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Anit a Desai's novel Fire on the Mountain won the National Academy of Letters Award in 1978

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.

[Statutory warning: long, bifurcated post – some thoughts on


Anita Desai’s writing followed by a Q&A. Apologies in case there’s
some overlapping between the two elements. I wrote it as a
flowing piece - a profile-cum-interview - for Business Standard
Weekend but since there isn’t a word-constraint here I prefer to
spread it out and play with the format.]

Long before the publication of Midnight’s Children


brought alive new possibilities for Indian writers wanting to
express themselves in English, decades before Arundhati Roy’s
Booker win, the advent of the big publishing houses, hefty
advances, the elevation of the fashionable young writer to pop-
celebrity status, and the occurrence, once highly improbable, of
the words “author” and “glamorous” in the same sentence, there
was Anita Desai – Anita Desai, contributing short stories to a
literary magazine while still in college in the 1950s; writing
diligently at her desk for a few hours each day; sending her
manuscripts to England because Indian publishers at the time
weren’t interested in contemporary fiction; juggling the unsocial
writer’s life with some very social demands, such as those of
raising four children.
Desai, who turned 70 earlier this year, has lived mainly in the US
for the past two decades. She was in Delhi last week because the
Sahitya Akademi has made her one of its lifetime fellows – and
because Random House India has marked the occasion by reissuing
three of her finest novels (Clear Light of Day, In Custody and
Baumgartner’s Bombay) in elegant, minimalist new designs
perfectly suited to the work of someone who continues to live by
the discipline of the writing process itself, rather than by the
stardust that sometimes sticks to the high-profile writer.
(Eventually all of her books will be collected in this format,
conceptualised by Random House India editor-in-chief Chiki
Sarkar; the concept resembles the Library of America’s tradition of
collecting the works of major American writers.)

Desai is only the third Indian writer in English to be


honoured thus by the Sahitya Akademi – Mulk Raj Anand and R K
Narayan were the others – and yet the very phrase "Indian writer
in English", with its hint of the baggage that the acronym IWE
often carries, sits uneasily on a lady who once said that her novels
"aren't intended as a reflection of Indian society, politics or
character – they are private attempts to seize on the raw material
of life".

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.

Desai’s attention to detail, the carefulness of her


descriptions and the fact that her fiction often deals with static
lives means that her books have sometimes been accused of being
static themselves (“pages go by and nothing happens” is a charge
I’ve heard) by readers who are interested more in the progression
of a plot than in the examination of minutiae. But this would be to
overlook the mastery with which she draws us into an interior
world, showing us the layers that can exist beneath a life that
might not, on the surface, appear to be very significant. In her
hands, characters like Bim, Deven and Baumgartner come to stand
for a small, modest form of heroism that doesn’t get the press it
deserves (see Q&A below).

In a perceptive introduction to the new edition of


Baumgartner’s Bombay, Suketu Mehta calls it “a tribute to the
also-rans of history”. The book is my favourite among Desai’s
works and I love the final chapter, after Baumgartner’s death,
which shows us his squalid little room as seen through other
people’s eyes. To them, he was a useless old man whose life and
death had no relevance to anyone, but to the reader – who has
been closely involved with him through the book – he is a very
important literary character. We’ve been privy to Hugo
Baumgartner’s back-story, his crushed dreams, his quiet
acceptance of his destiny, his love for his crippled stray cats
(which, in the hands of a lesser writer, might have become a too-
obvious symbol); we know about the cruel whimsicalities of history
but for which he might have led a very different life in a different
part of the world. We can’t dismiss him the way these people do.

