ANITA Desai’s latest novel Fire on the Mountain is a distinct let-down. It has many of the qualities that marked her first book, Cry, the Peacock; spareness, toughness and fine descriptive writing. But while Cry, the Peacock came off, Fire on the Mountain does not; perhaps because, trying the same trick once too often, Anita Desai achieves sensationalism instead of shock.
The ‘trick’ lies in springing a violent denouement on a narrative that is for the most part uneventful. For the careful reader Mrs Desai provided in the earlier book clues of tension and simmering passion under the surface of the upper middle-class, tea-on-the-lawn kind of life she records. In Fire on the Mountain the clues are stated, rather than created, and Mrs Desai, unforgivably, does not even bother to explain them with throwaway sentences like: ‘she thought desperately, with longing, of the charred house on the ridge …, ‘It made her ache for the empty house on the charred hill … a forest fire to wipe it all away’.[ih`c-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”block” ihc_mb_who=”unreg” ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
Nanda Kaul has ‘retired’, and lives alone in the summer resort of Kasauli. What we are given, in vigorous defence of her selfishness, her opting out of the responsibilities of continued family-life, are flashbacks of her earlier life as wife of a Vice-Chancellor and descriptions of her contrasting current life-style.
Anita Desai employs free indirect speech to record musings which are not to be misunderstood as authorial pronouncements. Only thus can we find acceptable even half-way Nanda Kaul’s outburst at the end of the book: ‘It was all a lie … all’. In Cry, the Peacock Mrs Desai used the first person narrative, a style altogether more ‘fair’ than the one employed here.
In addition, the author has to cope in Fire on the Mountain with Raka, Nanda Kaul’s great-grandchild, come to Kasauli to convalesce. She is content with making Raka a ‘naughty’ child (scrambling over rocks, climbing trees, etc)—or she would be just naughty, if she weren’t queen’.
To write of children requires a certain degree of empathy. Anita Desai describes Raka first through Nanda Kaul’s uncomprehending and hostile eyes; and then in one choleric remark made by a gardener, ‘The crazy one from Carignano’; and only briefly and unsatisfactorily through Raka’s own reactions, to a party scene, that reveal her hysterical temperament. Admittedly, what Mrs Desai attempts is difficult: to trace a relationship that is incongruous and thwarted, but still exists inescapably because of the bonds of kinship. But the logical end of such a relationship—for such a neat writer effect must flow from cause—is surely not catastrophe?
There is too, completely gratituously in a book of this size a life-sketch of Ila Das, Nanda Kaul’s contemporary and contrast. Ila Das is raped and killed at the end of the book and the connection with the main story is hard to find. And as if that were insufficient violence, Raka announces that she has set fire to the mountainside. Is Anita Desai saying then, God forbid, ‘Serve you right, Nanda Kaul’? Or more appalling still, is she saying, ‘Poor Nanda Kaul, all you wanted was a little peace, and now your friend goes and gets herself killed and your great grand-daughter goes mad’?
Anita Desai can only appear irresponsible. She attempts irony, but all she has done is to hedge her bets.
The only acceptable reality for Indo-Anglian fiction to imitate is the one chosen by Anita Desai. To write in English of people who think and express themselves in English, who even, as it were, act in English, and whose lives touch the ‘native’ life either peripherally or momentarily: this lets Anita Desai write with fluency and grace. It narrows her field, even at times makes her appear superficial because she writes of such a tiny cultural minority, and one that is dwindling: but for all that, it gives her scope for intensity.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Lecturer in English, Miranda House, New Delhi.
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