Alienated Self in Anita Desai’s 'Fire on The Mountain'

Anita Desai’s unquestionable existential concern helped her to create an epitome aura, with a chiseled style, she got differentiated her from other novelists of the younger generation, she is the only novelist who shows some sort of similarity to Arun Joshi. But still Arun Joshi has some vacuum to be filled, to acquire the extent of Anita Desai. Committed to novel writing she is very practical with her craft. The quest for the self in her novels and her obsessive existential concern is highlighted in all her novels. The emphasis is on her search for real identity, the sense of loneliness she feels and how she expresses it through imagery, symbolism, structure and narrative techniques.

For Anita Desai, freedom implies liberty in toto, such as the nexus of ideas that makeup the background of her conception of human life. There is perhaps nothing really new in these ideas, but Anita Desai continues to work in her novels with a significant difference. In her novels there is the recognition that liberty is at one with creativity and that only pure freedom can make the world happy. Yet no theory of human nature is new. Anita Desai stresses on responsibility for an action that appears even trivial. Our highest purpose fail miserably without positive action and then comes to our mind some chance, purposelessness or cross-purpose. The madness of Anita Desai’s heroines echoes the same. Their voices terminate in madness and again in action that appears half-accidental and half-willed.

In large part of her novels she has philosophic formulation, but not the age-old philosophic problems. She merely, but adequately, describes some phenomena of human life, such as, the problem of taste, the question of nature and the origin of values. Her preferences can be listed by different colors of vision that seems very important for telling us either what this or that man or what men or women in general are. She projects the situation and creates such individuals without any recourse to the ideas of beauty. Rather they have integral relation to what the individual essentially is or becoming. In this connection we have her characters based on existential psycho-analysis. The most significant part of her novels is the dialogues or the monologues.

Today my focus is on one of her major important novels, 'Fire on the Mountain” in which she highlights the truth that ‘A life of undiluted reality or undiluted illusion spells tragedy”.

In Fire on the mountain she gives us a positive message very valuable in the context of our contemporary society. She gives us a chance to try to strike a balance between reality and illusion and to make our lives more meaningful. Nanda Kaul and Ila das are such characters whose existential problems are unsolved. Nanda Kaul feeds herself on illusion. But when she receives the tragic news of the rape and murder of Ila das her illusion changes to reality. On the contrary, Ila das faces real life. Nanda Kaul an old woman has had too much of the world with her and, so longs for a quiet, retired life. Her busy past now looks like a box of sweets positively sickening. She desperately desires to avoid familiar obligations around her. She wants to free herself from all stifling and irritating involvements. So withdraws determinedly into carignano, her hill side home, Kasauli, where she hopes to live a period, reduced and radiantly single life. She cries out in agony: “Have I done enough and had enough? I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing?”

Nanda Kaul’s cry is a cry nothing but a cry in wilderness, a prayer shot into the vacant air which goes unheard and unanswered. Physically she is able to withdraw herself from her harsh life of duties and responsibilities, irritations and annoyances, dubious joy and certain sadness. She can neither escape her past, nor help the present nor predict the future. She is apparently all alone. Her past keeps her babbling in her memory and these memories create uncontrollable feelings in her consciousness. Her past is also not free from disturbances. There is Raka her great grandchild and Ila das her old friend and classmate. The arrival of Raka doesn’t make any differences to Nanda Kaul. She looks upon her as an unwelcome guest, an intruder. Raka also feels no less miserable, like a caged bird, a wild animal tamed and domesticated. They live apart, while still living under the same roof. There is a strange living-together-each resenting and avoiding the presence of each other. If the old lady loves to live alone, the young Raka desires it no less but with a certain difference. Yet her arrival at the carignano has created for Nanda Kaul a situation which she cannot escape. Anita Desai describes their aloneness in these lines:

“If Nanda Kaul was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of a duty and obligation her great grand daughter was a recluse by nature…”

Thus it seems that it is an awkward pair, neither of them belonging to the other. Then we have Ila das, a piano teacher-turned-social-worker who also breaks in Nanda Kaul’s solitude. Her voice is enough to disturb Nanda Kaul’s life. In fact, Ila das is a noble soul struggling against the odds of life. She is aware of the facts of life that misery and suffering are inevitable in life. So she always keeps smiling. Ila das simply tries to stop the disastrous marriage of the daughter of Preet Singh. For her good intentions she is assaulted and raped under the cover of darkness. The telephonic news of her death results in the death of Nanda Kaul. This tragedy leaves Raka utterly alone.

