloomed desultorily, under the apricot trees to the veranda where she had her old cane chair.

Here was a letter and she would have to open it. She
resolved to say ‘No' to whatever demand or request it contained. No, no, no.

THE VERANDA LAY
deep in shade. The tiles of its uneven floor were cool. Along the stone steps were pots of geraniums and fuchsias that bloomed unimpaired by the sun as they stood in the shade cast by the low, leafy apricot trees. Here was her old cane chair and she sat down on it, putting the letter down on her lap and gazing instead at the ripening apricots and the pair of bul-buls that quarrelled over them till they fell in a flurry of feathers to the ground, stirred up a small frenzy of dust, then shot off in opposite directions, scolding and abusing till a twist of a worm distracted them. Then there were only the cicadas to be heard, a sound so even and so insubstantial that it seemed to emerge from the earth itself, or from the season – a scent of pine-needles made audible, a spinning of sunlight or of the globe on its axis.

Looking past the leafy branches of those trees and the silvery needles of the pines at the gate, she could see the red rooftops of Lawrence School on the hilltop across the valley, and the fine spire of its church emerging from the seclusion of Sanawar's greenery. It was a comfortable view to have from one's veranda – more comfortable than the one from the back windows of the cliff plunging seven thousand feet down to the Punjab plains – but she was not comforted.

She looked at the scene with her accustomed intensity till a large white and yellow butterfly crossed over, disturbing her concentration, and made her look down at the letter.

It was addressed in her daughter's handwriting. The least loved or, at any rate, the most exasperating of her daughters. Asha, the beauty, had dedicated her life to the cultivation of long, glossy hair and an un wrinkled skin and had had little time left over for her unfortunate daughter, the one who married a diplomat and, as a result of his ill treatment of her, the affairs he had, his drinking and brutality, was reduced to a helpless jelly, put away out of sight and treated as an embarrassment who could, if she tried, pull herself together. In her last letter Asha had written, with her usual heartless blitheness, that she had persuaded Tara to try again. Tara's husband was given a new posting, this time in Geneva, and Asha had persuaded her daughter to go with him, to give him another chance. There was the little problem of their child who was only just recovering from a near-fatal attack of typhoid, but Asha was sure they would find a way to deal with this minor problem. The main thing, she had trumpeted, was for Tara to rouse herself and make another try at being a successful diplomat's wife. Surely Geneva would be an excellent place for such an effort. ‘Why, why shouldn't she be happy?' Asha had written and Nanda Kaul had not replied, had been too disgusted to reply.

She felt an enormous reluctance to open this letter. She looked at it with distaste and foreboding for a long time before she finally tore it open and drew out the bundle of dark blue pages across which Asha's large writing pranced. This writing had none of the writer's loveliness – it sprawled and spread and shrieked out loud an aggressive assurance and aplomb.

In this writing she conveyed a series of disasters and tragedies to her mother who read it through with her lips pressed so tightly together that it made deep lines furrow the skin from the corners of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, dark runnels of disapproval.

‘Darling Mama' (wrote Asha, and Nanda Kaul could scarcely believe that there had been a time when she was actually addressed as such and heard it quite naturally and calmly), ‘just a note this time as I'm in a mad rush. Now that I've persuaded Tara into going to Geneva and Rakesh into taking her – one day I'll tell you how I did that, I had a long talk with him, he's not really so bad as Tara might make you believe, she simply doesn't understand him, doesn't understand
men
, and she really is the wrong type of wife for a man like him so I can't blame him
entirely
although it is true that he does drink – well, I have to get Tara ready. This last year she's done
nothing
, Mama, just let herself go to rack and ruin, as well as her house – and poor little Raka, as you well know. Now she depends on me to wind up her household here and prepare her things and do her shopping for her – she says
she
can't, all she does is sit by Raka's bed and read her stories. So it's poor me who has to dash about all over Delhi – in the heat and dust-storms of summer – buying her saris, jewellery, getting her blouses tailored, having her suitcases mended, everything! Well, I mustn't complain, Mama, you know all I want is Tara to be happy and lead a good life. So I am doing all this for her without complaining.