Fire On The Mountain Study Guide

Fire On The Mountain by Anita Desai

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Contents
Fire On The Mountain Study Guide.............................................................................................. 1

Contents...................................................................................................................................... 2

Plot Summary.............................................................................................................................. 3

Part 1........................................................................................................................................... 5

Part 2, Chapters 1 - 11................................................................................................................. 8

Part 2, Chapters 12 - 21............................................................................................................. 11

Part 3, Chapters 1 - 8................................................................................................................. 14

Part 3, Chapters 9 - 13............................................................................................................... 17

Characters................................................................................................................................. 20

Symbols and Symbolism............................................................................................................ 24

Settings...................................................................................................................................... 26

Themes and Motifs.................................................................................................................... 28

Styles......................................................................................................................................... 33

Quotes....................................................................................................................................... 35

2
Plot Summary
The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Desai, Anita. Fire on
the Mountain. Penguin, 1982.

Fire on the Mountain is divided into three parts, “Nanda Kaul at Carignano,” “Raka
comes to Carignano,” and “Ila Das leaves Carignano,” each of which contains a series
of short chapters. Part 1, “Nanda Kaul at Carignano,” opens with just that: Nanda Kaul
listening to cicadas and meditating on her solitude until her peace was disturbed by the
postman trekking up her road. Ram Lal walked down to meet the postman, and returned
with a letter from Asha to Nanda Kaul informing her that Raka, her great-granddaughter
would be coming to stay with her. Nanda Kaul was angry and anxious at the prospect of
having to care for someone else when all she wanted was to be alone. A little later Ila
Das called on the telephone and asked to come visit sometime, which only increased
Nanda Kaul’s agitation. Days pass while Nanda Kaul read and revisited tumultuous
memories of domestic life before her children were grown and her husband died, until
one day Raka arrived in town. Ram Lal was sent to meet her while Nanda Kaul stewed
and fretted about how she had forgotten how to care for a child.

Part 2 begins with Raka’s arrival. Nanda Kaul gave her a cold welcome and proceeded
to leave her to explore the place on her own. Raka looked around Carignano a bit
before climbing a nearby knoll and heading out to explore the hills around the house.
They eventually fell into a rhythm where Raka would join Nanda Kaul for tea in the
afternoon, but be gone the rest of the day. This was what Nanda Kaul initially wanted,
but she began to feel perturbed by the child’s absences, and eventually she began to
admire Raka’s natural independence. Meanwhile, Raka had been exploring the region
like a wild animal, scrambling up cliffs, hunting snakes, foraging nuts and berries, and
stalking around the Pasteur Institute’s waste chutes, which Ram Lal had warned her to
stay away from.

Eventually Nanda Kaul began trying harder to talk to Raka, but she always looked like a
cornered animal. One afternoon, after tea, Nanda Kaul insisted that they take a walk
together to the top of a mountain. Raka reluctantly agreed. It was pleasant until Nanda
Kaul suggested that Raka stay permanently and enroll in school in Kasauli, which
prompted an abrupt rejection and Raka ran ahead. Nanda Kaul became too tired to
make it to the top, so she waited a long time until Raka returned. A few nights later,
Raka snuck into the Kasauli Club during a big party. She was shocked by the drunk
partiers in costumes and it triggered nightmarish visions. In absolute terror, Raka had a
flashback to a memory of her father brutally beating her mother, and she ran to
Carignano sobbing. A few days later, Raka, Nanda Kaul, and Ram Lal saw a forest fire.

Sometime later, a letter arrived to inform Nanda Kaul that Tara, Raka’s mother, had
suffered a nervous breakdown in Geneva and would not be calling for her. Around this
time, Nanda Kaul began creating tall tales about her childhood to impress Raka. Raka
continued to withdraw and explore the most ravaged and barren spaces in Kasauli.
Nanda Kaul became sullen and pouted about Raka’s indifference.

3
In Part 3, Ila Das came to visit. Nanda Kaul, Ila Das, and Raka sat together over tea
while Ila Das raved and screamed about her and Nanda Kaul’s past. Raka was
uncomfortable and out of place. The narrative provides an overview of their relationship
and the turns their lives have made. At the end of the afternoon, Ila Das took her leave,
and in high spirits decided to walk through the bazaar before heading home. Raka stole
a book of matches from Ram Lal and headed out into the hills. Night fell as Ila Das
walked home, and she was attacked and murdered by Preet Singh, who was mad at her
for trying to dissuade him from marrying off his young daughter. Nanda Kaul received a
phone call from the police shortly after asking her to identify the body, and the news
shocked her. Nanda Kaul was overcome with despair and the realization that her whole
life, everything she told herself about her motivations and her entire constructed sense
of self was fabricated as a means to get through life. As this crisis or epiphany took
place, Raka tapped at the window saying “Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire”
(145). The novel ends with black smoke enveloping the mountain.

4
Part 1
Summary
Chapter 1 opens with Nanda Kaul thinking about her own solitude at Carignano and
how all she wanted was to be left alone, when the sight of the postman walking up the
road distracted her. Chapter 2 shifts to the postman plodding up the road and recalling
the history of Carignano, running through all of its previous owners and what happened
to them. In Chapter 3, Ram Lal was returning from the bazaar and met the postman on
the road. They walked up to the house together, making a bit of awkward small talk.
When Nanda Kaul received the letter, she resolved to refuse whatever request it
contained. In Chapter 4 Nanda Kaul read the letter from her daughter Asha, which
informed her that Asha’s granddaughter Tara was going to Geneva and would be
sending her daughter Raka to stay at Carignano. The idea of her great-granddaughter
coming to Carignano troubled Nanda Kaul, and she got angry at the prospect of
someone ruining her solitude.

Chapter 5 moves the narrative into a flashback after giving a short description of Nanda
Kaul taking in the view from her veranda. The flashback shows the Vice-Chancellor’s
busy house and how Nanda Kaul was expected to project a certain image while she ran
every aspect of domestic life, paying particular attention to how she had to care for her
children. Switching back to the narrative present, she fretted about having to care for a
child again and likened it to a noose being slipped round her neck. In Chapter 6, Ila Das
called Nanda Kaul. Ila Das was her oldest friend, yet the sound of the phone is torture to
Nanda Kaul and she resented having to talk to her, making note of how awful her voice
was. Ila Das wanted to visit after Raka arrived and was settled.

Chapter 7 moves back into the past again. Nanda Kaul laid in bed remembering her late
husband and all of the work she did as homemaker and raising their children while her
husband had an affair. Chapter 8 returns to the narrative present, where Nanda Kaul
was sitting on her veranda reading a book: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. As she
watched the sun go down, she returned to her memories about her old house and the
burden of managing everything for everyone. As she went to bed, she considered how
happy she was to be done with that life and worried that Raka might drag her back into
it. In Chapter 9, Nanda Kaul continued to contrast her peaceful solitude against the fear
and agitation she felt at the prospect of Raka’s arrival. Over the course of these
thoughts, Nanda Kaul realized that she had forgotten how to care for a child. When she
discussed this with Ram Lal, they decided that they would make Raka potato chips for
dinner when she arrived. Chapter 10 closes out Part 1 with Ram Lal having walked to
the taxi stand to retrieve Raka while Nanda Kaul wallowed in self-pity and thought about
how she could not remember which of her children were which.

5
Analysis
Part 1 of Fire on the Mountain focuses on Nanda Kaul’s justification for her self-isolation
at Carignano and her general withdrawal from society. Much of the groundwork for this
justification is set by comparing Nanda Kaul to the stark and austere environment at
Carignano and the surrounding Kasauli, which is meant to reflect her personality. It is
repeated over and again that Nanda Kaul wants to be left alone, that she desires only
peace, quiet, and solitude. Her response to seeing the postman or receiving a letter or
phone call confirms that she is a misanthropic loner who bristles at any intrusion. When
she opened the letter from Asha, her daughter and granddaughter are described in
acidic terms, and it is clear that she does not think of them fondly. When the section
moves into Nanda Kaul’s memories, it is shown that she had exhausted herself in a
loveless marriage, where she spent her life keeping up the appearance of a perfect
home and raising a lot of children. These memories are vivid, but their general
presentation and the way that Nanda Kaul reacts to them suggests that she hated every
minute of her earlier life and felt imprisoned by everyone’s dependence on her.