There are many examples in Desai’s work of the use of a large


number of carefully chosen words to make a scene more vivid,
more alive. Turning randomly to a page in Clear Light of Day,
here’s a description of Bim’s cat descending a tree as Bim looks on
fondly:
She came slithering down the satiny bark, growling and grumbling
with petulance and complaint at her undignified descent. Then
she was in Bim’s arms...cuddled and cushioned and petted with
such an extravagance of affection that Tara could not help raising
her eyebrows in embarrassment and wonder.
Later on the same page, we have a corpulent, middle-aged
character named Bakul sitting “flaccidly, flabbily” on a chair. A
critic making a case for lucidity might argue that just one of those
words could serve the purpose, but in Desai’s best work adjectives
and adverbs (carefully chosen ones, of course) accumulate to
make a picture even more immediate. At their best, her
descriptions serve as a good counterpoint to George Orwell’s
celebrated rules for writers; they show us that good writing
doesn’t necessarily have to be spare and direct. Also, they
sometimes convey the perspective of a particular character – a
thoughtful character who is not a writer by profession and who
doesn’t have to feel conscious about using too many words. Seen
out of context, “...growling and grumbling with petulance and
complaint at her undignified descent” may seem like over-writing,
but consider how this word arrangement reflects Bim’s perspective
of her beloved pet, apart from adding humour and affection to the
scene.

A conversation

I met Desai for an interview at a small hotel in one of Delhi’s


quieter colonies, Sunder Nagar. Despite her reputation for being
reclusive, I was unprepared for how soft-spoken she is – and a
little concerned that my tape recorder wouldn’t pick everything
up.
You wrote once that your novels “aren’t intended as a
reflection of Indian society, politics or character”. Are you
resistant to the defining of writers primarily in terms of their
background?

I think every writer dislikes being labeled, because once you’ve


been put in a category you might even start to believe that that’s
where you belong, and that can restrict your movements. It’s nice
to know that you’re free to think and write as you wish. Whether
you live here or abroad is of no consequence really – what is
important is what you make of your experiences, which is what
you present to the reader.

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.

Bim is a fascinating character. As a child she announces that she


wants to be a heroine, and though she remains confined to a
small world, one can’t help but admire her personal choices.

Yes, Bimla was based on women I had known, in India – women


who had lived their lives against all odds, made something of their
lives. I wanted to celebrate that sort of life, which is heroic in my
mind. Being an individual despite all the pressure – to bear it, to
suffer it, and yet remain yourself – and without necessarily
stepping out of the house or seeing the world, as a heroic figure
would normally be expected to: this is a form of heroism too, and
it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

The same could be said for Baumgartner too.

Yes, and in his case he suffers through great political upheavals as


well – both in Germany, just before the war, and later in India.
That book contains my view of politics as this huge juggernaut
that rides over ordinary citizens – either you’re crushed by it or
somehow you manage to survive it. Very few of us have any say in
it, it always feels like the power is in someone else’s hands. But
Baumgartner manages to survive (a note of tenderness enters her
voice) like some little matchstick bobbing along on a vast ocean.
And finally, he drowns.

Which book is closest to your heart?

That’s a very difficult question to answer. The truth is, one


finishes every book with the feeling that you’ve missed it
somehow – that you haven’t done what you set out to do, that
along the way it took a turn you hadn’t intended. But when I
wrote Fire on the Mountain (1977), I had the feeling that I was
controlling a style that was largely my own. Until then I had been
writing in imitation of writers I admired, who had a huge influence
on me.

Similarly, with In Custody, I felt I had broken out of that domestic


circle I had been treading over and over again till I myself was
feeling suffocated. And I felt that at last I was writing about the
world that exists outside. These were moments of breakthrough.
Also, the fact that the two central characters in In Custody were
men. I wanted to write in the male voice – in fact, I had written
the first draft without a single female character, but then thought
that was unnatural! So I brought in Deven’s wife, and Nur’s
women.

Who are strong characters in their own right.

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?

I started writing short stories when I was a child. When I was in


college (in Delhi’s Miranda House) I contributed stories to
magazines like “Thought” – a political and literary magazine of the
time, which no longer exists – and later I started work on my first
novel. I had certainly accepted the vocation of a writer before I
married, and I continued it afterwards.

It was completely different back then – one felt entirely on one’s


own. There was no literary community. We were all so separated
by different languages and lives that it was a rare occasion when
one might even brush against another writer. It was a very solitary
occupation, unlike today when there is a community constantly in
touch with each other.
The other thing is, there was no publishing outlet – Indian
publishers of the time would do the safe thing, that is, publish
textbooks or reprints. They never looked around or paid much
attention to local, contemporary writers. I had no option but to
send my manuscripts to England and I was lucky to find Peter
Owen, a small publishing company with an interest in foreign
writers and voices.

