Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Read Free Book Online

tiles of the veranda to her room.

Chapter 2
    LEFT TO HERSELF in the afternoon, Raka felt over the room with her bare feet. She walked about as the newly caged, thenewly tamed wild ones do, sliding from wall to wall on silent, investigating pads. She patted a cheek of wood here, smoothed a ridge of plaster there. She met a spider that groomed its hairs in a corner, saw lizard’s eyes blinking out of a dark groove. She probed the depth of dust on shelves and ledges, licked a windowpane to cool her tongue-tip. She sagged across the bed on her stomach, hung her head over its edge, but the sun caught her eye, slipped in its yellow wedge and would not allow her to close it.
    It summoned her to the window, dragged her the length of a ray and drew her to the ledge where she laid her head on its comfortable guillotine.
    Below the window she saw stones in a heap, flowers that held no interest, a snail’s discarded shell. Not much.
    But a few feet further on, under the hopeless wooden railing, lay the lip of the cliff and the sudden drop down the red, rock-spattered ravine to the plain that lay stretched out and heavy, the dusty pelt of a yellow animal panting in the sun. Raka blinked at it. She knew it – that plain, that pelt, that yellow summer dust.
    Slipping one leg over the window sill, she climbed out into the bed of day lilies and went quietly to lean over the railing and look down. She knew her great-grandmother’s window overlooked the same scene. She was careful not to crunch the pebbles under her feet. Crouching by the rail, she made out the details that gave the hazy scene edges, angles and interest.
    Shoals of rusted tins, bundles of stained newspaper, peels, rags and bones, all snuggling in grooves, hollows, cracks, and sometimes spilling. Pine trees with charred trunks and contorted branches, striking melodramatic attitudes as on stage. Rocks arrested in mid-roll, rearing up, dropping. Occasional tin rooftops, glinting.
    Looking down the length of the jagged ledge, Raka saw it lined with other back walls and servants’ quarters, tin shedsand cook-houses. Around the bend, these grew in size, rose and billowed into the enormous concrete walls of what looked like a factory, for sharp chimneys thrust out cushions and scarves of smoke, black on the milky blue of the afternoon sky. Chutes emerging from its back wall seemed built to disgorge factory waste into the ravine and immediately below them were small, squat structures that looked like brick kilns amongst the spiked, curved blades of the giant agaves that were, besides the pines, the only vegetation of that blighted gorge.
    Puzzled, Raka turned her head on its stalk, gently. Her father and grandmother had extolled the beauties and delights of a Himalayan hill-station to her, but said nothing of factories. Here was such an enormous one that Raka wondered at their ignorance of it. To her, it seemed to dominate the landscape – a square dragon, boxed, bricked and stoked.
    Lizard-like, she clung to the rail and slid along its length to the outdoor kitchen and looked in to see if Ram Lal were there and could enlighten her. But the place was empty, a blackened, fire-blasted cave in which one fiery, inflamed eye glowed and smouldered by itself. A white hen that had insinuated itself into the kitchen unnoticed, saw the flutter of her white dress, squawked out loud and shot past her, making her step aside in surprise.
    In the room next to the kitchen, still smaller but somewhat brightened by the myriad magazine and calendar pictures stuck to the smoky walls. Ram Lal lay on his string cot, his limbs flung out to its four corners, his cap on his nose, lifting and falling with the low growls and sudden snorts that came and went beneath it.
    Leaving him, Raka detached herself from the kitchen walls and climbed the knoll that rose above the kitchen, helping herself up by holding onto fistfuls of hairy ferns and protruding rocks, to the top where pine trees grew