Chapter 8 contains a quote from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and the way that
Nanda Kaul reread it multiple times suggests that she turned to it as a model for how
she wants to fashion her identity. Nanda Kaul was agitated and apprehensive at the
idea of Raka intruding upon Carignano and drudging up her suppressed identity as
caretaker, so she used the book to steel herself and maintain the delusion that she had
exercised agency by retreating into isolation. The quoted passage prescribes what the
house of a woman who lives alone should look like, and Nanda Kaul seemed to revel in
the desolate, unkempt description that Sei Shonagon proffers. When she once again
drifted into memories of the Vice-Chancellor’s house, it seems to contradict everything
that The Pillow Book suggests, which allows her to view Carignano with a sort of smug
satisfaction about having achieved austerity.

As if to emphasize Nanda Kaul’s internalization of Sei Shonagon’s prescription, Anita

Desai describes Carignano and its gardens, as well as the surrounding landscape, in
terms that connect them to Nanda Kaul’s self-perception. When she moved into the
house, she consciously rejected the idea of planning a lush garden, instead choosing to
revel in the emptiness and scattered gravel. Desai overtly unites the property and the
character by directly comparing how they both reached “perfection” through a process
of “withering away” and elimination (31). This parallel is present in the history of
Carignano, presented in the thoughts of the postman in Chapter 2. The property had
changed hands many times over the years, and the history is full of marital infidelity,
misery, death, ultimately declining along with the colonial regime until independence in
1947, when Nanda Kaul bought it. The chapter ends by declaring that “the little town
went native” (10). In the immediate postcolonial years, the property and the former
English hill-station was no longer adorned in excessive Western-style glitz in the same
way that Nanda Kaul, now without a husband and basically cast aside by her children,
lacked any pretense to continue managing a large, extravagant household.

6
Discussion Question 1
Why is Nanda Kaul apprehensive about taking in Raka?

Discussion Question 2
What do the physical descriptions of the landscape and wildlife around Carignano
represent?

Discussion Question 3
Why does Nanda Kaul always refer to her previous house as "the Vice-Chancellor's
house"?

Vocabulary
sibilance, cicada, stolidly, bullock, inexorably, sere, cantonment, canter, largess,
vivacious, desultorily, aplomb, recuperate, brazier, ominous, sanatorium, furrow, plait,
subdued, festooned, badminton, funereal, asperity, epicurean, austerity, nimiety,
germane, proprietorially, jettison, irksome, knoll

7
Part 2, Chapters 1 - 11
Summary
Chapter 1 begins with Raka’s arrival to Carignano. Nanda Kaul thought she seemed like
an insect, Raka thought Nanda Kaul seemed like a feature of the landscape. In Chapter
2, Raka looked around Carignano a bit, then slipped out the window and considered the
view of the Pasteur Institute before climbing over the veranda railing to climb around the
adjacent knoll. She returned to the house in Chapter 3 and talked to Ram Lal about the
Pasteur Institute before sitting silently with Nanda Kaul for a cup of tea.

Chapter 4 encompasses a longer, undefined stretch of time to explain Raka’s habit of

disappearing all day and returning in the evening dirty and scratched up. Raka’s solitary
indifference disturbed Nanda Kaul, but they managed to find a rhythm where they lived
together by ignoring and avoiding each other. Nanda Kaul began to admire Raka and
view her as a perfected version of the independent creature she had aspired to become.
Chapter 5 follows Raka on one of her excursions into the hills and ravines of Kasauli.
She climbed and slid through refuse, watched a snake, and observed the area behind
the Pasteur Institute before scrambling back up the cliff and accidentally climbing the
wall into the Kasauli Club, which was unoccupied in the late afternoon. In Chapter 6
Raka returned to Carignano and sat with Ram Lal as he heated water for her bath and
told her about snakes, jackals, and ghosts in the hills. As they chatted, a dust storm
descended upon them. They rushed inside but Ram Lal feared that the wind would
knock over the water-heating hamam and start a forest fire, a prospect that excited
Raka but did not happen.

In Chapter 7, Nanda Kaul asked Raka to take a walk with her to Monkey Point. Raka felt
smothered by any interaction with her, but reluctantly agreed to go. As they walked,
Nanda Kaul told Raka about the region and the buildings they saw before reciting a
poem by Hopkins. They watched a group of langurs and began to enjoy the wild
together. This shared moment emboldened Nanda Kaul to pitch the idea of Raka
staying and going to school in Kasauli, but the mention of school, obedience, and order
shocked Raka and she turned her back on Nanda Kaul to run ahead. They approached
Monkey Point in Chapter 8, but Nanda Kaul was too tired to climb it, so Raka continued
without her while she sat and waited. Raka felt free on the mountain, and left Nanda
Kaul waiting for a long time.

In Chapter 9, Nanda Kaul wondered at her feelings of awe and alarm at Raka. She
continued trying to connect with her, but only succeeded in making her more
uncomfortable. In Chapter 10 Ram Lal talked to Raka about the Kasauli Club, and in
Chapter 11 she snuck into the club during a depraved costume ball. The scene shocked
her, and she was unable to comprehend all of the costumed freaks and monsters
drinking and singing. It began to merge with hellish visions which triggered a flashback
to a traumatic incident where she witnessed her father brutally abusing her mother. She
ran back to Carignano screaming and sobbing.

8
Analysis
In Part 2 of the novel, which centers on Raka, Anita Desai develops Raka's rejection of
society metaphorically, through the terms with which she chooses to describe her. The
section opens by calling “Raka” a misnomer for the child and claims that she is not
radiant like the moon—which is what Raka means—but is rather like an insect. The
comparisons between Raka and insects remain consistent throughout the rest of the
novel. Nanda Kaul was expecting a soft child who would need her care and attention,
but what she finds upon meeting Raka is a hard, independent, creature who thrives in
the forgotten nooks and crannies of civilization and is alien to social norms. When Raka
climbs the veranda railing, she is described as “lizard-like,” when asked what she would
do for the day, she seethes “as if she were a thousand black mosquitoes,” and when
she comes down the knoll she is like “a bird fallen out of its nest” (42, 45, 50). These are
just a few of the many, many examples of such descriptions, and Desai makes it clear
that Raka feels most herself when she is pursuing her secret explorations under the
sun, among rocks and pines, or in the ruins left behind by failed human settlements.
When Nanda Kaul expresses her desire for Raka to stay on with her and go to school in
Kasauli only to have Raka reject the idea outright, Raka is described as running
downhill, “looking down at her toes pushed beyond the scuffed lip of her sandals,
pressing into the dust and the dry pine-needles,” as if she is breaking out of the confines
of human culture, bursting past the most basic separation between body and earth:
shoes (59).

Nanda Kaul also sees herself as separate from society, but unlike Raka she holds onto
her connection to human tradition. This tension can be seen when she recites Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ poem “Heaven-Haven” for Raka. The poem is about a nun leaving
society to join the convent and pursue a simple spiritual life, and Nanda Kaul tells Raka
that when she moved to Carignano she thought about it constantly. Hopkins’ poem
expresses the nun’s rejection of materialist life for the pleasant and calm nothingness of
heaven, but Nanda Kaul seems to connect it to the austere landscape and her self-
imposed solitude, where she has given up everything from her life in order to shield
herself from the fact that none of it was ever really hers. Her vision of heaven-haven is
the social void of stewing and waiting for death. It is notable that Nanda Kaul was
inspired to recite the poem after becoming agitated at the presence of tourists,
scientists, and the army in the region, as if these interlopers from civilization, from the
world she came up in, these symbols of the human intent to dominate nature, remind
her of the way she has tried to separate herself from her own past and instead occupy a
non-life in a place where nothing happens. This move from disgust at people coming to
Kasauli to Nanda Kaul’s identification with a nun’s rejection of society via Hopkins’ poem
comes full circle in the next paragraph, when she and Raka observe a group of feral
langurs baring their teeth, trying to run them off for intruding on their territory. This
suggests that Nanda Kaul is to the langurs exactly what the tourists and soldiers are to
her. Desai’s description of an infant langur, though, hews uncannily close to
identification with Raka, as it looks “strangely ages, as if by worries and anxieties
beyond its age, its little face black and wrinkled, its tear-drop eyes glistening with
sadness” (58).

9
Discussion Question 1
How does Nanda Kaul's reaction to Raka staying with her begin to change over time?

Discussion Question 2
How does Raka feel about Nanda Kaul's attempts to get to know her?

Discussion Question 3
Why does Raka respond with such fear to the party at the Kasauli Club?