The literary scene changed absolutely with Midnight’s Children in


1981. Publishers realised that one could write in an Indian version
of English and do it with great vitality. Rushdie’s success and voice
encouraged a whole generation of younger writers, set them free.
Then, from the late 1980s, with more publishers coming in, writers
had an outlet. The huge commercial success of Arundhati Roy was
another inspiring moment – that you could make this much money,
that thought was dazzling, it was almost like getting a contract
from Bollywood. You could actually have a life of fame and
celebrity by writing a book!

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?

There were two ways I could do that. One was by keeping to a


very strict discipline, knowing that I must write daily and must
keep my writing in mind constantly – that I had to spend a few
hours each morning at my desk, writing. Even today, a day when I
don’t do that is a disturbed day, not quite a normal day for me.
When the children went to school I would immediately settle down
at my desk; when it was time for them to come home I would put
everything away, but keep it in mind so that I could pick up where
I’d left off.

The other thing that helped me as a writer perhaps was my


personal reaction to the partly domestic, partly social life an
Indian woman must lead – never feeling quite at ease with that
sort of social life. I would, of course, go out and meet people, but
there was a part of my mind which I was keeping separate.
Because as a writer you have to have a private life – that’s where
writing comes from.

A young Indian writer today has many authors to derive


inspiration from. When you began writing, there wouldn’t have
been as many. Who were your influences?

Mainly non-Indian writers, as you might have guessed. I read all


the English classics – the Bronte sisters, Virginia Woolf, E M
Forster. We didn’t really study the Indian writers – even Tagore
wasn’t studied – we had to discover them on our own, later in life.
As for contemporaries, I had a sense that I had no contemporaries!
R K Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand were there, but from an earlier
generation and I didn’t know them. The one contemporary I had,
whose company I enjoyed and who was a tremendous influence on
me, was Ruth Jhabvala – she was a neighbour of ours in old Delhi,
living a life very similar to my own. She was married, with three
daughters – in fact, I first saw her when she was wheeling a pram
up and down the road! We became friends, I would go to her
house, she lent me books, we discussed books and that was the
closest I came to a literary life. She was a huge support – she
never read anything I’d written, she didn’t read manuscripts, but
it was very encouraging to know that here was someone else doing
the same thing; that it was possible to be a writer!

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.

Things have changed enormously. Back when I started, we never


had a clue that such a thing could happen at all – the glamour, the
talk of big advances, etc, all of which sounds completely
antithetical to the literary life. Of course, I don’t want to dismiss
it altogether, because for the first time now Indian writers are
able to live on their writing. It wasn’t possible at all earlier –
royalties were absurdly low – but now publishers are willing to
invest in authors, making it possible for them to live even while
they are writing. So that’s not a bad thing. What’s unfortunate is
when they win respect by suddenly having money and access to a
better life, rather than by their actual writing.

Are you active online?

No, I don’t keep in touch with online developments. I’ve been


watching Kiran and though she probably doesn’t use the Internet
as much as most other young people, it still eats up a huge amount
of her time. It’s a constant distraction, though at the same time I
envy that you young people have everything at the click of a
button.

Have you felt your writing style change with the passage of
time?

As a writer, I’ve always enjoyed language – the use of language is


what it’s all about. When I was younger, I enjoyed that power a lot
more – my descriptions tended to be fuller and richer. In my later
books like The Zigzag Way I’ve probably been more spare and
sinewy, and I have been trying to – not cut out adjectives but to
select with the greatest possible care. It may have something to
do with the fact that I now read a great deal of poetry.

You’ve written children’s books, a movie screenplay (for Ismail


Merchant’s film of In Custody), and numerous works of
criticism. Is there any area of writing you regret not having
tried?

(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.

[Some earlier conversations with authors: Mohsin Hamid, Vikram


Chandra, Rajorshi Chakraborty, Raj Kamal Jha, Kiran Nagarkar,
Kiran Desai, Amitava Kumar]

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