Fire on the Mountain

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.

Getting up at last, she went slowly round to the back of the house and leant on the wooden railing on which the yellow rose creeper had blossomed so youthfully last month but was now reduced to an exhausted mass of grey creaks and groans again. She gazed down into the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves […] and said Is it wrong? Have I not done enough and had enough? I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing? But there was no answer and of course she expected none.

Looking down, over all those years she had survived and borne, she saw them, not bare and shining as the plains below, but like the gorge, cluttered, choked and blackened with the heads of children and grandchildren, servants and guests, all restlessly surging, clamouring about her.

She had practised this stillness, this composure, for years, for an hour every afternoon: it was an art, not easily acquired. The most difficult had been those years in that busy house where doors were never shut […] She remembered how […] she had spent the sleepless hour making out the direction from which a shout came, or a burst of giggles, an ominous growling from the dogs, a contest of squirrels under the guavas in the orchard […]All was subdued, but nothing was ever still. […]

This would go on for an hour and she would keep her eyes tightly clenched, her hands folded on her chest […] determinedly not responding. The effort to not respond would grow longer by the minute, heavier, more unendurable, till at last it was sitting on her chest, grasping her by the neck. At four o’clock she would break out from under it with a gasp.

Walking faster and faster back and forth, back and forth over the lawn, she had stayed out till she heard the car […] turn in at the gate […] Lights off, silence, then the throwing open of the car door, and her husband had come out. He had been to drop some of the guests home—no, she corrected herself with asperity, one of the guests home. She watched him go up the veranda steps, puffing at his cigar […] She had not moved, not made a sound. She watched him cross the veranda, go into the drawing room, and waited till the light there went out and another came on in the bedroom that had been only a small dressing-room until she had had his bed put there. Then she paced the lawn again, slower and slower.

[…]

That was one time she had been alone: a moment of private triumph, cold and proud.

Seated on the veranda in the late afternoon shade, Nanda Kaul waved away the tea tray and read, in small sips, bits and pieces from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

‘When A Woman Lives Alone’ was the title of one scrap that caught her eye:

“When a woman lives alone, her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond, it should be overgrown with water plants. It is not essential that the garden be covered with sage brush, but weeds should be growing through the sand in patches, for this gives the place a poignantly desolate look.

I greatly dislike a woman’s house when it is clear she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be, and when the gate is kept tightly shut.”

The care of others was a habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid. It had been a religious calling she had believed in till she found it fake. It had been a vocation that one day went dull and drought-struck as though its life-spring had dried up.

It had happened on her first day alone at Carignano. After her husband’s death, her sons and daughters had come to help her empty the Vice-Chancellor’s house, pack and crate their belongings and distribute them, then escort her to Kasauli. For a while, they had stood about, in Carignano, like too much furniture. She had wondered what to do with them.

Fortunately, they had gone away. Brought up by her to be busy and responsible, they all had families and employments to tend. None could stay with her. When they left, she paced the house, proprietorially, feeling the feel of each stone in the paving with bare feet.

Commotion preceded her like a band of langurs. Only it took the form of schoolboys who were unfortunately let out from school at just the same time as Ila das was proceeding toward Carignano with her uneven, rushing step, in her ancient white court shoes, prodding the tip of her great brown umbrella into the dust with an air of faked determination. Like langurs, the boys swung about her, long-armed, careless, insulting. They hooted at her little grey topknot that wobbled on top of her head, at her spectacles that slipped down to the tip of her nose and were only prevented from falling off by an ancient purple ribbon looped over her ears, at the grey rag of the petticoat that gaped dismally beneath the lace hem of her sari—at everything, in short, that was Ila Das. […] She said only harmless things like “I’ll tell your teacher—I know your Principal […]”

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 willful rejection of the child.

Seeing Raka bend her head to study a pine cone in her fist, the eyelids drooping 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.

[…] 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 an pursue her own secret life amongst the rocks and pines of Kasauli.

Bending down so that her face was at a level with the hunched child’s and her nose tapered softly forward, she said, “Raka, you really are a great-grandchild of mine, aren’t you? You are more like me than any of my children or grandchildren. You are exactly like me, Raka.”

But Raka retreated pell-mell from this outspoken advance. It was too blatant, too obvious for her who loved secrecy above all. Her small face blanched ad she pinched her lips together in distaste.

Nanda Kaul was equally shocked. Quickly straightening her back, she sat in her chair, stiffly. By the manner in which she tensed herself and drew strict lines down her face and folded her hands in her lap stilly, it was clear that she was trying to repair her authority, her composure, her distance in age.

They averted their faces from each other.

But it gave her an increased sense of Raka’s dependence on her, Nanda Kaul. She was not sure if it was poignant, ironical or merely irritating that Raka herself remained totally unaware of her dependence, was indeed as independent and solitary as ever. Watching her wandering amongst the rocks and agaves of the ravine, tossing a horse chestnut rhythmically from hand to hand, Nanda Kaul wondered if she at all realized how solitary she was. She was the only child Nanda Kaul had ever known who preferred to stand apart and go off and disappear to being loved, cared for and made the center of attention. The children Nanda Kaul had known had wanted only to be such centres: Raka alone did not.

Going down into the garden, Nanda Kaul said, in a voice that was incredibly altered, that was hoarse with a true remembrance, “How funny, Raka, I just remembered how your mother, when she visited me here as a little girl, used to sing ‘Rainy days are lily days! Rainy days are lily days!’”

“Lily days?” said Raka, puzzled. “What did she mean?”