Vocabulary
misnomer, satiric, despairing, guillotine, disgorge, blighted, resinous, haunches,
incongruity, conglomerate, dawdle, perturbing, irksome, billowed, splotches, grottoes,
polyglot, primly, censoriousness, conflagration, raucous, poltergeists, chastened, furtive,
unobtrusive, lithe, lucid, perambulated, daemon, rheumy, lugubrious

10
Part 2, Chapters 12 - 21
Summary
Chapter 12 begins with the aftermath of Raka’s horrific visions, she seemed even
darker and more withdrawn. Nanda Kaul and Raka watched a forest fire in the distance
which Raka remained fixated on through the night. In Chapter 13, Nanda Kaul became
jealous that Raka would talk easily with Ram Lal. While Ram Lal and Raka chatted
about ghosts, a band of langurs raided the house, stealing fruit and potatoes. Ram Lal
tried to run them off, but Raka stepped in to defend a mother and her baby. In Chapter
14, Nanda Kaul received another letter from Asha telling her that Tara had a breakdown
and would not be calling for Raka. Nanda Kaul decided that she wanted Raka to stay
anyway and does not tell her about the letter. A storm arrived in Chapter 15, and Nanda
Kaul tried to impress Raka by fabricating fantastic stories about her father being an
explorer in Tibet. Chapter 16 wraps up Nanda Kaul’s fiction. When she began talking
about her childhood home and all of the amazing objects they owned, Raka lost
interest. In Chapter 17, Raka noticed hosts of wildflowers that bloomed after the storm,
as if a new world was born of the violence. Nanda Kaul told Raka about the letter, but
she barely responded.

Raka went out to explore in Chapter 18, and found herself drawn to the ruins of a burnt
house. She thought about devastation, and how she felt best in the annihilated, lawless
spaces that were furthest from the civilized world. In Chapter 19, Nanda Kaul sat with
Raka and told her about her childhood and the places she lived. She began to make
stories up again about how her father had a zoo at their house, but Raka became
appalled upon hearing that the animals were caged and chained. Raka was skeptical
about Nanda Kaul’s stories, and Nanda Kaul felt she had transgressed a boundary by
talking so much. They separated angrily.

In Chapter 20, Nanda Kaul struggled against her compulsion to get close to Raka, as if
her standoffishness was a challenge. When Raka returned to Carignano in the evening,
Nanda Kaul tried to continue making up stories about her father and her childhood.
Raka tried to be polite, but it was clear that she desperately wanted to escape. As the
moon rose, Raka told Nanda Kaul that she was disappointed it was not a forest fire.
Part 2 closes with Raka slipping out of the house, leaving Nanda Kaul alone and feeling
scorned. Ila Das called and told Nanda Kaul that she wanted to visit the next day and
have tea with her and Raka. Nanda Kaul reluctantly agreed, and then spent the rest of
the evening by herself, thinking about death and her legacy, and feeling guilty that she
had made a fool of herself inventing fictions to impress Raka. In the end, she managed
to find a little bit of solace in the fact that she never misused Carignano in any of her
tales.

11
Analysis
Fire—the overarching image that dominates the book, from the title to the climax—
symbolizes Raka’s radical rejection of the suffocating, patriarchal society she was born
into and the phoenix-like possibility of a wilderness emerging from its ashes.
Throughout Part 2, after Raka recovers from her nightmarish, trauma-induced
flashbacks of her father’s abuse, she grows increasingly fixated on forest fires and
regularly visits the burnt ruins of a house on a nearby hill. She first learns about the
possibility of forest fires in Chapter 12, when she and Nanda Kaul are looking at the
sunset and see a glow on the horizon. Raka asks if the light is the moon rising, but
Nanda Kaul tells her the moon is not full and then realizes that it is a forest fire instead,
which electrifies Raka. Later, toward the end of Part 2, Raka does watch the moon rise,
but then turns away from it, disappointed that it was not another forest fire. As she
struggles to break free from Nanda Kaul’s smothering nostalgic fictions, Raka longs for
the burnt and devastated hilltop with the ruined house, calling it an appealing reality as
opposed to Nanda Kaul’s boring fantasy world. This echoing confusion or opposition of
the quotidian moon with attractive fire is telling because we know that Raka’s name
means moon, and so Raka is being equated with, but is unable to enact the
transformative destruction of, fire throughout the section. Raka, as she is named by a
family which she holds no attachment to, wants to become part of the feral, uncontrolled
natural world. At the end of the novel these poles unify when she becomes fire and the
two terms merge.

Raka is interested in fire because it embodies the opposite of the world that has hurt her
and which she is alienated from. In Chapter 18, after having learned of her mother’s
breakdown, Raka runs to the burnt ruins of a house to gather herself. This section
directly opposes the destruction where Raka is able to feel free against the civilized
world that confines and destroys her. As Raka approaches the ruins, Desai writes that
she is called by “demented” cuckoo birds who are different from the “dutiful domestic
birds that called Nanda Kaul” back at Carignano (90). The devastated ruins on the hill
inspire Raka, and she notes that “something about it—illegitimate, uncompromising,
lawless—made her tingle” (90). In the next paragraph, this feeling is directly opposed to
the nurseries and bedrooms “of her infancy” and the clubs and cities where she had
lived as a child (90). She feels no attachment to that stuffy old world she endured
before, and in fact hates it so much that she revels in any sign of its obliteration. A little
later on in the chapter, Desai writes that “it was the ravaged, destroyed and barren
spaces…that drew her: …the seared remains of the safe, cozy, civilized world in which
Raka had no part” (91). In a move that will be expanded upon at the end of the novel,
Desai has Raka stretch out in the ruins until she feels that her body lights up and she
becomes a blazing fire herself. As if to drive home Raka’s severing of herself from
humanity, the chapter closes with the sound of “wild, mad” birds following Raka and a
villager seeing her and calling her “the crazy one” (91).

12
Discussion Question 1
Why does Nanda Kaul try to hold Raka's attention with made up stories?

Discussion Question 2
How does Raka react to Nanda Kaul's invented stories? What holds her attention and
why? What turns her away and why?

Discussion Question 3
Why does Raka find the most destroyed and least traveled parts of Kasauli to go to?

Vocabulary
divulge, surreptitiously, avarice, nonchalance, cinereous, runnels, crepitation, bawdy,
marauding, fray, poignant, musk, brocades, brusquely, askew, tawny, samovar, thicket,
dawdling, dubious, obliging, goad, lugubriously, quavered, inexplicably, somnolent,
thwarted, assignation, burble, bulbous, beguile, scintillate

13
Part 3, Chapters 1 - 8
Summary
Part 3 begins with Raka, Nanda Kaul, and Ram Lal waiting and watching as Ila Das
made her way up the road toward Carignano amidst a group of kids who were following
and harassing her. Chapter 2 shifts to Nanda Kaul’s interior recollections of Ila Das. The
narrative focuses on the incongruencies of Ila Das’s life, having been born to a wealthy
family that was favored by the British, but always a pariah, partly due to her voice, and
now a broken and destitute woman. Nanda Kaul also recalled how they had been
friends since childhood.

Ila Das arrived at Carignano in Chapter 3, and in a comic scene she situated herself
and met Raka, who was unsure how to respond to Ila Das’s overly familiar manner. In
Chapter 4, Nanda Kaul, Raka, and Ila Das sat down to tea. Ila Das almost immediately
dove into a nostalgic monologue about Nanda Kaul’s past, going as far as singing an
old British song, all of which left Raka bored and Nanda Kaul gloomy. Chapter 5
proceeds in much the same fashion, with Ila Das talking on and on about her and
Nanda Kaul’s past, creating an image of a world that seems long gone. Raka did not
want anything to do with the musty sentimentalism, and Nanda Kaul seemed bored and
ashamed to be the subject of such a monologue. When Ila Das, who got carried away
with her memories, mentioned Miss David, Nanda Kaul abruptly ended the story and left
Ila Das sitting with her mouth agape. The chapter ends by referring to Ila Das and
Nanda Kaul as “beaten” and “silent” (122).

