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and The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 1977. While doing an online search for this novel, I
discovered that it is shelved under Fiction about Aging & Death in at least one library. Another
site, litweb.net has this synopsis of the novel: Fire on the Mountain (1977), set in Kasauli, a hill
station, focused on three women and their oppressed life.
After suffering through many South Asian novels about women and oppression, I had sworn off
any more such novels. I relented only because I had recently read Desai's In Custody, and I knew
she was an exceptional writer with rare sensitivity and perspective. I was not disappointed.
The novel starts out slowly with a detailed description of Nanda Kaul's movements on one
afternoon. Nanda Kaul, a great grandmother, has renounced her entire world, and has come to
spend her remaining days in the peace of the Kasauli mountains. She is disenchanted with
everything and wants nothing to do with any of the people in her life. Even a daily visit from the
postman is an unwanted intrusion.
A letter arrives from her daughter Asha, informing of her granddaughter Raka's arrival in
Kasauli. Asha's daughter Tara's marriage is in shambles and Tara is suffering from ongoing bouts
of depression. She is in no shape to take care of Raka, who is just recovering from a severe case
of typhoid. So Raka is dispatched to Nanda Kaul's mountain retreat. Through a few small
flashbacks, we see Nanda Kaul's life as a successful wife and mother. It appears that she was
tired of being a caretaker for everyone, and has retreated to the mountains to lead a reclusive life.
She appears to be a very strong determined woman, a person of very few words. She says, I
never cared for music myself. It makes me fidget. I greatly prefer silence.
The sickly great granddaughter, Raka, arrives. Nanda Kaul thought she looked 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. Soon Nanda Kaul discovers that she and Raka have a lot in common.
Raka is exactly like her. [..] So they worked out the means by which they would live together and
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.
But there is one fundamental difference: 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. Nanda Kaul
has disconnected herself from her world, but Raka has never had a chance to build any
connection with the world. A child who loves solitude, wanders about the mountain and ravines
looking for jackals, and churails, peeks at the Nightclub dances, enjoys the wild fire on the
mountain, is soon recognized as the Crazy one from the Carignano in the neighborhood.
The small interactions between Nanda Kaul and Raka are insightful, and a few short
conversations foretell the events to come. I really enjoyed this minimalist approach throughout
the novel. I think this novel is one of the finest examples of the 'show and not tell' style of story
telling.
A woman that Nanda Kaul has known since childhood comes to visit them on the mountain. Ila
Das is not quite together, and is prone to harassment by the neighborhood hooligans. ... but no
matter what she had said, it would have made them bellow - that was the way her voice acted
upon everyone.. Besides the unpleasant voice, Ila Das has suffered many other misfortunes in her
life and has struggled to survive with some dignity, with kind assistance from Nanda Kaul at
crucial times. She chatters nonstop about the times they have shared, bringing out some secrets
about Nanda Kaul's life, although nothing is fully revealed until the end of the novel. There are
clues: one is when Raka notices Nanda Kaul trying to silence Ila Das. On another occasion,
Nanda Kaul is sharing her father's history with Raka: He admired it, you see - he admired
anything uncommon, extraordinary. We get another clue when Ramlal the caretaker, is worried
that the dust storm may knock over the Hamam and start a fire and Raka is simply enamoured of
the idea.
What takes place in the last few pages of the novel catches the reader by surprise. All the signs of
the end were present in the novel, in the descriptions, in the tone of the narrator, and in the few
chosen words of the characters. This, to me, is the strongest feature of the novel. There is never a
word uttered about the oppression that these women have suffered through their lives. The book
is a simple portrayal of three women who have a found a way to live in content albeit in
seclusion. The injustices and oppressions are for the reader to derive.
This novel begins with Nanda Kaul''s arrival at Carignano in Kasauli.Carignano has a
long history of its lonely Enlish maidens.Nanda Kaul has taken refuse in Carignano
from the hustle bustle of plain land , after living a busy life of a vice chancelor''s
wife,she now in her old age wants some rest, she doesnot welcome a slightest
intrusion in her isolation from her past,but the postman comes to hand over a letter
which tells RAKA''s arrival in CARIGNANO,and tellephone rings to annouce that
Nanda kaul will be visited by her childhood friend Ila Das.Raka is a child of
nature,she belongs to nature ,, Raka, is "the crazy one from Carignano" explores the
nature around her,born of an unhappy marriage,who observes her mother being
brutally beaten up by her drunkard, sophiticate and arrogant foreign
delegate father.
