The writer won the Sahitya Akademi Award for this book in 1978.
“Fire on the mountain” (Allied Publishers Private Ltd) evokes an idyllic place: Carignano in Kasauli, India. It is barren, rocky; one has a sweeping view of mountains and plains. Nanda Kaul, an elderly, lives here all alone. It’s a place she had wanted and prepared for since the death of her husband, the Vice-Chancellor of a university. A strained relationship had always made her want to escape. Here she is comfortable with her apricot trees, pines and birds. She values her privacy. On seeing a postman approaching, “her nostrils pinched and whitened with disapproval” (page 5). Raka (meaning moon), her great-grandchild, is coming to stay. She receives the news with “her lips pressed tightly” (p 14). She hates the idea of the child shattering her private world.
Hints
Nanda recalls how she had to welcome her husband’s guests at “his house, never hers” (p 18), which tellingly depicts her as a stranger. To tell us that she was much more a host than a wife, we see her keeping out the flies, polishing the doors, shutting the cupboards, watching over the guests’ children. She had expected to be freed from these mentally oppressive burdens and live peacefully. But she feels that the child’s arrival would be a noose slipping once more round her neck. Ila Das, her friend, telephones. Instead of joy, Nanda drops “words like small, cold pebbles into the mouthpiece” (p 22), thus expressing her resentment, disinterest and lack of warmth.
She remembers her husband coming back after leaving one of the guests home. We are not told who the person is, but the emphasis hints at somebody special and also the possibility of an extra-marital affair. He goes straightaway to his room while she paces in the garden slowly. Concrete details enhance the tension brewing between the couple and establish growing distance. On the day of the child’s arrival, Nanda “bumps her leg against the bedpost” (p 33), letting us see into her nervousness.
An eye for detail
Nanda picks up an apricot from the grass. It is squashed by its fall. She flings it away. Seeing its flight, a hoopoe strikes down at it, tears at its flesh and flies off with a hump in its beak. The cook enters the kitchen, the chickens crowd about the door “scrapping the floor with their crooked toes in an excited scrabble for attention” (p 12). At one moment Nanda is lost in contemplation. A large white and yellow butterfly crosses over and breaks her contemplation. These are typical Anita Desai touches that raise the style for our visual delight.
There is no great rapport between Nanda and Raka. The child plays on her own and returns late in the evening “tossing a horse chestnut from one hand to the other” (p 73) showing how she is managing to find happiness in small things, and also how immersed she is in her own world. They stroll together but their isolation and loneliness are highlighted in their “hands behind their backs and fingers clenched”. Lack of communication could not have been better expressed than through an effective image.
Secrecy
The child’s arrival is “so disquieting” (p 47). The gap between old age and childhood keeps increasing. The child wants to be alone and pursue her own secret life among the rocks and pines. Whenever they take a walk, there is a feeling that they do not “belong to each other”. Conversation is one-way. They avoid each other. Both of them have been significantly marked by their traumatic experiences: Nanda has suffered humiliation and rejection, the child has just been recovering from a near-fatal attack of typhoid apart from coming from a broken family (she has seen her father beating her mother).
There are so many things they could have said to each other or done together to relieve their grief but we have them bottling up their feelings. They are unable to emerge from their shells. Nanda wants to be alone but flashbacks of her miserable past torture her time and time again, preventing her from enjoying peace in the present. Nanda is a recluse out of vengeance. Raka is a recluse by nature, by instinct. Although Nanda “relishes the sensation of being alone” (p 26) she does make an effort to connect with the child by telling stories but the latter is reclusive.
Their private worlds lead to social withdrawal. We witness these characters struggling to survive the harshness and the hardships of life by withdrawing into their solitude.
Powerful imagery
Creating an imagery to effectively express an idea is an art in itself. Anita has powerful and memorable images to offer us. Nanda is reading her estranged daughter’s letter with one finger moving “like a searching insect”, which states much about her attitude. She watches an eagle gliding freely and undisturbed. She feels herself in the place of this bird. We understand her urge to be free from a chaotic past. Freedom would mean a fresh life with no male to dominate over her.
She watches a hen dragging out a worm inch by inch from the ground till it snaps in two. She feels like the worm itself and winces at its mutilation. Inside her, something has shattered or is mutilated beyond repair. Nanda desires stillness and serenity – she imagines being “a charred tree trunk in the forest, a broken pillar of marble in the desert, a lizard on a stone wall” (p 23), betraying an agitated mind. Raka appears to Nanda to be “like one of those dark crickets that leap up in fright but do not sing, or a mosquito, minute and fine, on thin, precarious legs” (p 39), images suggesting weakness or fragility.
We hear cicadas sizzling “as though the sun were frying them in its great golden pan” (p 103). Raka is “as secretive as a little wild bird, or an insect that hides” (p 132). Ila Das, Nanda’s old friend, is coming for tea “fluttering up over the gravel like a bit of crumpled paper” (p 112). Nanda wants solitude and no intrusion but the cook announces there’s a call. She “swept up the flagstones of the path like an aroused snake” (p 144) to learn that Ila Das has been raped and killed.
Imagery enriches our reading experience.
Loneliness
The book gives us an insight into the psyche of two elderly women and a child who has difficulty relating to them due to certain family issues. The common thread running through them is what it means to be lonely. The child will end up setting the forest on fire, and will discover the great-grandmother on a stool with her head hanging, the long telephone wire dangling.
With so many families breaking up around us and leaving the members to cope with their loneliness as best as they can, and any failure to cope often leading to depressive moods or even suicide, the book is relevant to our times.