Free Fire On the Mountain by Anita Desai Page A

sedately.
    But Raka rarely walked on the Mall, Upper or Lower. As soon as she could do so without being seen, she slipped under the railing that kept pedestrians and horses from plunging off the road and down the precipice, and disappeared down the paths that were barely marked on the crisp grass and pine-needles and that only goats and villagers ever used. Keeping to these paths, she knew a Kasauli that neither summer visitors nor upright citizens of the town ever knew. She did not shirk the rubbish chutes or the servants’ latrines constructed of tin amongst the nettles. She visited villages down in the valleys and saw the wheat being threshed by mechanically treading cattle, and corn and pumpkins being dried on rooftops. The village women and children glanced at her but never spoke. Once she saw the red fur of a fox momentarily lit by a trick of sunlight before it disappeared between immense rocks. Once she heard a shot and then saw a boy saunter past with a gun over his shoulder and a pheasant dangling from his hand. She averted her eyes from him and plunged off the path into the raspberries and broom. Mostly she saw no one. She had the gift of avoiding what she regarded as dispensable.
    Sensing this, Nanda Kaul was perturbed. She could not tell why she wanted to bring Raka out into the open. It was not how she herself chose to live. She did not really wish to impose herself, or her ways, on Raka. Yet she could not leave her alone.
    Raka’s genius. Raka’s daemon. It disturbed.
    At tea, she asked Raka, ‘Why don’t you go down to the club sometimes?’
    Raka was as alarmed by this as by the suggestion that she go to boarding-school at Sanawar.
    â€˜Didn’t your mother and father take you to clubs, to parties?’ Nanda Kaul probed, uncharacteristically, and her very nose seemed to stretch longer as she leaned forward.
    Raka shook her head, untruthfully. Her father had made attempts, sporadically, ‘to bring her out of her shell’ as he called it, by taking her to tea at a restaurant and insisting, in Madrid, that her mother invite children to tea on her birthday. These had been painful occasions – as painful for Raka as for her broken, twittering mother. They had not been repeated. Her long illness in Delhi and her weak, exhausted state thereafter had absolved her of any further need to ‘socialize’. It had seemed months that she had been in bed, her hair shorn down to the scalp, feeling the stale air stirred by the revolving blades of the electric fan, her eyes shut while her mother read to her in a sepulchral voice that never changed its pitch and never disturbed her out of her deep, secret thoughts. One might have thought she still moved about in a kind of dream, set to the sound of cicadas and the wind in the pines instead of her mother’s martyred voice and the revolving electric fan.
    Looking down at her foot where a mosquito had raised a small red bump on the little toe, Raka said in a stifled voice, ‘But you never go to the club either, Nani.’
    Nanda Kaul’s foot gave an astonished little jerk inside the grey silk tent of her sari. Then she gave a snort of laughter. Bending down so that her face was at a level with the hunched child’s and her nose tapered softly-forwards, she said ‘Raka, you really
are
a great-grandchild of mine, aren’t you? You are more like me than
any
of my children or grandchildren. You are
exactly
like me, Raka.’
    But Raka retreated pell-mell from this outspoken advance. It was too blatant, too obvious for her who loved secrecy above all. Her small face blanched and she pinched her lips together in distaste.
    Nanda Kaul was equally shocked. Quickly straightening her back, she sat back in her chair, stiffly. By the manner in which she tensed herself and drew strict lines down her face and folded her hands in her lap stilly, it was clear she was trying to repair her authority, her composure, her distance