Name : Alina-Mihaela

Surname : Matei
Faculty : Faculty of Letters
University : University “ Dunărea de Jos”
Specialization : English-French
Group : 2nd
Year : 3rd

Metaphors of Rain and Fire

In
Salman Rushdie’s
The Firebird’s Nest

According to P. Bayapa Reddy in Aspects of Contemporary World Literature, myths

and cultural past of India has been a favourite choice of Salman Rushdie partly because
he has a tenuous link with this land which gives tremendous leaps to his thoughts and
fancy and partly because India as a major literary subject helps him win the favour of his
western audience by catering to their devious curiosity about Indian ethos.

The present paper aims at illustrating how this story explores the mythical, historical,
economic and social facets of contemporary life through two dominant metaphors: rain
and fire, and their applicability in the given context.

Rushdie’s 1997 short story The Firebird’s Nest was included in the 2004 anthology
Telling Tales. In this evocative and tense story, an American woman marries an older,
Indian man whose hometown, where women die by spontaneous combustion, is
destroyed by drought and economic hardship. The title of the novella includes a subtle
metaphor, the firebird, which refers to a bird of flame and fire, that to some to see one
signifies true love. In some myths the Firebird is a symbol of the Sun Goddess and to
some myths this bird has a sweet voice and gilds all that it touches. Also in some Russian
myths the firebird is a creature of light travelling through its own unique paths to its
destination.The firebird also reflects the image of Phoenix, which is synonym with
rebirth or recovery. The bird traditionally lives near a cool well which it visits each
morning to bathe and sing. When the Phoenix reaches the end of its life, it is said to build
itself a nest of aromatic spices such as cinnamon and myrrh. It then sets the nest and
itself on fire and is burned to ashes.
The story opens with the description of the drought which has devoured the entire
domain (“The rains have failed so often that now they say instead, the drought
succeeded.”) and has turned it into a dying place (“It is a hot place, flat and sere.”), a
wasteland, forcing both man and animal to migrate south and east in search of water.
The paragraph ends with some sort of a mystery, which will be elucidated only towards
the end of the novella, the women do not die in the way in which men (farmers) die –
“eaten by his land” because of all the cracks due to the drought, “women catch fire, and
burn”. The story proceeds with the return of Mr Maharaj with his pregnant American
bride, Mrs Onassis, in a limousine driving to his abominable palace. She is describes as
being “rich. As rich as the old, obese Nizam of - , who was weighed in jewels on his
birthdays and so was able to increase taxes simply by putting on weight”, “she is a fertile
land; she will bring sons, and rain”. She is a “rainmaker” capable “to bring together
capital and ideas” for “conjuring up the monetary nourishment” for any project. Thus the
rain or the water becomes a metaphor of economical survival.
At first the room prepared for Mr Maharaj’s bride “crumbles, stinks”, “the curtains” in
the room “are tattered”, “the bed precarious”, “the pictures on the wall pornographic
representations of arabesque couplings at some petty princeling’s court”, “a fan stirs the
hot, syrupy air”, but after a while “her own room begins to look like luxury’s acme. Glass
in the windows, the slow-turning electric fan. A telephone with, sometimes, a dialling
tone. A socket for her laptop’s power line, the intermittent possibility of forging a modem
link with tat other planet, her earlier life.” For her welcoming party he has prepared “an
extravaganza”:

By moonlight, beneath hot stars, on great carpets from Isfahan and Shiraz, a
gathering of dignitaries and nobles welcomes her, the finest musicians play their
mournful, haunting flutes, their ecstatic strings, and sing the most ancient and
freshest love-songs ever heard; the most succulent delicacies of the region are
offered for her delight.

But this effort to recreate his lost “magic kingdom” proves to be another economical
disaster which he admits, by replying bitterly, as soon as his bride asks him – “You have
made a magic kingdom for me, or is this how you relax every night?”

The camels, the horses, even the edibles have been brought from far away. We
impoverish ourselves to make you happy. How can you imagine that we are able
to live like this? We protect the last fragments of what we had, and now, to please
you, we plunge deeper into debt. We dream only of survival; this Arabian night is
an American dream.

