Anita desai view of tragic life as seen in her women characters in fire on the mountain

The two main characters in Fire on the Mountain, Nanda Kaul and Raka, each represent a withdrawal and rejection from patriarchal society. Nanda Kaul spent most of her life performing domestic labor that she felt no drive for and no connection to. It was not until the end of her life that she finally broke away and constructed her life in a manner conceived as absolute rejection of her previous role as domestic matriarch. She moved to the desolate mountains and shunned any attachment or relation, owned almost nothing, and paid Ram Lal to do her cooking so that she could be totally still and alone. Nanda Kaul, who was educated and economically privileged, was nonetheless consigned to the role of homemaker by the patriarchal norms of the culture. Many of Nanda Kaul’s flashbacks are bitter recollections of nonstop childcare, hosting, and managing appearances. At one point, remembering her children and grandchildren she thinks, “Had they never been silent? Never absent? Plaiting her fingers together, contracting her eyelids, she fretted to catch at a saving memory, one that did not distract and hustle but cooled and calmed” (25). “The care of others … had been a religious calling she had believed in till she found it fake” … “she had been so glad when it was over” (30). In her new, solitary life at Carignano she embraced the devastated austerity of the landscape as the opposite of domestic duty.