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The Indian author Anita Desai creates in Fire on the Mountain (1977) a perfect tragedy in the Greek mode. The novel has an abrupt ending in a tragic manner and the tragedy becomes complete when Raka sets the forest on fire. Lonely and isolated Nanda Kaul suffers lot in her life. She chooses loneliness after her husband’s death. She wants undisturbed life but slowly she is attracted towards her great granddaughter Raka. She becomes uneasy by seeing a frequent talk in between Raka and Ram Lal. She becomes jealous. Like Nanda, Raka also wants loneliness and undisturbed life. Both live under a one roof but maintain distance between them. Nanda makes a false story about her childhood to attract Raka. Raka can’t understand why her great grandmother who avoids talking now didn’t stop talking.
The novel also presents a study of trauma that takes refuge in seclusion. Nanda, who avoids meeting people now eager to meet her friend Ila Das. She is jobless as well as homeless. Her intention of meeting to Nanda is to seek her help. She wants a little space in the big house of Nanda but remains silent. Nanda also know what she wants but again she thinks about her undisturbed life and remains silent. After the tea party Ila returns home unaware of the impending danger. On the way at late evening, was raped and murdered by Preet Singh, a villager whose daughters marriage Ila Das wants to stop with old widower. Telephone from the police station with the news of her only friend’s death who is the only witness of her happiness and suffering and request for identification creates a terrible shook to Nanda Kaul. In this shook she collapses in the chair with the hanging phone in her hand. Raka puts fire on the mountain and comes to the door running, scratching, tapping and drumming, and announces to her Nani that she has set the forest on fire. This is the first time that Raka insistently calls her Nani, but she gets no response. The reader is left to imagine what might happen next. Thus ends Anita Desai’s sensitive portrayal of her female protagonist, who has been trapped in the interminable meshes of daily life as the caretaker and nourisher and what-not in the family. Raka suppose that her great grandmother’s shock is more powerful than her. To Nanda, Ila’s death is like the fire that has burnt the hill. The fire on the mountain now doesn’t hear her now. She is beyond of all things. She makes a confession of her behavior with Raka and Ila. She feels bad and holds herself responsible for Ila’s tragic death.
The end of the life of Ila Das’s life is pathetic one. She wants to do something for society but it become harmful to her. The pain is so intense that Nanda chokes and dies of heart attack. The death of two friends at a time made a story more pathetic. Death of Ila Das is unnatural and death of Nanda Kaul is also shocking for the reader. The death of both friends suggests the futility of human existence. While Nanda dies because of her concern for her loneliness, Ila dies because of her concern for others.
Both adjust in their young days. When both are young they adjust in their life but in old age they accepted alienment. Both self-adjustment and self-alienation signifies the tragic sense of unfulfilment. Overall, Ila’s unfortunate circumstances can be viewed as a commentary of the lives available to single, poor women in India but also the sexual violence that results in any context of patriarchal domination. Nanda’s exile to Kasauli, though presented as an act of choice, is actually forced on her. She comes to terms with the reality of her self-enforced exile when she hears that her old friend Ila Das has been raped and murdered. At the same time, Raka sets the forest surrounding the house on fire. She remains the observer of whole incident and the only one who emerges strong. She is the only one who is a loner by choice. She doesn’t try to ‘belong’. She makes up her own bit of feminine ‘space’ wherever she is. She thus explores the mountainside, turning nature inside out for the benefit of her own empirical satisfaction, and when her wanderlust reaches satiety, she sets fire to it, destroys it. She emerges in complete control of her surroundings. She makes it. She mars it. She establishes herself with effortless aplomb as the mythical ‘destroyer and preserver’ of her environment. She doesn’t let her environment shape her existence. She makes her own essence shape the environment. Raka-the ‘moon’-girl, like an other-worldly creature is the epitomisation of feminine ‘jouissance’ of feminine volition to the extreme. She knows that the hills have undergone denudation due to the effects of the vaccine industry and spreading forest fires which occur every now and then in Kasauli.
Raka sets fire to the mountain showing the discrepancies in human behavior, her own, her grandmother’s and of Preet Singh who rapes and murders Ila. It seems Raka has grasped the significance of this message and the landscape alone is her teacher and confidante. She identifies herself with nature, of the shelter she gets and in this process does not experience a ‘loss of self’, but she becomes; she inhabits; the world of nature. Raka does not let herself be seduced nor is her rebellion ‘completely within’, although the world sees her as the ‘crazy one from Carignano’. She transcends the realm of the known and worldly by crossing radically into the territory of nature and the unknown away from human habitat. Raka carries the message of purifying the existing social system with the burden of philosophy on her fragile shoulders and identifies the destruction of nature which infact protects and soothes.
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