This economical aspect is recaptured several times in the novella through the metaphor
of rain, every time making reference to the American bride – who will help Mr Maharaj
shape up his kingdom: “She is rich; she is fertile land; she will bring sons, and rain.” , “a
rainmaker”, “Rainmaker, bring us rain.”.
The images of “burning bridges” and of “burning boats” in her dreams – representative
for the metaphor of fire – evoke the loss of links with her previous life, the feeling of
being trapped in a world of fantasies, a dangerous world where brides are burnt.
Next the metaphor of fire joins the metaphor of rain, as Rushdie describes women as
creatures of “fiery heart” dressed in the colours of fire, not only red and gold but also
blue in melancholy, green in envy and white and black in utter rage.
The story continues with a story within a story which accentuates the bride burning and
demonstrates the emergence of life from death. Miss Maharaj narrates to Ms Ossian the
horrible tale of a gigantic mythological prince of that kingdom who had married a dancer
of unfading beauty. Old age gripped the prince but his wife, even at fifty, looked a
woman of twenty-one. The prince suspected his wife of taking lovers and so, because of
his jealousy, he set his fort on fire in which both of them died. Only their children
survived – a daughter who became a dancer and a son who grew into a sportsman. It was
said that the old prince himself was metamorphosed into “a giant bird” composed
entirely of flames and had burned his bride. Since then the same firebird has been
appearing from time to time to burn other brides at their husband’s instance by “brushing
their bodies with his malevolent wings.”

All brides in these parts are brought from far a field. And once the men have
spent their dowries, then the firebird comes.

The she describes how a princess “recently” committed suicide by “drinking fire”: “she
crushed her heirloom diamonds in a cup and gulped them down”. Her question “Do you
know how many brides he has had?” terrifies the American bride, but her panic ends only
when mystery of the fable is revealed. One night, as the young bride watches the
confrontation between Miss Maharaj and her brother – that night Miss Maharaj admits
that Miss Ossian was Mr Maharaj’s only bride – finds out that it was he who was the
firebird – he will later admit “as his body turns to fire, as the wings burst out of him, as
his eyes blaze; his words hang in the air as the firebird’s breath scorches Miss Maharaj,
burns her to a cinder […]. I am the firebird’s nest.”, and then he turns into flames like
the mythological bird, Phoenix. Seeing Miss Maharaj burn, “something loosens within
the American”, so she crashes upon Mr Maharaj “like a wave” and the dancers follow
her.
They feel the frontiers of their bodies burst and the waters pour out, the
immense crushing weight of their rain, drowning the firebird and its nest, flowing
over the drought-hardened land that no longer knows how to absorb the flood
which bears away the old dotard and his murderous fellows, cleansing the region
of its horrors, of its archaic tragedies, of its men.

The bodies of the dancers, who were spinsters like Miss Maharaj represent infertility or
dry earth and the water symbolizes cleansing, purification. Water is a life giver. The
women and the dancers become themselves again and “the universe resumes its familiar
shape”.
The novella finally closes as the American bride caresses her womb thinking “ The new
life growing within her will be both fire and rain”. Thus the metaphors of fire and rain
become existential.

The Firebird’s Nest is a fictionalization of the myth of Phoenix. As P. Bayapa Reddy

said, Salman Rushdie “has used the ghost element as a technique of romance to
comprehend the mythological past as well as to enact the concept of metamorphosis
because the mystery about the firebird’s nest is hidden in it.”
 Bibliography

Aldama, Frederick Luis (2003) Postethnic Narrative Criticism : Magicorealism in

Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman
Rushdie , USA: University of Texas Press;

Campbell, Joseph (1946) (Ed.) Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Culture,
Washington, D.C.: Pantheon Books Inc.;

Gopal, Priyamvada (2009) The Indian English Novel: Nation, History. And Narration ,
NY: Oxford University Press;

Gordimer, Nadine (2004) (Ed.) Telling Tales , Picador;

Reddy, Bayapa P. (2008) (Ed.) Aspects of Contemporary Wold Literature , Delhi:

ATLANTIC;