Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Page B

couldn’t explain it. But he told us he saw how dafkness could fall at midday, the sky turn ashen, the sun disappear, all birds and animals fall silent as the earth lay in a vast shadow till the sorcerer lifted his hand, spoke magic words and made it vanish.
    â€˜Stranger still, they could cause tempests to rise out of a clear, sunlit day. Sudden winds would blow, strong enough to rip tents out by their pegs and break the horses’ tetherings, and lightning would flash and thunder roll. It was a sport to the sorcerers, nothing more, but the people would fall flat on their faces and pray, in fear. My father watched it all, you know, he told us about it . . .’
    â€˜Did he write a book?’
    â€˜A book?’ she laughed. ‘Oh no, he was not an academic person at all, not like my husband. He was an explorer, a discoverer. He travelled, hunted, collected exquisite things that he eventually brought home to us.’ She stared at the bare walls of Carignano. ‘It is a pity I have none, or only so few, of his belongings. We were a large family – they were scattered. One of my brothers went to Mauritius, you know, another to Ceylon. And my sisters were all great collectors – in their homes you would see
tankhas
, human hip-bone trumpets, carpets and furs. All I have kept is – this.’
    Both gazed at the Buddha, sole survivor of that splendour, looking as though the holocaust around him was less than the dust to him.

Chapter 16
    THEN NANDA KAUL went on, raising her voice above the drumming of the rain on the roof and the booming and echoing of thunder in the hills that followed the rain like hunting horns.
    â€˜The house I had in the plains was crowded, too crowded – my parents’ things, my husband’s things, his family’s. There were Persian carpets his father had bought in Iran when he was with the Ambassador there. There was glass his mother had bought in Venice. There were the Moghul miniatures my husband collected.’ She covered her eyes, as though dazzled, and bent her head.
    The thunder galloped across the roof, chasing the fleecy clouds and the lightening rain.
    â€˜It was too much, you know, Raka. I am not a collector myself. I had to break free of it. So I came to Carignano without any of it.’
    â€˜Left it behind?’
    â€˜No, no, I gave up the house – it went to the next Vice-Chancellor. No, I distributed it all – to your grandmother, her sister and brothers. I haven’t even seen any of it for years,’ she wound up quickly, seeing Raka twist restlessly on her stool, her interest lost in this talk of belongings rather than happenings. Opening out her hands as though willingly releasing the child, she got up brusquely and went to the window. ‘There, it’s slowing down,’ she said, and Raka jumped up and joined her.
    â€˜Look at the hydrangeas, beaten down by the rain,’ said Nanda Kaul, her voice natural once more, and roundedwith relief and pleasure. ‘Look how the rain brings out their colour. They’re blue again.’
    In a little while they went out onto the veranda – on the way, Nanda Kaul picked up
The Travels of Marco Polo
and slid it back onto a bookshelf – and saw the last raindrops slanting down in the sudden, washed sunlight.
    The storm was over. The clouds disappeared: one wisp after another was folded up and whisked away into the blue, and a lovely evening emerged, lucid and peerless, the hills fresh and moist and wooded, blue and green like coils of paint out of a tube. Away in the north the rock-scarred snow range glittered. To the south many hundreds of miles of the plain were visible, streaked with streams and pitted with bright pools of rain.
    Going down into the garden, Nanda Kaul said, in a voice that was incredibly altered, that was hoarse with a true remembrance, ‘How funny, Raka, I just remembered how your mother, when she visited me here as a little