In Chapter 6, Nanda Kaul recovered from the shock of facing her past and regained her
composure to ask Ila Das about how she had been. Raka took the opportunity to flee
before getting caught in another interminable monologue. Ila Das’s tenor shifted from
gleeful recollection to the despair of her present, and in a mixture of Ila Das’s voice and
Nanda Kaul’s memory the narration tells the story of Ila Das’s decline and ill fortune,
ending with her move to Kasauli. In Chapter 7, Nanda Kaul began to soften towards Ila
Das a bit as she explained how she was not able to make ends meet for herself. The
chapter ends with Nanda Kaul trying to work up the sympathy to invite Ila Das to live at
Carignano, but then deciding it would ruin her solitude and refraining. Chapter 8 is
another long monologue by Ila Das in which, despite her abject poverty, she positioned
herself above the poor of the region and told how, as a social worker, she tried and
largely failed to help them. Ila Das also told Nanda Kaul about her conflicts with the
villagers. She had a particularly antagonistic with the priest-man who hates her and
whom she hates; she also mentioned running into trouble with Preet Singh over her
opposition to child marriage. The chapter ends with Ila Das despondent about her
situation.

14
Analysis
Nanda Kaul is so resistant to having Ila Das over, and cringes so hard at Ila Das’s
reminiscences because her existence exposes Nanda Kaul’s repressed history and the
lie that she lives at Carignano. Desai writes that “Ila Das’s life was simply not all of a
piece” and this fact irked Nanda Kaul endlessly (110). But this seems like Nanda Kaul is
projecting her feelings about herself onto Ila Das. Excluding the fact that Nanda Kaul is
financially secure, their situation is not really all that different: they both came from the
same social position in which they were raised wealthy and privileged and were
groomed for English colonial high society, and now they have both lost everything,
ending up isolated and miserable, trying to get through each day in the remote, rock-
strewn, outpost in the mountains. They have both been betrayed by men in their lives
and have subsequently lost their place in a society that only used them. Finally, Ila Das
also idealizes Nanda Kaul and wants her help, but Nanda Kaul is so bitter about
spending her life caring for a family that betrayed her that she is incapable of supporting
her only true friend. Ila Das knows the truth that Nanda Kaul is a scorned woman hiding
in exile to protect her late husband’s legacy rather than a self-fashioned and
independent iconoclast who lives in defiance of society, and the damage this knowledge
does to Nanda Kaul’s ego makes her want to avoid Ila Das.

Ila Das represents the colonial mentality, and both she and, to a lesser extent, Nanda
Kaul live in a state of colonial hangover until the end of the novel. Ila Das has so
thoroughly internalized colonial prejudice that she remains convinced that she is more
civilized than most Indians even as she is left behind by decolonization, ostracized, and
cannot keep a job or afford to feed herself. When she arrives at Carignano, the first
thing she exclaims is that it reminds her of home, with the word “home” italicized, and
continues, “I mean childhood of course, when we had honey for tea and badminton on
the lawn” (116). This suggests that, more than any specific dwelling, she still identifies
with the time of the Raj, and even though India has been independent for much of her
life it is the colonial past that she carries with her. This attitude comes up over and over
with Ila Das: when she recalls her struggle to take up teaching in her forties she talks
about how the other teachers were all of a different class, she pines about how she
wishes she could have stayed in a time and place where there were lawn parties and
badminton, and later she thinks of the grain seller who tries to help her as uncivilized.
She does allow moments of self-reflection though, and twice she articulates that her
upbringing made her helpless in the real world, one time even wishing she were a
peasant in her village who could grow pumpkins and keep a goat before shutting the
idea down. As both Ila Das and Nanda Kaul were from Punjab, the years around
decolonization and partition were probably traumatic, but it is Ila Das’s colonial mentality
that prevents her from integrating with the world around her.

Discussion Question 1
What is Ila Das and Nanda Kaul's relationship like?

15
Discussion Question 2
What does Raka think of Ila Das?

Discussion Question 3
How does Nanda Kaul change over the course of her date with Ila Das?

Vocabulary
thwarted, murmuring, moth-eaten, bawled, uncouth, hooligans, extricating, impertinent,
disdain, jeering, perambulator, motif, dandled, urchins, floundered, pretense,
unendurable, manorial, wince, rumpled, presumptuous, repast, gilded, ramshackle,
veritable, doleful, susurrating, rapacity, ardour, raconteur, harrow

16
Part 3, Chapters 9 - 13
Summary
Chapter 9 signals the end of Ila Das and Nanda Kaul’s tea date. Ram Lal lit the hamam
for Raka’s bath and cleared the table while Ila Das and Nanda Kaul walked out to the
veranda. Raka stole Ram Lal’s box of matches and then jumped back over the fence
and climbed down into the ravine. In Chapter 10, Nanda Kaul and Ila Das part ways. Ila
Das mentioned briefly how strange and wild Raka was, and then tottered down the road
while Nanda Kaul watched. Nanda Kaul thought about how fragile Ila Das’s existence
was, and decided that if anyone messed with her she would defend her. Nanda Kaul
began to relax on the veranda, feeling relieved that she made it through the
psychological dangers of her afternoon with Ila Das as she gently moved a praying
mantis out of the open view of the birds.

Chapter 11 shifts to Ila Das as she decided to stop in town and go to the bazaar rather
than go straight home. She felt buoyed by her visit with Nanda Kaul and began to think
cheerfully about possibilities for the future, but people taunted and made fun of her as
she continued. She stopped at the grain-seller to check the price of corn meal but could
not afford anything. The grain-seller knew Ila Das and was kind to her, but he also knew
Preet Singh and recalled him coming to the shop earlier and saying obscene things
about Ila Das. He gently expressed concern for her and tried to dissuade her from
walking home alone after the sun set, but she laughed it off and left. As she tried to
hurry home, worried by the dark and upset with herself for going shopping with no
money, she began to panic. In Chapter 12, Ila Das fell into despair as she made the
final descent down the path to her village. She felt scared and alone and wished she
had had the courage to ask Nanda Kaul for a room at Carignano. Just as her hamlet
came into view and she felt a touch of relief, a black shape jumped on her from a pile of
rock. It was Preet Singh, who strangled her as she struggled to fight back. The chapter
closes with Preet Singh raping and murdering Ila Das and leaving her in the dark.

Chapter 13 closes out the novel back at Carignano, where Nanda Kaul was dismayed
by the phone ringing. She decided to let it ring and not ruin her mood, but Ram Lal
answered it and called to her. It was a police officer, calling to inform her that Ila Das
was found dead and asked if she would identify the body. Nanda Kaul dropped the
phone was thrown into crisis, in her grief and disbelief, she faced the fact that she had
lived a lie. Raka tapped on the window to tell Nanda Kaul that she set the forest on fire.
The novel ends with flame and smoke overtaking the mountain.

Analysis
Anita Desai accelerates her use of foreshadowing in the last section of the book. As Ila
Das leaves Carignano, she makes a throwaway quip about it being so dry she would be
afraid to light a match, and then says that a forest fire would be too much for her to deal

17
with. Three or four paragraphs later Raka is described running down a hill with sparks
flying out of her hair, which moves like flames in the wind, before she snatches Ram
Lal’s box of matches. When Ila Das wanders the bazaar a little later, she sees a group
of street vendors with their babies and puppies playing as if they had “life’s fires burning
brightly” inside them, a fire that, she notes, has died out in her, leaving only ashes (136).
On her ill-fated way home, Ila Das looks at the last of the sunlight disappearing over the
ridge where Carignano stands and sees bright light in “russet and auburn, copper and
brass” (140). She also watches an eagle “lit up like a torch” which then drops into the
valley like “a scrap of burnt paper” (140). It is also worth pointing out that the darkness
descending throughout Ila Das’s walk is mirrored by the black smoke spiraling up the
mountain in the last sentence of the novel.

The murder of Ila Das is also foreshadowed in the descriptions of this last section.
When Ila Das walks away from Carignano, Nanda Kaul watches her and thinks that
horror hovers around her, and that “there had never been anyone more doomed…than
she” (133). Nanda Kaul rightly sees Ila Das’s life hanging by a thread, and she foresees
that any little act could end it. Shortly after, a jeep kicks up dust at Ila Das, and she has
to stop, “blinded and choked” (136). After the grainseller tries to convince her not to walk
alone after dark, she “shook her head violently” (138). At the end of Chapter 11, she
feels afraid of the hazardous walk home, and then takes “the steeply plunging footpath
that would take her down” (139). Finally, right before the scene of her murder, there is a
“murderous” agave plant, the tolling of cow bells, and drying corn and wheat hanging as
the light gives way to darkness (141). These descriptions prepare the imagination for
the impending violence and function to build an atmosphere of palpable tension and
suspense.

