Fire On the Mountain (6 page)

Leaving him, Raka detached herself from the kitchen walls and climbed the knoll that rose above the kitchen, helping herself up by holding onto fistfuls of hairy ferns and protruding rocks, to the top where pine trees grew in a ring
amongst the stones. Here a breeze stirred, cool, dry and resinous.

Raka leaned against the crusted bark of the tree, as thick and scorched as pieces of burnt toast, feeling the cracked surfaces by rubbing her shoulder-blades against them. Down below her, on the other side of the knoll, was the green rooftop of a large, low building that had bright geraniums in baskets along its verandas, white muslin curtains that the windows alternately inhaled and exhaled, a giant deodar tree to shade it and, across the road, freshly swept and marked tennis courts, empty and waiting. That must be the club her grandmother had spoken of, but deserted now, asleep. It seemed that all Kasauli slept except for the cicadas that sawed and fiddled without stop. In the sky, huge vultures circled lazily, stealthily, on currents of air, prowling for game.

Raka slid down on her haunches, then lowered herself onto a flat stone at the foot of the tree. Resting the small knobs of her spine against the trunk, she surveyed Sanawar which lay in the deep shade of its trees, and Dagshai and Sabathu, handfuls of pebbles gleaming on golden hilltops. A cricket close by broke in raucously upon the silence and she spent the rest of the afternoon lifting stones in search of it.

WHEN AT LAST
she heard Ram Lal knocking about in the kitchen, making tea – the loose, jingling sounds so clearly proclaimed tea-time and not any other, heavier meal – she slid down the knoll and went to question him about the factory.

In between setting out the tea-cups on an old walnut tray, blowing up the fire into a blaze and whipping at clouds of smoke with his kitchen rags, Ram Lal told her.

‘That is the Pasteur Institute. It is where doctors make serum for injections. When a man is bitten by a mad dog, he is taken there for injections – fourteen, in the stomach. I've had them myself. Once a whole village was rounded up and taken there – a dog had gone mad and bitten everyone in the village. The dog had to be killed. Its head was cut off and sent to the Institute. The doctors cut them open and look into them. They have rabbits and guinea pigs there, too, many animals. They use them for tests.'

He stopped to pour boiling water from the great black kettle into the tea-pot and Raka watched the hissing stream, hanging onto the edge of the table by her fingernails.

‘Why is there so much smoke?' she asked, in a somewhat weak voice.

‘Oh, they are always boiling serum there – boiling, boiling. They make serum for the whole country.'

Going out with the tea-tray balanced professionally on the palm of one hand, he stopped by the railing and nodded in the direction of the concrete Institute walls that had worried Raka by their incongruity and their oddly oppressive threat. ‘See those chutes? They empty the bones and ashes of dead animals down into the ravine. It's a bad place. Don't go there.'

‘Why?'

‘Jackals come at night to chew the bones. Then they go mad and bite the village dogs. The mad dogs run around, biting people. Keep away from there, huh? Specially at night. At night you hear jackals howling and people have seen ghosts.' He lowered his voice. ‘The ghosts of people who have died of dog-bite and snake-bite roam on the hillsides. It isn't safe, hear?'

Raka pressed pale lips together and nodded. She followed
Ram Lal to the veranda where he put down the tray, and sat down very stiff and still while her great-grandmother poured out a cup of milk for her with a drop of tea in it.

As she handed over the cup, Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes and said ‘How pale you are, child. Didn't you rest at all?'

Raka ducked her head and lifted the cup to her mouth. Her great-grandmother was left to interpret the motion as she wished.

After they had emptied their cups, ‘What will you do with yourself now, Raka?' Nanda Kaul wondered, having watched the child seethe silently on the small stool beside her, seethe as if she were a thousand black mosquitoes, a stilly humming conglomerate of them, and did not know whether to contain or release this dire seething.

She chose not to. She did not want to be drawn into a child's world again – real or imaginary, it was bound to betray. Sighing under the weight of her destiny, she poured out another cup of hot, black tea, murmuring ‘How hot it's grown. Too hot. Do you think you'd like to take a walk or is it too hot?' Let her contain herself or release herself, whatever she could do best, thought Nanda Kaul, drinking the bitter dregs.