For Nanda Kaul the past, the present, the future is all in ashes. She has tried to create a fantasy world from the past, a world of happy families, love, wealth, and good humor. At one stroke the news of Ila das’s death rips the curtain aside and reveals the hidden reality. The fabrication of fantasy is of no use. The hidden reality is enough to force Raka to escape and seek her thrill by setting fire to mountain-side. Ila dies leaving her fantasy, while nanda Kaul sees. Nanda Kaul finds how senseless the compromise between the external and inner experiences is. Everyone is struck once again by the want on waste of human potential. Nanda kaul’s attempt to detect the scheme of events in human existence seems to be an exercise in futility. She tries to be unattached with the world, but the world sticks to her tenaciously. She is sick of her past and so she removes herself to anew heaven. But the past, including the memory of her husband’s infidelity, keeps assaulting her. She resents Raka but she can not disown her. She wants to will away carignano to her but does not do so. She detects Ila das’s voice but she can not dismiss her. When she takes pity on her, she feels she should invite her to stay with her but fails to do so. When Ila das dies an unnatural death, Nanda Kaul succumbs to the shock of this news and Raka remains the sole survivor. The mountain fire, which has been so often alluded to in the novel is symbolic of eternally impending danger that may engulf anyone anytime. We are not even sure if it will leave Raka untouched. Human existence is never safe, and never at the mercy of chance, and it cannot escape the truth that is death. Therefore in brief it is absurd, futile and meaningless.

Self realization is not the main thrust of fantasy in fire on the mountain rather used in an entirely different way. It is not used as an escape route, it also does not border on hallucination. Two kinds of fantasy worlds exist side by side one which is consciously and deliberately woven by nanda Kaul to interest her great grand daughter Raka and the other shared by Raka and Ramlal is based on Ramlal’s belief in the supernatural. There is also a third world of fantasy of Raka’s imagination. It reflects her alienation from the disjointed world of her parents. There is no conscious awareness of the division or polarity between truth and falsehood, where Ramlal is concerned. His belief in the supernatural is neither an escape nor an emotional prop. It is an integral part of his world and of his background. Raka accepts it because it has a certain authenticity and with her wide-eyed wonder, she wants to know more about the churails and their intrusion into human sphere. Ramlal and Raka meets as equals, not as an adult and as a child, they share the wonder that the existence of such beings is likely to arouse. When she chances to visit the club one evening, she is confronted by a total reversal of her expectations, and instead of ladies ‘dressed as queens and men as princes’ all that she finds in a group of mad men and rioters; chasing each other and appearing like monsters to her.

It is this fear which leads her to set the forest on fire. It is her liberation from her childhood-fears and violent realization of future. For nanda Kaul, it serves as mirror of the hollow-self she has created. This also serves as a revaluation of her earlier values. She rejects her former roles completely at this stage of her life but this does not set her free. She finds herself going against the habit of a life-time. She is in her confrontation with her reality and thus is pushed into an emptiness which signals an end.

In this novel the protagonist nanda Kaul, is no longer a young woman trying to find her place for herself in an adult setting or relate to a new family structure. She is rather a woman of mature years who has experienced different situations and relationship and who has succeeded in fulfilling their claims. In worldly terms she has been a giver all her life holding back only the hour of stillness every afternoon. But with these children grown and settled, and her husband dead, she had moved to carignano away from the activity of life. This withdrawal, however is unnatural and therefore, inimical to the act of life.

All the other protagonist characters in her novels are devoid of love. This kind of devoid of love reduces every creative act into a self destructive act the various sets of instinct, feelings, emotion and passion, however, in between the two reality and the unreality strike us. The human island into the novels of Anita Desai had numerous symbolic connotations. They echo conflicting demands of protection and independence. Most protagonists show a tendency towards neurotic behavior in which some have abnormality and some are of eccentricity. She is interested in peculiar characters rather than every day average characters, in which there is no sense of contentment at all, but when they realize that they have to live they will compromise. There is no perfect man-woman relationship in her novels and so the description of such is inadequate. Basically everyone is solitary.

I conclude by saying that the human island created by Mrs. Anita Desai in her novels acquires tremendous significance and becomes symbolic of those urges that lead and motivate us to speak a separate unique identity of our own. Main point to pop-up is that through this quest for self all the characters were made alienated and so we can say that this became a dominant factor in her novels.