Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai

First published: 1977

Type of work: Domestic realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Kasauli, India

Principal Characters:

• Nanda Kaul, the protagonist, an academic vice chancellor’s wife who has retired to her “country” home, Carignano
• Raka, her great-granddaughter, who is spending the summer at Carignano
• Ila Das, Nanda Kaul’s friend since childhood, currently a social worker near Kasauli
• Ram Lal, Nanda Kaul’s cook and Raka’s friend

The Novel

The plot of Fire on the Mountain is relatively brief and uncomplicated, the significant action occurring within the psyches of Nanda and, to a lesser extent, Raka, her great-granddaughter. When Ila Das is raped and killed, that violent action happens “offstage” at the end of the novel, almost simultaneously with Raka’s announcement that she has set the forest on fire. While there are few important “events” in the rest of the novel, Anita Desai prepares the reader for the horrific ending by carefully embedding violence in her imagery and in her symbolism. In effect, the “fire” metaphorically smolders within her characters before it literally ignites at the end of the novel.

Part 1 of Fire on the Mountain provides the geographical and psychological setting prior to the arrival of Raka, Nanda’s great-granddaughter. After the death of her husband, Nanda has apparently chosen to live an isolated life in her retirement. Except for an occasional telephone call and a visit from the postman, which she regards as unwelcome intrusions, only the presence of Ram Lal, her cook, disturbs her solitude. Carignano, her literal and metaphorical “retreat,” is perched on the side of a cliff, and its setting suggests the precarious nature of the life she has established there. That life, free from obligations to others, is threatened by the visit of the postman, who brings her a letter informing her of the impending visit by Raka. When Ila Das, a friend since childhood, telephones Nanda and also asks about visiting her, Nanda realizes that her “pared, reduced, and radiantly single life” is in jeopardy.

The second part of the novel concerns the interaction—and lack of it—between Nanda and Raka, who, despite the generational gap, are quite similar in behavior. At first, Nanda considers Raka an “intruder, an outsider,” and resists being drawn into the child’s world. Nanda soon discovers, however, that she and her great-granddaughter have much in common, primarily their aloofness and determination to pursue their own secret lives. Raka is distant not only emotionally but also spatially, and her Kasauli is not Nanda’s: Raka frequents, despite Ram Lal’s warning, the forbidden ravine behind and below Carignano. In spite of their initial mutual rejection, Nanda comes to miss Raka during the child’s forays into the ravine; Nanda finds “the child’s long absences as perturbing as her presence was irksome.” Consequently, Nanda insists on accompanying Raka on some walks, notably the one to a peak called Monkey Point, but Raka spurns Nanda’s overtures and prefers her own secret world.

When her ploys prove unsuccessful, Nanda whets Raka’s curiosity by telling the child about her own childhood in Kashmir, where her idealized father had a zoo, including a pangolin, a “hard, scaly creature in its armour.” (Nanda’s father, in direct contrast to Raka’s brutish one, obviously interests Raka, who resembles the pangolin, also the object of the father’s loving care.) Nanda’s stories, however, succeed only temporarily, and she is reduced to thinking of giving Carignano to Raka. Meanwhile, Raka continues her exploration of the ravine and also visits an abandoned burned house near Carignano. When Raka leaves her ravine, which is associated with nature and death, to visit the clubhouse, which is associated with civilization, she is, ironically, threatened for the first time in Kasauli. At the club the masked revelers appear as “caged, clawed, tailed, headless male and female monsters” who remind her of her father returning from a party and beating her mother senseless. At this point, reality impinges upon her secret world and transforms it into a nightmare.

The final part of the novel also concerns a visit: Ila Das arrives at Carignano after being taunted and physically abused by a group of boys. Although she is aware of Ila Das’s desperate financial plight, Nanda adroitly steers the conversation away from any discussion of Ila Das moving into Carignano. When the two old women persist in the “game of old age,” Raka slips away and steals some matches. Finally, Ila Das leaves Carignano, and on her way home in the dark is raped and killed by the father of a young girl whose marriage to an old landowner she had opposed. When the police call Nanda with the news of the murder, Nanda realizes that “it was all a lie,” that her stories about her father, her loving husband, and the circumstances leading to her stay at Carignano were all fabrications. While she holds the phone, Raka announces, “I have set the forest on fire.”

The Characters

As is the case in Desai’s other novels, Fire on the Mountain is more memorable for its characters than for its plot or “action.” In fact, plot is important only in terms of what it reveals about the characters, Desai’s primary concern. Desai focuses not so much on physical appearance—unless it reflects an inner reality or serves a symbolic purpose—as on her characters’ inner lives. Nanda, the protagonist, is a case in point, for Desai tells her readers little about Nanda’s appearance but does tell the readers, through the use of a stream of consciousness narrative technique, much about her thoughts, values, fears, suppressed hostility, and unconscious need for love.