NANDA KAUL NEVER
discovered what Raka did with herself. All she discovered was that the child had a gift for disappearing – suddenly, silently. She would be gone, totally, not to return for hours.

Occasionally she caught a glimpse of her scrambling up a stony hillside, grasping at tufts of grass or bushes of Spanish broom, her small white-knickered bottom showing above a pair of desperately clinging heels. Or wandering down a lane in a slow, straying manner, stopping to strip a thorny bush of its few berries or to examine an insect under a leaf. Then she would round a boulder or drop from the lip of a cliff and vanish.

She would return with her brown legs scratched, her knees bruised, sucking a finger stung by nettles, her hair brown under a layer of dust, her eyes very still and thoughtful as though she had visited strange lands and seen fantastic, improbable things that lingered in the mind.

It was against the old lady's policy to question her but it annoyed her intensely that she should once again be drawn into a position where it was necessary for her to take an interest in another's activities and be responsible for their effect and outcome.

When would she be done?

She wrote a letter to Asha in her very plain, tall writing, in green ink on large sheets of white paper, briefly informing her of Raka's safe arrival and choosing to say nothing that might give away her resentment, her grievance.

As she folded the sheets and slipped them into a large envelope, she set her lips together and decided to make it clear to Raka – that Raka was a perceptive child was clear to
her
– that she was not part of Nanda Kaul's life, that she had her own place and might stay in it.

Seeing her emerge from the dark like a soundless moth, or dawdle up the path nursing a hand swollen and red with nettle stings, Nanda Kaul turned her head slightly and called to Ram Lal ‘Is the child's bath water hot?' and Raka would slip past her on her way to her bath.

So they worked out the means by which they would live together and each felt she was doing her best at avoiding the
other but found it was not so simple to exist and yet appear not to exist.

Nanda Kaul could not help finding the child's long absences as perturbing as her presence was irksome. Occasionally she found herself walking restlessly from room to room or from one end of the garden to the other, not in search – it was not in her to search out another – but because the child's arrival and disappearance were so disquieting.

She was like a rabbit conjured up by a magician – drawn unwillingly out of the magic hat, flashing past Nanda Kaul, then vanishing in the dark of a bagful of tricks.

There was nothing nastier to Nanda Kaul's mind than magic.

Why should the calm of her existence be drawn taut, tense by speculation on this child's wanderings? So, when Raka did turn up, unpunctually, her legs scratched and the pockets of her dress stained with raspberry juice, Nanda Kaul turned a look on her that was reproachful rather than welcoming.

But Raka ignored her. She ignored her so calmly, so totally that it made Nanda Kaul breathless. She eyed the child with apprehension now, wondering at this total rejection, so natural, instinctive and effortless when compared with her own planned and wilful rejection of the child.

Seeing Raka bend her head to study a pine cone in her fist, the eyelids slipping down like two mauve shells and the short hair settled like a dusty cap about her scalp, Nanda Kaul saw that she was the finished, perfected model of what Nanda Kaul herself was merely a brave, flawed experiment.

It made her nostrils flare and her fingers twitch but she had to admit that Raka was not like any other child she had known, not like any of her own children or grandchildren. Amongst them, she appeared a freak by virtue of never making a demand. She appeared to have no needs. Like an insect burrowing through the sandy loam and pine-needles
of the hillsides, like her own great-grandmother, Raka wanted only one thing – to be left alone and pursue her own secret life amongst the rocks and pines of Kasauli.

If Nanda Kaul was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of duty and obligation, her great-granddaughter was a recluse by nature, by instinct. She had not arrived at this condition by a long route of rejection and sacrifice – she was born to it, simply.

Standing by the railing at the back of the house and watching the child carefully lower herself down the cliff to the kilns and agaves and refuse of the ravine, Nanda Kaul felt a small admiration for her rise and stir.

RAKA DROPPED LOWER
and lower down the ravine. The lower she went the hotter it grew. Red dust settled between her toes and sandpapered her sandals. Runnels of sweat trickled from under her arms and behind her knees. The plain below opened wide its yellow mouth and it was its oven breath that billowed up the mountainside and enclosed her.