Nanda Kaul’s immediate response to the call about the murder of Ila Das is disbelief—
she initially cries that it has to be a lie, before she quickly understands the harsh reality,
and this understanding exposes all of her actual lies, it strips her of the capacity for
denial. As she struggles to respond to the caller, she cannot make a sound, she chokes,
and then twists her head and lets it hang down. Nanda Kaul’s response to the death of
Ila Das is a near-exact echo of Ila Das’s actual death, in which she struggled to cry out
but was choked, eventually going limp, her head hanging down. The final line of the
novel, with the black smoke spiraling up the mountain, does not only mirror the falling
darkness during Ila Das’s death, it also echoes the opening line of the novel as well,
where the postman is winding up the mountain road. In this way, the novel has a sort of
cyclical structure that compliments the cycle of destruction and, it is hoped, rebirth in the
novel’s plot.

Discussion Question 1
What does the murder of Ila Das symbolize?

18
Discussion Question 2
Why would Raka start a forest fire?

Discussion Question 3
What does the violent conclusion of the novel mean?

Vocabulary
monsoon, nattering, decisive, floundering, rackety, precarious, derisive, azure, opaline,
edifice, covet, audacity, gamboling, guffaws, jeering, effusively, vexed, pompous,
waylaid, scuttling, hamlet, lugubriously, loamy, fuchsia, peremptoriness, innuendoes,
histrionics,

19
Characters
Nanda Kaul
Nanda Kaul is the grand matriarch of a fallen and scattered family. In the narrative
present, she is at the end of her life and wants nothing more than to be left alone in her
remote house, Carignano, where she sought to hide from her past and find inner peace
through isolation and detachment from human relations. Nanda Kaul once led an
extravagant life, she was raised in a high caste and was educated by English
governesses and played badminton on huge estates with her childhood best friend Ila
Das. As an adult, she was married to the Vice-Chancellor of a university in Punjab, and
they lived in a big house that was always busy with guests and children. During this
period Nanda Kaul managed everything and all of her time was devoted to running the
house, which she felt was a huge burden.

After the Vice-Chancellor died, leaving Nanda Kaul a widow, her children helped her
pack up the big house and then disappeared into their own lives. Nanda Kaul moved
into Carignano, in a remote village in the mountains, to be alone. At Carignano she lives
with Ram Lal, her cook, who mostly stays out of her way, and she passes the time
reading and staring at the garden and the mountain view. Nanda Kaul had become
misanthropic, she resented society, hated her family, and she wanted to be alone. When
Nanda Kaul received a letter informing her that Raka, her great-granddaughter, was
coming to stay with her, it sent her into a bitter rage that her final days of solitude might
be disrupted.

Nanda Kaul expected to have to care for Raka when she arrived, but she quickly
realized that the girl also wanted to be left alone and had no need for care or attention.
Nanda Kaul was intrigued by the feral-seeming Raka, and against her will she started
trying to engage and impress the girl, which only deepened the gulf between them.
When Ila Das visited Carignano, Nanda Kaul was stricken with horror at the memories
that she evoked. When Ila Das was raped and murdered, Nanda Kaul's tough,
constructed self shattered, and she realized that everything in her life had been a lie,
she had performed a role that was thrust upon her, and she had twisted her current
status as pariah into a false pretense of something noble and chosen.

Raka
Raka is Nanda Kaul's great-granddaughter. Her grandmother is named Asha and her
mother is named Tara. Her father was abusive and her mother was mentally ill. They
traveled and lived all over the world, in Zurich, Paris, New York, and elsewhere. They
had recently been living in Delhi, where Raka was recovering from a near-fatal attack of
Typhoid, when her father was posted to a new job in Geneva. Tara wanted to go join
him, but Raka was still too sickly to travel overseas, so they sent Raka to stay with
Nanda Kaul, more-or-less abandoning her.

20
Raka is a strange child, totally withdrawn and uninterested in other people, but she
loves the natural world. She spends all day everyday scrambling up cliffs and down
ravines, hiking goat paths, foraging food, watching animals, and exploring the
Himalayan wilderness around Carignano. She keeps her distance from Nanda Kaul,
only becoming interested when Nanda Kaul tells her adventure stories; she does take a
vague liking to Ram Lal though. She is disgusted and horrified at the idea of socializing
with proper girls her age. Raka feels most comfortable in the places that frighten
everyone else, like a supposedly haunted and burnt manor on a hillside, and the ravine
behind a rabies-vaccine factory, where jackals congregate to eat the remains of lab-
tested animals. When she is alone on mountaintops, she imagines that she is on a
capsized boat, adrift at sea.

Raka is a feral child, and she embodies a wildness that is diametrically opposed to
modern civilization. School, parties, clubs, and sentimentality are anathema to her.
Throughout the novel, she is compared to insects and birds repeatedly, and her general
bearing betrays an attempt to become other-than-human. Like Nanda Kaul, Raka
refuses to play any part in a society that has already tried to take away her dignity. In
the end of the novel, she sets the forest on fire.

Ila Das
Ila Das was Nanda Kaul's lifelong best friend. She was short and puppet-like, and was
often ridiculed for her strange appearance and personality. She is described as having a
voice that was so shrill and hideous that it was her "tragedy in life" (20). Ila Das was
sentimental, and she accosted Nanda Kaul, who she adored, with a litany of nostalgic
memories when they visited with each other. Ila Das lived on her memories from the
past, while Nanda Kaul tried her best to forget.

Like Nanda Kaul, Ila Das had a privileged childhood with English governesses, piano
lessons, and instruction in French, but as she got older her life lost its charm. When her
parents died, her brothers spent their entire fortune, leaving nothing for Ila Das and her
sister, who began scrapping together odd jobs to make ends meet. With Nanda Kaul's
help, Ila Das went to school and got a certificate in social work, and in the narrative
present she lived in a small village near Carignano and worked as a social worker for
the government—but this did not pay enough for her to even feed herself.

As a social worker in a rural village, Ila Das had increasingly heated conflicts with the
villagers, and incurred the wrath of the local "priest-man" and many of the other village
men. She had received a fancy Western-style education that made her proud and
pompous, but her knowledge clashed with the cultural beliefs of the village and she
found herself fighting with people over vaccines, modern health care, and opposing
child-marriage. After trying to interfere with the plans for one villager named Preet
Singh's plans to marry off his 12-year old daughter to a local landowner, he attacked
her, raping and killing her.

21
Ram Lal
Ram Lal is Nanda Kaul's live-in cook at Carignano. He is described as stiff and dour,
and he has a stoic, longsuffering attitude. He spends most of each day lounging on a
hammock, making tea for Nanda Kaul, and in the evenings he heats up bathwater for
Raka in a hamam. It is suggested that he was also once part of the "proper and ordered
world in the distance," but no details are given (52). Raka talks with him more than
anyone else, and he tells her about the area's history, the local wildlife and
superstitions, and warns her to stay away from the Pasteur Factory.

The Vice-Chancellor
The Vice-Chancellor, Mr. Kaul, was Nanda Kaul's late husband and the father of her
many children. He was a wealthy man who smoked cigars and was concerned with
properly performing his social position. He demanded a lot from Nanda Kaul, and she
was relieved when he died. He never loved his wife, instead he carried on a lifelong love
affair with a Miss David, but did not marry her because she was Christian.

Preet Singh
Preet Singh is a villager who wants to marry his 12-year old daughter off to an older
landowner in the village. Ila Das opposed child marriage and confronted him trying to
convince him to allow the girl to wait. In the end of the novel he raped and murdered Ila
Das.

Tara
Tara is Raka's mother and Nanda Kaul's granddaughter. She is married to a diplomat
who drinks too much and abuses her. Tara struggles with mental illness and trauma,
and is not capable of taking care of herself, much less Raka. Tara follows her husband
to Geneva and sends Raka to live with Nanda Kaul. In Geneva, Tara has another
breakdown and is put in a nursing home, it is suggested that she will not be calling for
Raka.

Asha
Asha is Raka's grandmother and Nanda Kaul's "least loved or, at any rate, ... most
exasperating" daughter (14). Asha is beautiful and spent more time fixated on her looks
than on caring for Tara, her daughter. She wrote the letter informing Nanda Kaul that
Tara would be sending Raka to stay with her.

22
The grainseller
The grainseller sells grain in the Kasauli Bazaar. He is "an elderly, whiskered man in a
singlet and very clean, white cotton pyjamas" (136). He often took pity on Ila Das and
gave her some extra peppers or garlic when she bought grain. He tried to warn Ila Das
not to walk home in the dark, because Preet Singh had been in the shop saying
obscene things about her.