“You’ll see,” Nanda Kaul said, and her face twisted oddly at the thought of the blue letter folded up inside her desk. “Go now, go for your walk,” she said, harshly.

In the silence that followed, Nanda Kaul bitterly cursed her failure to comfort children, her total inability to place herself in another’s position and act accordingly. Fantasy and fairy tales had their place in life, she knew it so well. Why then did she tell the child the truth? Who wanted truth? Who could stand it? Nobody. Not even herself. So how could Raka?

But Raka did not say anything more. Her face was pale, but composed. She might have been indifferent, although deliberately so. After all, she had known her mother ill for most of her life, mysteriously ill, mostly in bed, under a loose pink blanket that smelled of damp, like the lilies. It was no new shock. Her voice had something flat about it, Nanda Kaul noted, when she got up, saying “I think I’ll go out now, Nani.”

“Oh yes, all my father’s animals lived inside. I really believe he cared for them as much as for us. Even the pangolin. You wouldn’t think anyone could be attached to that hard, scaly creature, always curled up inside its armour, but somehow my father was. He admired it, you see—he admired anything uncommon, extraordinary…”

As she murmured on, touching the knives and forks on the table, her eyes wandering in a kind of grey thicket of dreams, the child squirmed, looked over her shoulder at the window, at the sun glistening on the knoll, the pine boughs dipping as the parrots sprang on them, screaming, and longed to get away. She could not understand this new talkativeness of her great-grandmother’s who had preferred, till lately, not to talk to her at all, nor had wanted to be talked to. Now she was unable to stop.

But now Raka sighed and twisted aside to see if Ram Lal would not come and release her from this disagreeable intimacy. He did not come. She would have to do something. She would have to break out into freedom again. She could not bear to be confined to the old lady’s fantasy world when the reality outside appealed so strongly.

She thought desperately, with longing, of the charred house on the ridge, of the fire-blasted hilltop where nothing sounded, mercifully, but the creaking of the pines in the wind and the demented cuckoos, wildly calling.

And here she was, hedged, smothered, stifled inside the old lady’s words, dreams and more words. She yawned with boredom.

“You are tired,” said Nanda Kaul, sadly.

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.

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 on to its back, and sighed.

Nanda Kaul sat back in her upright chair and gazed straight at [Ila Das], in silence. She was not going to help Ila Das play this game. No, it was too shameful. She had decided that it was shameful and that, in any case, it had no appeal for Raka, the child who never played games.

“But the summers were best,” Ila Das burbled on. “In spite of the heat and dust, summers were best. Those enormous melons that grew in your garden—the children would split them and eat them on the veranda steps. The lichee trees would be loaded, oh loaded, with bunches of ripe pink fruit. And the jamun tree—mum, mum,” she gobbled. “And after the heat of the day, the lovely evenings out on the freshly watered lawn.”

Now the pink lichees, the badminton games and piano tunes fled from Ila Das’s side, leaving behind a shriveled, shaking thing. Little by little, all those sweetnesses, those softnesses died or departed, leaving her every minute drier, dustier and more desperate.

Nanda Kaul knew: she had followed this despairing progress from not too great a distance. So Ila Das could turn to her with a harsh honesty that was as real as her memory-making had been, and Nanda Kaul knew how real each was in its turn, how they came together, one bitter, corroded edge joining the other, making up this wretched whole.

“Isn’t it absurd,” she rattled on, “how helpless our upbringing made us, Nanda. We thought we were being equipped with the very best—French lessons, piano lessons, English governesses—my, all that only to find it left us helpless, positively handicapped!” She cracked with laughter like an old egg, “Now if I were only of the peasants in my village, perhaps I’d manage quite well. Grow a pumpkin vine, keep a goat, pick up kindling in the forest for fire—and perhaps I could cut down those thirty rupees I need to twenty-five, to twenty—but not, I think, less.” Almost crying, she turned to Nanda Kaul. “Do you think I could do with less?”

Once under the chestnut trees of the Lower Mall, Ila Das tried to tease herself out of her panic. Why was she afraid? Of whom? She was not in debt to anyone in the bazaar. No, Ila Das would never take a loan, never. Ooh, what would her father have thought if she had? She gave a little spurting giggle at the thought of her father, in his fawn waistcoat with the gold watch chain cascading out of his pocket, knowing his daughter, groomed by a long line of governesses and ayahs, to be in debt to some hairy, half-dressed shopkeeper.

But here she stopped herself. Why did she think of that kindly concerned man in the grainshop as hairy, half-dressed? Now when would she ever get over that pompous education of her, leave it all behind and learn to deal with the world, now her world, as it was?

The last of the light had left the valley. It was already a deep violet and only the Kasauli ridge, where Carignano stood invisibly, was still bright with sunlight, russet and auburn, copper and brass. An eagle took off from the peak of Monkey Point, lit up like a torch in the sky, and dropped slowly down into the valley, lower and lower, till it was no more than a sere leaf, a scrap of burnt paper, drifting on currents of air, silently.

No, no, it is a lie! No, it cannot be. It was a lie—Ila was not raped, not dead. It was all a lie, all. She had lied to Raka, lied about everything. Her father had never been to Tibet […] They had not had bears and leopards in their home, nothing but overfed dogs and bad-tempered parrots. Nor had her husband loved and cherished her and kept her like a queen […] And her children—[… she] neither understood nor loved them. She did not live here alone by choice—she lived here alone because that was what she was forced to do, reduced to doing. All those graces and glories with which she had tried to captivate Raka were only a fabrication: they helped her to sleep at night, they were tranquillizers, pills. She had lied to Raka. And Ila had lied, too. Ila, too, had lied, had tried.