But she ignored that great hot plain below. Her eye was on the heart of the agaves, that central dagger guarded by a ring of curved spikes, on the contortions of the charred pine trunks and the paralysed attitudes of the rocks.

The refuse that the folds of the gorge held and slowly ate and digested was of interest too. There were splotches of blood, there were yellow stains oozing through paper, there were bones and the mealy ashes of bones. Tins of Tulip ham and Kissan jam. Broken china, burnt kettles, rubber tyres and bent wheels.

Once she came upon a great, thick yellow snake poured in rings upon itself, basking on the sunned top of a flat rock. She watched it for a long while, digging her toes into the slipping red soil, keeping still the long wand of broom she held in her hand. She had seen the tips of snakes' tails parting the cracks of rocks, she had seen slit eyes watching her from grottoes of shade, she had heard the slither of scales upon the ground, but she had never seen the whole creature before. Here was every part of it, loaded onto the stone, a bagful, a loose soft sackful of snake.

Leaving it to bask, she slid quietly on downwards, and now sweat ran from her face, too, trickled out between the roots of her hair in springs.

She shaded her eyes to look up at the swords of the Pasteur Institute chimneys piercing the white sky, lashed about with black whips of smoke. Raka sniffed the air and smelt cinders, smelt serum boiling, smelt chloroform and spirit, smelt the smell of dogs' brains boiled in vats, of guinea pigs' guts, of rabbits secreting fear in cages packed with coiled snakes, watched by doctors in white.

She licked her dry lips and tasted salted flakes of sweat. She dropped her eyes and gazed down at the plains, smothered in dust so that she could not make out cities, rivers or roads. Only the Chandigarh lake gleamed dully, metallically – a snake's eye, watching. Dust storms tore across the plain, rushing and lifting the yellow clouds higher and higher up the mountainside.

Raka began to scramble uphill. As she went, storming through soil and gravel, starting small avalanches of pebbles and loud, clanking ones of empty tins, she disturbed the crickets and made them raise their voices in alarm. Like a chorus singing and singing at the back of a stage, they sang in some difficult tongue she had not met before – not in Geneva, nor in New York, nor anywhere in that polyglot world she had once been led through. Was it Sanskrit? Was
it Greek? It was complicated, shrill, incessant and Raka shook and shook her head to get the buzz out, half-closed her eyes against the glare and dust and had her thigh slashed by the blade of a fierce agave. Small beads of blood bubbled out of the white streak of the scratch. She doubled over to lick them, then hauled herself up over the lip of the cliff.

By a slight error in calculation, she came up not in the Carignano garden but into the backyard of the Kasauli club. She halted, stumbled a bit at this dismaying error, then saw that all the doors and windows of the green-roofed building were shut and there was no one about. She skirted the kitchen, allowing herself a glance out of the corner of her eye at its vast blackened oven, its acres of wooden tabletops, its cupboards of damp china and dull silver, all limp and lifeless at this hour. Ducking her head, she edged past the honeysuckle-hung porch, dashed across the garden where salvias and hydrangeas wilted, unwatered, and tumbled out onto the road that led up to Carignano.

RAM LAL HAD
stoked up the
hamam
with splinters of firewood and filled its round brass drum with water for Raka's bath. Having lit it, he sat down beside it on a flat stone outside the kitchen door, and smoked a quiet
biri
.

Then Raka came sliding down the knoll and almost on top of him – a bird fallen out of its nest, a nest fallen out of a tree – with grass sticking out of her hair and thorns stuck into her sandals. Sucking a finger that tended to get stuck in adventures, she sat down beside the
hamam
, listening to it thrum with heat like a steamboat. When the water was hot,
Ram Lal would spin the tap at the side, fill a brass bucket and carry it into her bathroom. The dust and grime would flow in a soapy sludge through the green drain hole into the lily bed outside. Till then, they would sit together.

‘I saw a snake, Ram Lal,' she told him.

He took the
biri
out of his mouth. ‘Here?'

‘No, down in the ravine,' she said, pointing towards the cliff which was melting into an orange haze now that the sun was dropping westwards through the dustclouds over the plains.