Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Page A

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? Wasit 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.

Chapter 6
    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.
    â€˜I saw a snake, Ram Lal,’ she told him.
    He took the
biri
out of his mouth. ‘Here?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜A cobra?’
    â€˜It was big – this big,’ she said, showing him with her arm, ‘And yellow. It was sleeping.’
    â€˜Yellow? This big? Ah,’ said Ram Lal, settling his
biri
back between his lips. ‘That was a
daman
. A rat snake. A good snake to have around.’
    â€˜It was quite far down, really.’
    â€˜Don’t go that far,’ Ram Lal said sharply. ‘I told you not to – it isn’t good.’
    â€˜I wanted to see a jackal. I’ve never seen a jackal. I hear them at night.’
    â€˜Why do you want to see a jackal? Didn’t I tell you, they are mad? If they bite you, you will have to go to the Pasteur Institute and get fourteen injections – in the stomach. I did once.’
    â€˜Do jackals bite?’
    â€˜Of course. Jackals are as fierce as cobras. That place there,’ he waved into the dust in which the forms of the pine trees were only barely visible now, writhing in the wind, ‘is very bad, not safe. Why don’t you go to the club and play with the
babas
there?’
    â€˜I did go. But there were no
babas
there. No one.’
    â€˜You should go in the evening, at the proper time,’ he said primly, suddenly recalling better days, spent in service of richer, better homes. ‘You should have an ayah. Then shecould wash you and dress you in clean clothes at four o’clock and take you down to the club. You would meet nice
babas
there. They come in the evenings with their ayahs. They play on the swings and