Sunday book pick: The tender preoccupations of an old woman in Anita Desai’s ‘Fire on the Mountain’

“...Each felt she was doing her best at avoiding the other but found it was not so simple to exist and yet appear not to exist.”

The protagonist of Anita Desai’s 1977 novel, Fire on the Mountain, Nanda Kaul, has finally retired after long, tedious years of being useful to her family – her husband, their children, and a band of grandchildren. The house, Carignano, is finally empty and entirely her own. She zealously guards her privacy and has to put on no maternal feelings like she had to in her youth. Unlike most women her age, she has shorn herself of all emotions – she is positively disapproving of her children, the grandchildren’s faces meld into each other, and she hasn’t even bothered to remember what her great-grandchildren’s names are. In fact, she is so unattached to her role as a mother that she is even able to rank her children according to how well she can tolerate them. Asha, though beautiful, is the “least loved” and “most exasperating” among her daughters.

Up in the hills

A lone woman living in the (then quiet) hills of Kasauli, Nanda is also fiercely protective of the silence in her home. The first chapter, featuring a postman labouring up the hill and Nanda Kaul watching him in crescendoing anger and fearfulness, terrified he’ll bring her correspondence from the outside world, disturbing her carefully constructed peace, is a stellar example of how to introduce a protagonist. The description, so complete in itself, can pass as a full-bodied short story.

Nanda Kaul is equally – if not more – resentful of the telephone in her house. She sees it not as a device for communication and convenience, but a banshee whose “scream rang through the house, tearing it from end to end.” Her solitude is also impressed upon by her sparse lifestyle – she likes having very few things in her home, there are no visitors and only one servant, and her meals of toasts and apricots are enough. She is in fine health and dresses elegantly, if simply. Nanda Kaul is truly grateful for being old. She looks back at her youth with no fondness for her marriage and genuine disdain for motherhood. She remembers lying down and closing her eyes and wishing everyone around her would disappear. She confides in herself that she has suffered from “nimiety, the disorder, the fluctuating, and unpredictable excess.”

When her daughter declares that she’s sending Raka, her granddaughter, up to Kasauli to recuperate at Carignano, Nanda Kaul dreads the intrusion, loathes it – she has forgotten how to care for and entertain children, she groans that she has “discharged all [her] duties”, so why is she being punished now? She reluctantly agrees to take Raka in but not without comparing the child to the pestilent presence of a mosquito that has flown in from the plains to “tease and worry” her. The child is also equally ill at ease with the arrangement, and unbeknownst to Nanda Kaul, her “unusually high-pitched” voice makes Raka feel “itchy.” Mosquito metaphors aside, Nanda Kaul and Raka are alike in more ways than one. While Nanda Kaul is a recluse out of vengeance, Raka is so by nature. To Nanda Kaul’s surprise, Raka is also unlike any of her children or grandchildren – she was “a freak by virtue of never making a demand.”

The two girls stay out of each other’s way and fall into silent companionship. As Raka courageously, intuitively wanders in the lush hills of Kasauli, Nanda Kaul starts to feel a desperate need to connect with the child. Though neither deems to speak what’s on her mind, Nanda Kaul regales the child with stories from her own childhood in Kashmir. The extravagance of her childhood (a father who travelled widely, wild animals at home, a dutiful mother) is replicated in her married life at Carignon (a doting husband, a sprawling family, and an endless crowd of visitors). She baits Raka with these stories in an attempt to not only remember her past – a favourite pastime of the elderly, as Raka correctly judges – but perhaps also to find kinship in family where she has always felt like an outsider.

It comes tumbling down

The other presence that haunts Nanda Kaul is her childhood friend Ila Das, whose shrill, grating voice is a serious “handicap” that Ila Das is ashamed of and Nanda Kaul cannot stand. After much insistence to visit Raka at Carignon, Nanda Kaul finally gives in and invites Ila Das once she has run out of excuses to keep her friend at bay. Even at her old age, Ila Das is taunted for her voice and awkward gait and the village children tease and mock her as she trundles up the hill. A social worker by profession, Ila Das’s career is marked by provoking men who are loath to have a woman interfering with their family matters.

The world of these three women is fragile and flammable. And so are the forests of Kasauli, deceptively welcoming yet disposed to catching hellish fires and burning down everything in their way. Terror and awe colour Nanda Kaul and Raka’s faces as they watch the “copper glow” tearing through the mountains. As very early consequences of human negligence and climate change, the past, the one we are so far away from, feels incomprehensibly tame in front of the horrors that present-day wildfires have become.

Anita Desai models Nanda Kaul as someone who is indifferent to nature – she is at home in it but does not delight in the impish ways of birds and animals. And yet, Desai’s description of nature, the women’s animal ways are so vivid and passionate that one cannot help but think of them as tiny critters in the mountains’ ample, formidable lap. The languorous descriptions of Raka wandering in the hills, the glorious expanse of wilderness, and animals and birds in flight saturate the pages with a sweetness reminiscent of the happy days in Eden before the shame and sin crept in.

The novel concludes hastily – there is a mad rush of action at the end, something awful happens, and the ornate lies split open. Desai does not seem interested in Nanda Kaul’s misfortune; she forsakes her at her wretchedest state, and moves ahead unburdened with the truth that she has unleashed on her reader and characters. In this moment, she’s the most like Nanda Kaul – she’s discharged from her role as an author. None of this is real, she tells us, and yet I, the reader, am abandoned, reeling from the sorrow of what I have just learnt…

Fire in the Mountain is the seventh book I have read by Anita Desai and I’m so mesmerised each time I read her. The richness of her prose makes me grieve for not just a time long gone by but also for the rapid, calculated loss of language – its beauty, complexity and depth. There is very little reverence for language in the contemporary novel: everything is about bigness – big Themes, big Politics; the contemporary author seems to have forgotten that writing is about the creation of something Beautiful. Something so transcendental that it is untouched by the smallness of the Big. Sometimes, you have to write just for the sake of it. Desai’s fiction conveys the pleasure of writing when most new writing would have you believe it’s all a headache, a big Torture. It isn’t – writing is one of man’s happiest pursuits. We need writers who remind us that writing is Joyous and Freeing, and only then will we have literature that is worth anything. Till then, there is more Anita Desai to read and re-read.

Fire on the Moutain, Anita Desai, Penguin Random House India.