Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai

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-needlesof 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.

Chapter 5
    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