Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Page B

their parents play bridge and tennis. Then they have lemonade and Vimto in the garden. That is what you should do,’ he told her, severely.
    Raka listened to him create this bright picture of hill-station club life politely rather than curiously. It was a life she had observed from the outside – in Delhi, in Manila, in Madrid – but had never tried to enter. She had always seemed to lack the ticket. ‘Hmm,’ she said, picking at a nicely crusty scab on her elbow.
    â€˜Don’t do that,’ Ram Lal said sharply, still speaking out of that proper and ordered world in the distance to which he had once belonged. ‘You will make it bleed again and it will leave an ugly scar. You get so dirty crawling about on the hillsides.’
    â€˜I will soon bathe,’ Raka assured him, and shifted on her bottom with impatience at this new censoriousness of his.
    â€˜Yes, I had better take your bucket in before the dust-storm arrives. Look, look, it is coming,’ he shouted, holding down his cap about his ears as the wind tore across.
    Raka stood up on the stone to watch the dense yellow haze gather and hurl itself across the plains, blotting out the scattered villages and mango groves, sweep on to the foot of the mountain and then, as if in rage at finding its way blocked, mounting the hillside, lifting higher and higher till it swept over the cliff and engulfed Kasauli, blotting out the view, the sky and the air in a gritty mass.
    Ram Lal caught her by the shoulder and pushed her into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them. She went immediately to the window, wiped off the grime and peered out.
    A white hen was lifted into the air and tossed past thewindow in a frantic, fluttery arc, its squawks snatched out of its beak and shattered like glass.
    The sun was bobbing in and out of the dust clouds, lighting them up in a great conflagration – a splendid bonfire that burned in the heart of the yellow clouds. The whole world was livid, inflamed. Only the closest pine trees showed, black silhouettes lashing from side to side.
    â€˜The
hamam
will be knocked over!’ Ram Lal yelled. ‘All that boiling water and fire!’
    â€˜Will it set fire to the garden?’ shouted Raka. ‘Will it set the hill on fire?’
    â€˜Don’t know, don’t know,’ he muttered worriedly, grinding the palms of his hands together. ‘This is how forest fires do start. I can’t tell you how many forest fires we see each year in Kasauli. Some have come up as far as our railing. You can see how many of the trees are burnt, and houses too. Once the house down the hill, South View, was burnt down to the ground before the fire engine arrived.’
    â€˜Could they drive it down the hill to South View?’
    â€˜Yes, they dragged it down by jeeps, but there was no water. There is a water shortage every summer in Kasauli. There was no water to put out the fire and the whole house burnt down, and the cowshed with two buffaloes in it.’
    â€˜I’ve seen a burnt hut up on top of that hill there, on the upper Mall,’ Raka remembered.
    â€˜Hut? It was a beautiful cottage. An English Mem lived there. It was burnt down in a forest fire and she went mad and was taken to the lunatic asylum with her arms and legs tied with rope. They say all her hair was burnt off, even her eyelashes, when she went in to save her cat. The watchman says he can still hear the cat howling in the ruins at night.’
    â€˜Can he? Can you? Have you? At midnight?’
    But Ram Lal was too worried about his
hamam
of boiling water to tell her ghost stories now. He came to the window and stared out, trying to make out its brass shape in thebroiling dust. They could hear the grit and gravel flying and dashing against the stone walls and tin roofs, raucous poltergeists of the storm.
    â€˜If it falls over, all that dry grass will be set on fire,’ he worried. ‘And I’m old,’ he groaned