Fire On the Mountain Read Free Page B

hasn’t quite got over her typhoid yet. She is very weak and the heat and humidity of Bombay will do her no good. Everyone who sees her saysshe should go to the hills to recuperate. So Tara and I have decided it will be best to send her to you for the summer. Later, when Tara is settled in Geneva and has set up house, she will send for Raka. At the moment it is not possible for the child to travel or live in an hotel. We can’t think of a better way for her to recuperate than spend a quiet summer with you in Kasauli. And I know how happy it will make you to have your great-grandchild for company in that lonely house’ (here Asha’s writing, bloated with self-confidence, doubled in size and fairly swelled up out of the blue paper at Nanda Kaul). ‘Now Rakesh’s brother has very kindly agreed to take Raka with him as far as Kalka – he’s taking his family to Simla for a short holiday and Raka can travel with them as far as Kalka. There, he will put her in a taxi and send her up to Kasauli. It should be quite safe. She will be with you on . . .’
    Nanda Kaul narrowed her eyes as she went over the details of her great-grandchild’s journey. Then she folded the blue sheets firmly, as if suppressing the hurry and rush of her daughter’s excited plans, and slipped them back into the envelope. Placing it on her lap again, she looked out into the apricot trees, down the path to the gate, the cloudy hydrangeas, the pines scattering and hissing in the breeze, to the red roofs of Lawrence School on Sanawar’s green hill-top. One long finger moved like a searching insect over the letter on her lap, moved involuntarily as she struggled to suppress her anger, her disappointment and her total loathing of her daughter’s meddling, busybody ways, her granddaughter’s abject helplessness, and her great-granddaughter’s impending arrival here at Carignano.
    She tried to divert her mind from these thoughts and concentrate on this well known and perpetually soothing scene. She tried to look on it as she had before the letter arrived, with pleasure and satisfaction. But she was too distracted now.
    All she wanted was to be alone, to have Carignano to herself, in this period of her life when stillness and calm were all that she wished to entertain.

Chapter 5
    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 the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves, to the Punjab plains – a silver haze in the summer heat – stretching out to a dim yellow horizon, 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 thought of the veranda of their house in the small university town in Punjab, the Vice-Chancellor’s house over which she had presided with such an air as to strike awe into visitors who came to call and leave them slightly gaping. She had had her cane chair there, too, and she had sat there, not still and emptily, but mending clothes, sewing on strings and buttons and letting out hems, at her feet a small charcoal brazier on which a pot of
kheer
bubbled, snipping threads and instructing the servant girl to stir, stir, don’tstop stirring or it’ll burn, and then someone had to be called to hold the smallest child from falling into the bubbling pot and carry it away, screaming worse than if it were