The Postman
The Postman is the local mail carrier. He knows the history of Carignano, and provides
a quick overview at the beginning of the novel.

23
Symbols and Symbolism
Carignano
Carignano's remoteness and austerity symbolize Nanda Kaul's withdrawal from society
in favor of solitude. The sparse, rock-strewn bareness of Carignano's garden and the
plain white walls of the house are described in terms that also refer to Nanda Kaul.

Hen and worm

The hen that drags a worm out of its hole and snaps it in two represents Nanda Kaul's
feelings about being torn between her past and her currently constructed self. She
watches the hen and worm while she talks to Ila Das on the phone, and she feels like
the worm being pulled apart by the intrusion of Ila Das.

The Pasteur Institute

The Pasteur Institute represents civilization's failure to dominate nature. The Institute
dissects animals to make anti-rabies serums, but the animal corpses are thrown into the
ravine behind the factory and subsequently eaten by jackals, who in turn become rabid
and spread the infection.

The Kasauli Club

The Kasauli Club represents colonial hangover. The club is a leftover from British rule,
and the party that Raka observes there contains demented people dressed up in
macabre, satirical reproductions of British colonial life. It stands high on the hill casting a
shadow over Kasauli, even though it has no relation to the daily lives of the villagers.

The Band of Langurs

The band of langurs represents Raka's increasing identification with the forces of nature
that lay waste to civilized society. She is delighted when they tear through Carignano,
and she physically intervenes to defend them from Ram Lal.

The Forest Fire

The forest fire represents Raka's total rejection of civilization and her desire for an
apocalyptic rebirth of the wild world.

24
The Buddha Sculpture
The sculpture of Buddha represents the loss of Nanda Kaul's material wealth and
excess after the death of the Vice-Chancellor. It is the last object she owns from her
earlier life, and it sits in defiance of the material world staring at nothing.

The Burnt House

The burnt house where Raka goes to hang out represents her rejection of the "safe,
cozy, civilized world in which [she] had no part" (91). She is drawn to it and feels
invigorated by its devastation.

The Grainseller
The grainseller represents the disconnect between the real world and Ila Das's
perception of her position in it. When he tries to help Ila Das, she brushes him off and
later thinks of him as uncivilized, even though he is an important member of the
community who has always been kind to her and tries to help her.

Dark / Smoke
The dark that falls as Ila Das is murdered and the smoke that spirals up the mountain
after Raka sets the forest on fire represent obliteration. They both smother the scene of
worlds ending, blotting out everything but the act of annihilation.

25
Settings
Carignano
Carignano is Nanda Kaul's remote house on a ridge in the lower Himalayan village of
Kasauli. Almost the entire novel takes place at Carignano. It is a minimalist dwelling with
bare white walls and sweeping views of mountains and plains on all sides. The house
has a tiled veranda with potted geraniums and fuchsias, and a garden with a few apricot
trees and clumps of iris. Its most notable feature is its austerity. Nanda Kaul lives a
solitary existence there, with Ram Lal and Raka.

The Vice-Chancellor's House

The Vice-Chancellor's house, in a small university town in Punjab, was where Nanda
Kaul lived and raised her family when her husband, the Vice-Chancellor, was alive. The
house was always full and bustling with guests, children, grandchildren, and servants.
Nanda Kaul felt that it was an all-consuming job to run the house, and she grew to
resent everyone—life there was "a whirlpool of which she was the still, fixed eye in the
center" (24).

Kasauli Club
The Kasauli Club is a social club next to Carignano, where the higher classes of Kasauli
have parties. One night there was a big party and Raka went through the ravine and
climbed the wall to check it out. There was a band playing and the costumed guests
were drunk and acting wild. Raka could not comprehend what she was seeing and the
vision triggered a hallucinatory nightmare that shocked her and caused a flashback to a
traumatic memory of wetting herself with fear while watching her father beat her mother.
She fled to Carignano "like an animal chased, sobbing 'Hate them—hate them'" (71).

The Pasteur Institute

The Pasteur Institute is a factory where doctors experiment on animals and make
serums for rabies injections. It is a big, ugly factory with smokestacks that are visible
from Carignano. Chutes on the factory's back side empty waste and animal carcasses
into a ravine. Jackals come at night to feed on the carcasses and then get infected with
rabies.

The Bazaar
The Bazaar is the market in Kasauli. When Ila Das left Carignano she was in such a
good move that she went to browse at the bazaar, even though she had no money. It

26
was there that the grainseller warns her not to walk home when it is getting dark, but
she does not listen to him.

27
Themes and Motifs
Alienation
Anita Desai’s characters symbolize the alienation of women under patriarchy and of
postcolonial identity in India. Nanda Kaul is the top example of this. She endured most
of her life in a barren, loveless marriage, performing domestic labor and projecting a
socially acceptable image of marriage in order to maintain his status as Vice-Chancellor
of a university. Despite devoting herself to keeping his house and raising their many
children, neither he nor the children respect her or seem to care about her. She
remembers her life like she was a prisoner and, having been so thoroughly alienated
from herself and her potential, she herself becomes barren and incapable of connecting
with others. Nanda Kaul ends up so estranged from herself that she becomes a recluse
who never goes out, shudders when the phone rings, and identifies most with a
windblown tree. When Raka arrives and Nanda Kaul feels obliged to connect with her in
some way, she pulls from The Travels of Marco Polo to invent fanciful stories about her
childhood because the reality is devoid of anything she can relate to. Nanda Kaul seeks
peace and quiet in order to find her true self, but even after her attempts at rejecting the
past she never really escapes the way she was defined by her husband and children.

Ila Das was raised with a colonial education and attitude, having been around English
governesses and studying French language and piano, all of which instilled in her a
false sense of superiority, but in fact did nothing to prepare her for the reality of
postcolonial India. Privileged as she was, colonialism destroyed Ila Das' understanding
of who she is. She is unable to reconcile her ego with the demands of the present, and
thus ends up alone, despised, and destitute, unable to even feed herself. The ghosts of
British colonialism haunt the Kasauli landscape, from the Pasteur Institute to the
macabre parody of British culture at the Kasauli Club, and the struggle to recover a
sense of cultural identity that had been alienated by colonialism plays a part in Ila Das’
murder by Preet Singh.

Raka is no less alienated than the other two women in the novel, but she does identify a
path towards self-realization in her love of nature. Unfortunately for her, her wild nature
is obstructed by societal norms and the powerless position she is in by dint of being a
child. She is so alienated that she seeks actualization by attempting to become
something other-than-human, but alas, she cannot escape her condition. In the end,
Raka takes radical action and revolts by burning the whole thing down, probably ending
both her and Nanda Kaul’s unfulfilled lives.

Rejection of Patriarchy
The two main characters in Fire on the Mountain, Nanda Kaul and Raka, each
represent a withdrawal and rejection from patriarchal society. Nanda Kaul spent most of
her life performing domestic labor that she felt no drive for and no connection to. It was

28
not until the end of her life that she finally broke away and constructed her life in a
manner conceived as absolute rejection of her previous role as domestic matriarch. She
moved to the desolate mountains and shunned any attachment or relation, owned
almost nothing, and paid Ram Lal to do her cooking so that she could be totally still and
alone. Nanda Kaul, who was educated and economically privileged, was nonetheless
consigned to the role of homemaker by the patriarchal norms of the culture. Many of
Nanda Kaul’s flashbacks are bitter recollections of nonstop childcare, hosting, and
managing appearances. At one point, remembering her children and grandchildren she
thinks, “Had they never been silent? Never absent? Plaiting her fingers together,
contracting her eyelids, she fretted to catch at a saving memory, one that did not distract
and hustle but cooled and calmed” (25). “The care of others … had been a religious
calling she had believed in till she found it fake” … “she had been so glad when it was
over” (30). In her new, solitary life at Carignano she embraced the devastated austerity
of the landscape as the opposite of domestic duty.