Carignano, Nanda’s “retreat,” suggests Nanda’s determination to withdraw from her former active life, replete with its duties, obligations, and roles. Among the roles she rejects is the role as sacrificing nurturer of others: “The care of others . . . had been a religious calling she had believed in till she found it fake.” At the end of part 1, she pleads, “Discharge me. I’ve discharged all my duties.” In her desire to simplify her life, Nanda “jettisons” her past, strips it to its necessities, and attempts to reject other people. Like Carignano, she is “barren,” and like the garden, through age and “withering away” she has arrived at a “state of elegant perfection.” The setting is both “perfected and natural” in that she has imposed her will on stubborn nature. Like the apricot trees that flourish in stony soil, however, she cannot resist her natural impulse to reach out to her great-granddaughter, Raka.

Although she resembles Nanda in her aloofness, Raka is not “exactly like” her great-grandmother: While Nanda’s rejection of Raka is “planned and wilful,” Raka’s rejection of Nanda is “natural, instinctive, and effortless,” at least as Nanda sees it. Since Desai presents most of the story through Nanda’s perspective, readers know more about Nanda than they do about Raka, who remains, with the exception of the clubhouse revelations, an enigma throughout the novel. As seen by Nanda, Raka is a part of nature, a child whose natural habitat is the ravine and whose behavior is described in animal imagery. When she first meets Raka, Nanda compares her to a “dark cricket” and a “mosquito,” comparisons that continue until Nanda discovers a rapport between the two. In addition to the negative insect imagery, there are references to Raka as one of the “newly caged,” which suggests that Nanda will not be able to domesticate her “natural” great-granddaughter. Raka seeks her freedom, which is epitomized by the eagles with which she identifies at Monkey Point. (Ironically, Nanda also identifies with eagles, but it is the “low, domestic call” of the cuckoo that she hears just before Raka’s visit.) Raka cannot really escape from the civilized world, regardless of how much she attempts to repress her memories of her parents’ behavior. Like Nanda, Raka fears human contact because it has brought her pain.

Like Raka, Ila Das tests Nanda’s commitment to physical and emotional isolation. A pathetic creature whose most notable feature is her “cackle,” Ila Das appeals indirectly to Nanda’s charity and compassion. Despite her desperate financial status and ridiculous appearance, however, Ila Das has much in common with Nanda: Both are “old, beaten, and silent” as they reenact the past. Ila Das, in fact, is superior to Nanda, in that she has not withdrawn from life but has instead reached out to help the people she serves as a social worker.

Critical Context

Fire on the Mountain, Desai’s fifth novel, has much in common with her earlier short story “Grandmother,” in which the grandmother, like Nanda, is a product of her experiences and has become an isolated soul. Like the novel, “Grandmother” concerns the confrontation between an older woman and a child, except in the short story the child has not, like Raka, withdrawn from the world. The novel also is linked with Cry, the Peacock (1963), which uses stream-of-consciousness narrative and imagery to depict the diseased psyche of a woman who is slowly disintegrating and who, like Nanda, is very much a prisoner of her past. Maya, the protagonist, becomes alienated from her husband, just as Nanda has become alienated from her husband in Fire on the Mountain. The themes of alienation and lack of communication in married life also appear in Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), a novel that stresses the impact of the past on the future.

Desai also tends to concentrate on the inner world of her characters and often uses setting to mirror or to effect a character’s development. Setting and character interact most prominently in Voices in the City (1965), which concerns a young man in Calcutta who is unable to “connect” with other people, while in Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971) an Indian immigrant in England (who resembles the protagonist of Voices in the City) struggles with an alien culture. Desai’s themes and characters lend themselves to the short, poetic novel or the novella, and she also seems to prefer the three-part structure she uses in Fire on the Mountain and in two other novels. In a real sense, the structure appears dialectic, with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis corresponding, in the case of Fire on the Mountain, to Nanda’s tenuous withdrawal, Raka’s threat to her aloofness, and the concluding death and fire which act as a kind of purification, bringing self-awareness.

Bibliography

Asnani, Shyam M. “The Themes of Withdrawal and Loneliness in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain,” in Journal of Indian Writing in English. IX (January, 1981), pp. 81-92.

Ganguli, Chandra. “Fire on the Mountain: An Analysis,” in Commonwealth Quarterly. VI (December, 1981), pp. 40-44.

Krishna, Francine E. “Anita Desai: Fire on the Mountain,” in Indian Literature. XXV (September/October, 1982), pp. 158-169.

Maini, Darshan Singh. “The Achievement of Anita Desai,” in Indo-English Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1977. Edited by K. K. Sharma.

Prasad, Madhusudan. “Imagery in the Novels of Anita Desai: A Critical Study,” in World Literature Today. LVIII (Summer, 1984), pp. 363-369.

Singh, R. S. Indian Novel in English, 1977.