Characters

Nanda Kaul: the recluse who chose nothing

The widow of a university Vice-Chancellor, Nanda Kaul has retired to Carignano to be rid of people, and Desai gives her wishes a striking shape: they are all negative. She longs ‘to be left to the pines and cicadas alone’ (I, Ch.1), to be ‘a tree, no more and no less’ (I, Ch.1). What she loves in the house is its ‘barrenness’. This is a woman defined by subtraction, and Desai lets us admire the austerity before she dismantles it.

The dismantling is the point of the whole novel. Nanda Kaul believes she earned her emptiness through a lifetime of duty, and she tells Raka a flattering story of a Kashmiri girlhood, an adventurous father, a Buddha carried from Tibet. The telephone call in Part III strips it away. Her father bought the Buddha from a pedlar; her husband never loved her but kept a lifelong affair with Miss David; her solitude was never a choice at all. Desai names the reversal plainly: ‘she did not live here alone by choice - she lived here alone because that was what she was forced to do, reduced to doing’ (III, Ch.13). The pride that looked like philosophy is revealed as a defence built over defeat, and her stories are named as what they always were, ‘tranquillizers, pills’ (III, Ch.13).

Her cruellest failure is one of care. She almost asks Ila Das to stay, holding the arm of her chair ‘in an effort to speak’ (III, Ch.7), then clutches it tighter to stop herself. That withheld sentence sends Ila to her death on the dark path. Desai has already warned us: ‘The care of others was a habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid’ (I, Ch.9).

I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing? Nanda Kaul, Part I, Ch.5

In the exam: use Nanda Kaul when an argument turns on the gap between what a character claims and what Desai reveals; her collapse is your strongest evidence that the novel treats chosen solitude as self-deception (AO2).

Raka: the wild child and the true recluse

Raka arrives shorn, insect-like and staring, so unlike her name (which means the moon) that Desai calls it ‘an utter misnomer’ (II, Ch.1). The embrace between old woman and child makes ‘a sound of bones colliding’ (II, Ch.1), an image of estrangement where the novel might have offered tenderness. Raka needs nothing and asks for nothing, disappearing for hours into the ravine, the charred pines and the burnt house on the ridge.

She is Nanda Kaul’s double, and the comparison undoes the older woman. Desai draws the line sharply: ‘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, by instinct’ (II, Ch.4). Raka is ‘the finished, perfected model of what Nanda Kaul herself was merely a brave, flawed experiment’ (II, Ch.4). The child achieves effortlessly the detachment the woman has strained a lifetime to fake, which is why Raka’s presence so threatens her.

Raka is also the agent of the fire. She is drawn to ruin: ‘The scene of devastation and failure somehow drew her, inspired her’ (II, Ch.18), and at the burnt house she stretches ‘till she was alight, ablaze’ (II, Ch.18). When the novel’s horrors break together, she scratches at the window with her announcement that she has set the forest on fire. Her arson is not malice so much as the elemental, destructive innocence Desai has built into her from the first page.

In the exam: pair Raka with Nanda Kaul whenever the question is about isolation or childhood; she lets you argue that Desai presents true detachment as uncanny and aligned with destruction, not peace (AO2, AO3).

Ila Das: the friend and the victim

Ila Das is comic before she is tragic, and Desai makes us laugh at her first: shrill, grotesque, clinging to a lost gentility, entertaining Carignano with an imaginary piano. Behind the performance is a life of decline. A once-wealthy family was ruined by three dissolute sons; Nanda Kaul’s husband once made a lecturing post for her, and when he died she was forced out into a poorly paid welfare job. Poverty has not touched her courage. She fights superstition, disease and, fatally, child marriage.

Her death is the novel’s indictment of violence against women, and Desai handles it with restraint that makes it heavier. Ila has confronted Preet Singh, who means to marry his seven-year-old daughter to an old widower. Walking home at dusk she refuses the grainseller’s warning: ‘I am always alone. I am never afraid’ (III, Ch.11). Preet Singh strangles and rapes her; Desai records it in a few plain words and no more. A woman who gave her life to caring for others is destroyed for daring to interfere, and the friend who could have saved her stayed silent.

In the exam: Ila Das anchors any argument about the ethic of care or the position of women; set her active kindness against Nanda Kaul’s withdrawal, and read the restraint of the murder scene as method, not omission (AO2, AO4).

Ram Lal: the cook and the one companionable presence

Ram Lal keeps Carignano running: old, loyal, practical and superstitious, the single human being in the novel who offers plain company without demand. He talks easily with Raka where Nanda Kaul cannot, warning her off the ravine with its jackals and mad dogs and telling her ghost stories. He carries the local knowledge the Anglicised women lack, and Desai gives him the line that seeds the ending. Watching the dust-storm turn the sky into ‘a splendid bonfire’ (II, Ch.6), he says, ‘This is how forest fires do start’ (II, Ch.6). His folk wisdom is proved right while the educated household looks away.

The figures offstage

Some of the novel’s most decisive characters never reach Carignano, yet the plot turns on them.

The Vice-Chancellor, Nanda Kaul’s dead husband, is never named. He ran the crowded university household she fled, and the final pages expose him: he never loved her, keeping a lifelong affair with Miss David the mathematics mistress. His unfaithfulness is the rot at the centre of the marriage Nanda Kaul spent years pretending had been full. He also created Ila Das’s teaching post, so his patronage and its withdrawal shadow her ruin too.

Asha and Tara, the daughter and granddaughter, are the mothers who send Raka away. Asha, socially preoccupied and beautiful, writes the arranging letter; Tara, Raka’s mother, is abroad in Geneva inside a marriage marked by drink and violence. Between them they pass the damaged child up the family line to the one relative who wants no one, which is how the novel’s two solitaries are forced together.

Preet Singh is the villager whose child-marriage plan Ila Das tries to stop; he intends to sell his seven-year-old daughter to an old landowner for a quarter-acre and two goats. He murders and rapes Ila on the path home. Desai keeps him almost faceless, which turns him from an individual villain into the novel’s image of the patriarchal violence the welfare state cannot reach.

References are by part and chapter because editions of Fire on the Mountain vary; the exam is closed book, so chapter is the right unit.