Raka, on the other hand, has never known anything other than the complete rejection of
patriarchal, technological society. She is represented as a wild creature; she embodies
civilization’s other. She is still a young child, and all she has known is an abusive home
life moving from country to country and near-fatal illness. At the Kasauli Club Raka was
already in thrall to nightmarish hallucinations of humanity at its most abject when she
hears a song go, “Mama, she loves Papa, Papa, he loves Mama,” followed by a tune
that goes “Ta-ra, ta-ra, ta-ra-ra,” which is her mother’s name (71). These songs and
visions trigger a trauma-induced flashback to vicious abuse from her father. In the
narrative, she is even more withdrawn and given to wandering the wild after this, but it is
clear that she has rejected all connection and any norms of a domestic childhood since
before she ever arrived. Her experience of patriarchal terror has driven her to embody
its extreme rejection, she feels more at home with jackals in a charnel heap or in the
burned ruins of an abandoned house than she ever would with parents.

Desai writes, “if Nanda Kaul was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of duty and
obligation, her great-granddaughter was a recluse by nature, by instinct” (48). This
connection allows Nanda Kaul to find solace in Raka, and Raka accepts her until the
moment she begins to talk about the domestic world. Even at Carignano, though, they
are not far from the violence of patriarchal society, as we see at the end of the novel
when Ila Das is raped and murdered for opposing forced child marriage. Raka’s pride in
showing Nanda Kaul how she set the forest on fire suggests that she sees utter
destruction of the whole village as their best way out.

Civilization versus the Wild

In Fire on the Mountain, Anita Desai contrasts modern civilization—and specifically
Indian society—as a soul crushing system that wears the individual down, against the
wild—embodied in Raka and the landscape around Kasauli—as a plane of dangerous
freedom and violent yet exhilarating contingency. All three of the female characters in
the book, Raka, Nanda Kaul, and Ila Das, have experienced and been crushed by their
proximity to elements of high culture or western style civilization. Raka’s abusive father

29
is a diplomat who has taken her around the world negotiating for the nation state. After
she grew up with English governesses playing badminton, Nanda Kaul married. Her
unloving husband, who she feels saddled her with a lifetime of childcare and
homemaking, was the Vice-Chancellor of a university. And Ila Das, who came from a
similar background as Nanda Kaul, went on to teach in a university, tutor piano, and
was finally a government social worker. Nanda Kaul and Raka both find an alternative to
the violence of a declining civilization in Kasauli’s stark and rugged landscape. They trek
the mountains, laugh at marauding Langur monkeys, watch and try to accommodate
birds and a praying mantis, and become transfixed by storms and forest fires.

Desai uses the Pasteur Institute, an abomination of a modern industrial factory

surrounded by sweeping views of the Himalayas, as a symbol of this contrast. She
writes, “Raka sniffed the air and smelt cinders, smelt serum boiling, smelt chloroform
and spirit, smelt the smell of dogs’ brains boiled in vats, of guinea pigs’ guts, of rabbits
secreting fear in cages packed with coiled snakes, watched by doctors in white” (49).

Raka feels free when she is alone on a mountain top, like she is shipwrecked at sea,
remote, distant from the human world. Nanda Kaul has a harder time cutting all
connection to civilization, but she tries and mostly succeeds. But Ila Das continues to
live through the decline of human civilization, and without the wild to turn to it destroys
her. She has become destitute because the university did not promote her out of
corruption, no one cares about piano lessons anymore, and the end result of pushing
for human rights as a government social worker is that a reactionary traditionalist
assaults and murders her. In one of her final thoughts as she undertakes her ill-fated
walk home, she catches herself thinking of the kind and caring grain-seller as a savage,
“some hairy, half-dressed shopkeeper” (139). When she catches herself she asks,
“when would ever get over that pompous education of hers, leave it all behind and learn
to deal with the world, now her world, as it was?” (139).

Raka as Inhuman
Anita Desai creates the sense that Raka is wild, or other-than-human, by repeatedly
describing her in terms that refer to insects, birds, and even plants. This motif applies to
every single description of Raka throughout the novel. In Raka’s first appearance in the
book, when she first arrives at Carignano, Nanda Kaul thinks that she looks like a “dark
cricket” or a mosquito (39). Further down on the same page, Desai writes that her large
eyes made her resemble an insect. When she looks around the house on her first day
there, she “walked about as the newly caged…on silent, investigating pads” (40-1). She
moves her head “on its stalk” and holds the veranda rail “lizard-like” (42). Raka is a bird,
she seethes like a thousand mosquitoes, her eyelids are shells, still as a twig, but when
she moves she is a stickbug, her indifference is an elusive fish, and on and on. There
are too many instances to list, but the consistency of these inhuman descriptors creates
a real sense of Raka as wild, as other, and it effectively positions her outside of society
and just beyond our comprehension.

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The descriptive motif discussed here casts its shadow over all of Raka’s actions,
especially since the comparisons to insects begin before Raka ventures out into the hills
and goes semi-feral. Because of how she has been described, Raka’s trips to the waste
chutes outside of the Pasteur Institute take on a certain feeling as well. Rather than just
a child pushing limits, or someone drawn to macabre scenes, it almost seems as if she
is courting rabies, thinking that the disease could turn her into a jackal.

It is also clear that Raka identifies with animals more than humans, the inhuman
descriptors are not dehumanizing in an insulting way, rather they parallel her own affinity
for anything but the human. There are a couple examples of Raka identifying herself
with animals and defending them. When the band of Langur monkeys raid Carignano,
Ram Lal tries to run them off, and when he threatens a mother with her baby Raka
finally steps in to defend them. Another example would be when Nanda Kaul is trying to
impress Raka with invented tales about her father having a zoo when she was a child,
but hearing that the animals were chained or in cages has the opposite effect on Raka,
who is appalled and, though she does not allow Nanda Kaul to observe any strong
reaction, becomes visibly restless and over the conversation.

Annihilation
Both Raka and Nanda Kaul respond to their alienation through an overpowering desire
for annihilation. Nanda Kaul has reduced her world to Carignano, and at the opening of
the novel she claims that it is the place’s “barrenness” that appeals to her (4). At the end
of her life, all she wants is to be still and alone. After receiving news that Raka was
coming, she thinks, “I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing?”
(17). Anita Desai makes it clear that Nanda Kaul sees herself in the austere void of
Carignano, a house that is nothing more than a few whitewashed walls. She recalls the
bustling hustle of her past with horror, like a version of hell that she has escaped by
dissolving into the void of sunbaked rock and sky. She identifies with the garden at
Carignano, which like her, “seemed to have arrived, simply by a process of age, of
withering away and elimination, at a state of elegant perfection” (31). For Nanda Kaul,
waiting for her time on Earth to drain away, perfection will be achieved in emptiness.

Raka seeks a more active annihilation of the world she has no place in. She is a total
outsider and does not have any intention of trying to fit in with society. She is drawn to
the most devastated places in Kasauli: the rubble strewn ravine, the waste chutes
behind the Pasteur Institute, the charred ruins of a burnt house, windswept
mountaintops, the burnt pines left by a forest fire. In the same way that Nanda Kaul
identifies with the sparseness of Carignano, Raka identifies with the spaces where
civilization cannot get a foothold, or places where it has and then failed. On at least two
occasions Raka feels liberated on barren and windy hilltops, and the way she expresses
it is by imagining she is shipwrecked at sea—another metaphor for the failure and
annihilation of human civilization.

When Raka revolts against her alienation by setting the forest on fire, she is ending her
world. She wants to turn all of Kasauli into the apocalyptic zones that persist when

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civilization fails because that is where she might imagine beginning anew, natural and
free. The way that she calls “Look, Nani” to Nanda Kaul suggests that she is doing it for
her as well, destroying the world that broke Nanda Kaul and Ila Das in an attempt to
liberate them all (145).

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Styles
Point of View
The point of view in Fire on the Mountain is third person omniscient, shifting fluidly
between characters and always conveyed in past tense. The primary characters of the
novel are Nanda Kaul and Raka, so the narrative follows them most often, but it also
gives the thoughts and emotions of Ram Lal, the postman, Ila Das, the grainseller, and
the caretaker of the burnt house. The narrative voice provides lengthy memories and
flashbacks from Nanda Kaul and Ila Das, even the postman and the grainseller
remember the past. In contrast to these characters, Raka never remembers or thinks
about the past, with the notable exception of her trauma induced flashback—and even
that is experienced as an event unfolding in the present, experienced as if it was
happening at the party. The only other time that Raka references the past is in a briefly
thought statement that the natural areas around Carignano are more appealing to her
than any of the other places she has lived.

Nanda Kaul’s thoughts and emotions are the most complex of any character in the
novel. The narrative follows her closely, allowing the reader to feel the tensions and
incongruities between how she thinks about herself and her past, and how she
develops. Because of how closely the omniscient narrator stays to Nanda Kaul’s
interiority, it comes as a revelation when she breaks down and admits that she has been
living a lie, regardless of the passages and details that hint at it throughout the novel.
Much of the novel’s power comes from the felt reckoning of Nanda Kaul with herself.