Ila Das is born of a rich familly,girls were thaught French and piano under the
guidence of english governace,boys were sent for higher education in OXFORD,but
the boys were mere squanderers who spent the money in drinking and
gambling.when their father died ,the family fortune has divided among the brothers
according to the rule of hindu patriarchal law.GIRLS WERE LEFT BEHIND WITH THE
FANCIFUL IDEA THAT THEY WILL BE MARRIED TO RICH HUSBANDS.Tow sisters are
burden with their mother ,they have to fight for living,Ila Das at last becomes a
social worker.ILA DAS tries to make the illitarate mass understand the draw back of
child marriage,she has brutally paid while preventing a seven years old child''s
marriage with a sixty years old guy.Prith Sign father of the seven years old girl
raped and murdered her.
Eveywhere irrespective of time and place,THE ONLY WAY OF PUNISHING A WOMAN
IS PHYSICALLY ABUSED HER,RAPED HER,the attitude of the patriarchy is always the
same ,they always sees a wommen as inferior human being ,as BEING A second
sex.
Nanda Kaul has also suffered all through her life,she has passed a loveless married
life.She always aVice Chancellor''s wife,her every identity is link to her husband,her
husband is the lord who has carried a lifelong affair with Miss.David.Nanda now
wants her own indentity.
Raka took the revenge on behalf of all the suffering wommen,she set the mountain
in fire.RAKA IS THE SYMBOL OF HOPE FOR WOMAN.
Her work bears this out. Though her concerns include the
suppression and marginalisation of women, her approach is not a
stridently feminist one (or especially directed at the treatment of
women in conservative societies); if anything, it’s too underplayed
for the tastes of some readers. It’s also part of a larger motif that
can be seen in the three reissued books, that of the circumscribed
life: people unable, or unwilling, to escape what many of us would
think of as a trapped, claustrophobic existence, and who yet
manage to find a measure of dignity even within those constraints.
Clear Light of Day, which she has called the most autobiographical
of her works, sets the lonely childhoods of two sisters, Bimla (Bim)
and Tara, against their lives as adults – Tara having married a
diplomat and moved to the US, thus escaping the family house
where she had felt stifled, while Bim stayed behind, a custodian of
old memories. In Custody has small-town lecturer Deven resigned
to a humdrum existence until he gets the opportunity to interview
one of his idols, a once-great Urdu poet now leading a shabby,
parasitic life in an old Delhi house. And Baumgartner’s Bombay is
about a perpetual outsider, a German Jew who escapes the
Holocaust as a child and lives an unobtrusive, unremarkable life in
India for decades.
A conversation
Besides, once you’re boxed into a category, you run the danger of
becoming a spokesman for that particular box. But my writing just
isn’t polemical in that sense, it’s an absolutely personal response
to life.
The three books that have been reissued…were they your own
choices? You once described Clear Light of Day as the most
autobiographical of your novels.
No, this was a Random House selection – the next lot of three
books will be chosen soon as well, we have to decide on those.
Clear Light of Day was autobiographical primarily in terms of
setting and period – it was set in old Delhi, where I grew up, and
around the same time. The other element was the relationship
between Bim and Tara and their siblings – that’s something I
wanted to explore, based on my experiences while growing up.
Not that this is exactly my own family, of course.
Yes, but they are very peripheral, very marginal – at least in terms
of how the men look at them.
I enjoyed the bittersweet humour in that book – Deven’s
earnest but woefully unsuccessful attempts to capture Nur’s
voice on his tape recorder; how he invariably ends up with
something embarrassing, instead f something he’d want to
preserve for posterity.
Yes, and though it’s all so frustrating for Deven, it’s possible for
the reader to laugh at the situation too. I meant that bittersweet
humour to be there – I certainly didn’t want the book to be an
outright tragedy. It was meant to be the way life is, which is
tragic-comic, with elements of the absurd.
I believe you started writing very early in life. What was the
Indian literary scene like in the 1950s and 1960s? How easy was
it to get published?
You have a reputation for being very much the solitary writer,
the sort of person Orhan Pamuk described in his Nobel speech -
alone for hours at a desk. Yet you married early and brought up
four children [including Kiran Desai, winner of last year's Man
Booker Prize] in a society that has many expectations of
women. How did you manage any privacy at all, let along find
time to write your brand of intensely detailed literary fiction?
When I spoke to Kiran last year, she mentioned that you aren’t
part of the literary party scene at all. What are your feelings
about the glamour that has crept into the literary life today?
Yes, I’ve now moved to a house on the outskirts of New York – it’s
small village really, very secluded. Whenever Kiran needs to do
some serious work, she comes out there. My life is totally different
from hers, though even she is quite solitary compared to most of
her contemporaries.
Have you felt your writing style change with the passage of
time?
(Smiling) One does what one can with one’s life. I’ve tried to
make the fullest use of what I had, and I hope I’ve succeeded to
an extent.