Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai

distasteful. It meant asking the lawyer over and she wished no one to come.
    She wished no one to go either – certainly not Raka.

Chapter 15
    A HIGH WIND whined through the pine trees all afternoon, lashing the branches and scattering the cones. Up on the knoll, Raka sat hugging her knees, watching the long-tailed rose-ringed parakeets that clung to the cones, biting out their sweet nuts, letting go with frantic shrieks as the wind knocked into them and tore away the cones, tossing them down the hill. Small white butterflies were being blown about like scraps of paper over the bleached grass, but the pairs would not be separated, they always found each other again and fluttered together, two by two.
    When Nanda Kaul came out into the garden after her afternoon nap, to call Raka to tea, the greyness along the horizon had curdled into white and grey lumps that the wind was driving lower and lower across the Simla Hills. They stood together, watching.
    â€˜It’s a storm from the north. How strange, at this time of year. We have dust-storms from the south, in June, and the monsoon follows them. We get north winds later in the year usually,’ the old lady mused. The wind was whipping at her sari and cracking the silk folds against each other so she retreated to the veranda.
    Over their tea they watched the clouds drop from the sky, swollen and heavy with cold, like a great polar bear crouching, hurrying over the hill-tops, its white fur settling on rooftops, brushing the hillsides, enclosing the pines. Then it was upon them. With it, the rain.
    What rain! The house shook, the roof crackled, long raindrops slanted in. They rose, picked up the tea-tray andretreated to the drawing-room. It was dark here. A light was lit. The room took on the appearance of a shelter, warm, glowing. The downpour drummed on the taut tin roof, deafening. The coolness and wetness of the air refreshed, exhilarated – it was iced wine dashed in the face.
    Raka could not sit still. She went to the window to watch, rubbing the pane with her nose. Or wandered about the room, touching things. She normally touched nothing in the house.
    Nanda Kaul poured out another and another cup of tea, recklessly. She, too, felt a kind of restlessness, a release.
    â€˜We could be shipwrecked,’ she said with a smile so unaccustomed that it was stiff and cracked. ‘Water, water everywhere. What a storm.’
    The wind flung the rain at the windowpane. Raka backed away, came and sat on a stool, put out a finger and stroked a little bronze Buddha that sat inscrutably smiling and stilly counting its beads on the tabletop.
    Nanda Kaul looked down at the scratched brown finger with a dirty nail stroking the smooth bronze head. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful piece?’ she said suddenly in a high, musical voice that did not sound as if it belonged to her. ‘It comes all the way from Tibet, you know. My father brought it.’
    Raka, her chin cupped in her hand, looked at the old lady in some surprise. No one had told her of her great-great-grandfather, or anyone else, ever having visited Tibet. But perhaps they had, and she had not listened. She was very selective about her listening. Now she did.
    â€˜That was long, long ago at a time when hardly anyone had even thought of trying to go to Tibet. Only the government could arrange such an expedition, and then it was with a great deal of military aid. Traders went, of course, for the sake largely of musk, that precious scent that is so highly prized all over the world. They would bring back other things, too – turquoise, gold and silver, carved idols andbrocades. But my father did not go either as an official or a trader. He went as an explorer, out of curiosity.’ She rubbed the tips of her long, fine fingers together, nervously, as she talked, and gazed, not at Raka, but at the small, quiet Buddha. ‘We had spent the summer in Kashmir, of course. At the end of it, in early