Ila Das’s internal monologue is also integral to the power of Part 3. She both exposes
and complements Nanda Kaul’s character, and her thoughts give a much clearer view of
what Nanda Kaul is trying to repress. When Ila Das walks home in the dark, her shifting
emotions and rising fear make for an intense ending.

Language and Meaning

The language in Fire on the Mountain is beautifully wrought and poetic. The diction is
accessible and precise while simultaneously allowing for extended abstract passages
and uncommon words. There are moments where the language is almost purple, but
Desai reins it in before it becomes too much, and alternately there are passages that
match the starkness and austerity of the setting. As the novel takes place in India, it
integrates a number of local words and names, which are often italicized. Because
English language in India is remnant of British colonialism, the book uses British
spellings of many words. While there is a good amount of dialogue in the novel, or
perhaps more often one person monologuing out loud, a majority of the novel is
narrated internally. Nonetheless, a lot is conveyed in the difference between Nanda
Kaul’s manner of speaking when she fabricates long stories to intrigue Raka versus

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when she remains awkward and withdrawn in spontaneous conversation on the
telephone.

Desai’s use of imagery is integral to the atmosphere and meaning of the novel. She
conveys a lot about the characters’ subconscious thoughts and motivations through the
way she describes the settings, and there are times when the descriptions of, for
example, Carignano and Nanda Kaul hew so close to each other that they seem to
merge. Desai also makes good use of foreshadowing, a device that she integrates into
the narrative seamlessly with her constant descriptions and the way she often gives
minor details gravitas through her narrative eye.

Fire on the Mountain is full of metaphors and similes, one example being the way that
Raka is continually likened to insects or other wild animals. There are plenty of other
examples, some are similarly recurring, like Ila Das being likened to a puppet, while
others shift, like the call of the cuckoos around Nanda Kaul sounding domestic as
opposed to the demented and mad cuckoo song around Raka.

Structure
Fire on the Mountain is divided into three parts: Part 1 is called “Nanda Kaul at
Carignano,” Part 2 is “Raka comes to Carignano,” and Part 3 is called “Ila Das leaves
Carignano,” with each part more or less revolving around the event of the title. Part 1 is
broken up into ten chapters, Part 2 has 21 chapters, and Part 3 has 13 chapters. The
chapters are all numbered and mostly short, ranging from half of a page to around six
pages at the upper limit. Sometimes the chapters lead directly into the next one, and
other times an unspecified amount of time has passed between chapters. As the section
titles suggest, Part 1 focuses on Nanda Kaul, Part 2 alternates between Raka and
Nanda Kaul, and Part 3 follows Ila Das, Nanda Kaul, and to a lesser extent Raka.

The novel primarily takes place in the narrative present, but it incorporates a lot of
memory and flashbacks, often moving fluidly between Nanda Kaul’s ruminations on the
past and the landscape that she observes while she ruminates. Ila Das’s past is either
thought about by Nanda Kaul or narrated in dialogue while she talks at Raka and Nanda
Kaul, but her thoughts also shift around through time. The past and the present take
place in such radically different settings that they can almost seem like different plotlines
at times, but the past is always inflected by Nanda Kaul’s present feelings, and it always
works in the service of fleshing out Nanda Kaul’s or Ila Das’s present situation.

With a paperback format of 146 pages, the novel moves quick and feels intense and
compact. The novel is barely concerned with plot, and the amount of action that actually
takes place is minimal and concentrated in the last few pages. The novel is much more
concerned with creating the grounds for a struggle between the stickiness of socially
imposed identity and and the ability to be a self-made individual, as well as a
psychological portrayal of alienation and revolt under patriarchy and colonialism.

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Quotes
To be a tree, no more and no less, was all she was prepared to undertake.
-- Narrator (Part 1 Chapter 1)

Importance: This quote, near the beginning of the novel, shows Nanda Kaul's
withdrawal from society. It identifies her with the still, inhuman landscape she has retired
to and it explains that she has no intention of reengaging with the world of social affairs.

Here was a letter and she would have to open it. She resolved to say 'No' to whatever
demand or request it contained. No, no, no.
-- Narrator (Part 1, Chapter 3)

Importance: Nanda Kaul appears firm in her total rejection of familial duty here, but we
know that she ends up allowing Raka to come to Carignano. This quote illuminates the
internal tension between her rejection of her past and her inability to be anything else
than what she was conditioned to be.

Then there was the bread to be spread with butter, jam jars opened and dug into, knives
taken away from babies and boys, girls questioned about homework, servants
summoned to mop up spilt milk and fetch tea, and life would swirl on again, in an eddy,
a whirlpool of which she was the still, fixed eye in the centre.
-- Narrator (Part 1, Chapter 7)

Importance: This quote gives a sense of how Nanda Kaul thinks about her past, as
constantly swept up in the hustle of domestic duty. It shows what she is rejecting with
her desire for isolation and stillness at Carignano.

The amount she had jettisoned from her life might take another's breath away.
-- Narrator (Part 1, Chapter 9)

Importance: Nanda Kaul has attempted to find herself by rejecting the material and
social form of her old life. This quote shows that she has rid herself of everything to do
so, yet still suggests that she measures her life by how others view it.

Puzzled, Raka turned her head on its stalk, gently. Her father and grandmother had
extolled the beauties and delights of a himalayan hill-station to her, but said nothing of
factories.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 2)

Importance: This quote gives a sense of the ways in which Raka is different. It
describes her body in plantlike terms, and shows how she sees the world differently
than Nanda Kaul, who has not mentioned the Pasteur Institute in her interactions with
the setting. To Raka the factory dominates the landscape.

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Listening to her great-grandmother moving about in the bedroom, she felt as if she
heard the sounds of collar and chain. She had not a dog's slavishness to
companionship, and bit her lip with vexation.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 7)

Importance: For Raka all human interaction is forced, and so having to join Nanda Kaul
for tea and talk would be oppressive. This shows that even if Nanda Kaul imagines
herself as a withdrawn pariah, Raka is more extreme.

What had pained her most was seeing Raka run after Ram Lal and swing from his arm.
She had not even called to her Nani to come and see the langurs.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 13)

Importance: Despite her desire to be tough and free of attachment, Nanda Kaul craves
attention from Raka. In this quote she is jealous that Raka has a friendship with Ram
Lal, and was not thinking of her when the band of langur monkeys raided the house.

It was as dry and clean as a nut but she burst from its shell like an impatient kernel,
small and explosive.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 18)

Importance: This quote describes Raka's relationship to Carignano. She likes it best of
anywhere that she has lived, but she still feels confined. In the tension between her
wanderings and the ritual of teatime with Nanda Kaul, she begins to understand that
she desires a radical break from society. In calling her explosive, the narrative also
foreshadows her radical act of destruction at the end of the novel.

Raka turned from the moon—disappointed: she had hoped it was another forest fire.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 20)

Importance: Raka desires the destruction of civilization, even the relative freedom she
has is not enough and the only way she can conceive of breaking away is through
annihilation. This quote is notable because her name, Raka, means moon, and so it
suggests that she wants to turn away from her own being in favor of sheer devastation.

Raka no more needed, or wanted, a house than a jackal did, or a cicada. She was a
wild creature—wild, wild, wild, thought Nanda Kaul.
-- Narrator (Part 2, Chapter 21)

Importance: By this point in the novel Nanda Kaul has fully come to understand that
Raka is wild and cannot be tamed. This quote drives that realization home.

Isn't it absurd,' she rattled on, 'how helpless our upbringing made us, Nanda. We
thought we were being equipped with the very best—French lessons, piano lessons,
English governesses—my, all that only to find it left us helpless, positively handicapped.
-- Narrator (Part 3, Chapter 7)

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Importance: Here Ila Das is explaining to Nanda Kaul how their preparation for British
colonial life has left them incapable of adapting to the reality of postcolonial life. This
stands in contrast to Raka's feral education as an ecological autodidact.

It was all a lie, all. She had lied to Raka, lied about everything.
-- Narrator (Part 3, Chapter 13)

Importance: This is Nanda Kaul's moment of reckoning with herself. When she learns
that Ila Das has been killed her entire constructed identity falls to pieces and she sees
herself for the broken, deluded relic that she is.

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