The novel, Part by Part

Desai builds Fire on the Mountain in three unequal Parts, each named for a person and a place. Read the novel first; then let each guide show you what Desai is doing beneath the still surface of Nanda Kaul’s retreat.

Part I · Chapters 1–10

Nanda Kaul at Carignano

An old woman guards her hard-won solitude, until a letter announces that a child is coming.

Part II · Chapters 1–21

Raka comes to Carignano

Across a long dry summer the great-granddaughter roams the burnt ridge, needing no one at all.

Part III · Chapters 1–13

Ila Das leaves Carignano

A tea party, a walk home into the dark, and two blows that fall almost at once.

Reading the shape of the novel

Notice the architecture before you dive in. The first two Parts set two solitaries circling one another across a scorched summer: Nanda Kaul, a recluse out of vengeance for a lifetime of duty, and Raka, a recluse by instinct who wants nothing and asks for nothing. Part II holds them up as mirror images, the old woman’s wilful emptiness against the child’s effortless one, and lets us feel how far Nanda Kaul is outdone by the girl she cannot reach. Then Part III arrives with Ila Das and her tea party, and everything the quiet chapters have been building detonates at once: a murder on the path home, a telephone call, a confession, and fire on the mountain.

References across this site are by Part and chapter rather than page, because editions of the novel vary and the exam is closed book.