Fire On the Mountain Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜But there is one problem I can’t help Tara with’ (the letter ran on just as Nanda Kaul had known it would, and she tensed her knees under the silk folds of her sari) ‘and the problem is, of course, Raka. Now, Mama, you know I have to dash off to Bombay at the end of the month to help Vina with her confinement – you see how old grandmothers have to rush about these days, it’s almost as bad as having another set of babies oneself – and Tara thought I could take Raka with me. But that is quite out of the question. Poor little Raka looks like a ghost and