Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Read Free Book Online Page B

watched the child seethe silently on the small stool beside her, seethe as if she were a thousand black mosquitoes, a stilly humming conglomerate of them, and did not know whether to contain or release this dire seething.
    She chose not to. She did not want to be drawn into a child’s world again – real or imaginary, it was bound to betray. Sighing under the weight of her destiny, she poured out another cup of hot, black tea, murmuring ‘How hot it’s grown. Too hot. Do you think you’d like to take a walk or is it too hot?’ Let her contain herself or release herself, whatever she could do best, thought Nanda Kaul, drinking the bitter dregs.

Chapter 4
    NANDA KAUL NEVER discovered what Raka did with herself. All she discovered was that the child had a gift for disappearing – suddenly, silently. She would be gone, totally, not to return for hours.
    Occasionally she caught a glimpse of her scrambling up a stony hillside, grasping at tufts of grass or bushes of Spanish broom, her small white-knickered bottom showing above a pair of desperately clinging heels. Or wandering down a lane in a slow, straying manner, stopping to strip a thorny bush of its few berries or to examine an insect under a leaf. Then she would round a boulder or drop from the lip of a cliff and vanish.
    She would return with her brown legs scratched, her knees bruised, sucking a finger stung by nettles, her hair brown under a layer of dust, her eyes very still and thoughtful as though she had visited strange lands and seen fantastic, improbable things that lingered in the mind.
    It was against the old lady’s policy to question her but it annoyed her intensely that she should once again be drawn into a position where it was necessary for her to take an interest in another’s activities and be responsible for their effect and outcome.
    When would she be done?
    She wrote a letter to Asha in her very plain, tall writing, in green ink on large sheets of white paper, briefly informing her of Raka’s safe arrival and choosing to say nothing that might give away her resentment, her grievance.
    As she folded the sheets and slipped them into a large envelope, she set her lips together and decided to make it clear to Raka – that Raka was a perceptive child was clear to
her
– that she was not part of Nanda Kaul’s life, that she had her own place and might stay in it.
    Seeing her emerge from the dark like a soundless moth, or dawdle up the path nursing a hand swollen and red with nettle stings, Nanda Kaul turned her head slightly and called to Ram Lal ‘Is the child’s bath water hot?’ and Raka would slip past her on her way to her bath.
    So they worked out the means by which they would live together and each felt she was doing her best at avoiding theother but found it was not so simple to exist and yet appear not to exist.
    Nanda Kaul could not help finding the child’s long absences as perturbing as her presence was irksome. Occasionally she found herself walking restlessly from room to room or from one end of the garden to the other, not in search – it was not in her to search out another – but because the child’s arrival and disappearance were so disquieting.
    She was like a rabbit conjured up by a magician – drawn unwillingly out of the magic hat, flashing past Nanda Kaul, then vanishing in the dark of a bagful of tricks.
    There was nothing nastier to Nanda Kaul’s mind than magic.
    Why should the calm of her existence be drawn taut, tense by speculation on this child’s wanderings? So, when Raka did turn up, unpunctually, her legs scratched and the pockets of her dress stained with raspberry juice, Nanda Kaul turned a look on her that was reproachful rather than welcoming.
    But Raka ignored her. She ignored her so calmly, so totally that it made Nanda Kaul breathless. She eyed the child with apprehension now, wondering at this total rejection, so natural,