Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fire on the Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Freedom
Honesty and Self-Reflection
Trauma and Suffering
Class and Privilege
Female Oppression
Summary
Analysis
As Nanda Kaul takes her tea on the verandah in the cool shade of late afternoon, she reads The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. It includes a picturesque description of the kind of dilapidated house in which a single woman should live. Nanda Kaul loves that passage. Holding the book in her hand, Nanda Kaul rises from her chair and walks out into the garden. As she has so many times before, she admires the view out over the plains. She has often wished that she could travel in time to get a 19th-century English watercolorist to capture the vista—with its light and space—in a painting.
Sei Shonagon was a medieval noblewoman who lived in the household of the Japanese empress. Her book lists observations and musings much like a diary, although her literary skill turned it into a valuable historical record and piece of literature. This choice of afternoon reading suggests Nanda Kaul’s intelligence and taste, hinting that she was her educated husband’s intellectual equal, despite his lack of affection for her. The passage at hand emphasizes Nanda Kaul’s wish for the freedom and isolation of her solitude.
Themes
Dusk gathers, and lights begin to come on in the surrounding communities. Nanda Kaul retreats to the drawing room, where she reads more sections of The Pillow Book before returning to “When a Woman Lives Alone.” Although Carignano isn’t nearly as rundown as Sei Shonagon describes, Nanda Kaul thinks that the simple austerity of her home would have pleased the medieval Japanese lady. Carignano is so different from the house she lived in with the Vice-Chancellor, with its bevy of servants, endless stream of guests, and mob of children. Life there was excessive and disordered, and she was so glad to leave it all behind. She worries that Raka’s arrival might reintroduce chaos into her carefully measured life.
There’s a clear difference between what Sei Shonagon describes in her passage as romantic and charming and the way Nanda Kaul lives, yet Nanda Kaul grants herself the Japanese noblewoman’s approval. This suggests that Nanda Kaul may not be fully honest with herself, and readers should be wary of accepting her assessments blindly. This also hints subtly that Nanda Kaul makes her life fit a preordained image (the exact opposite of the marriage in which she felt trapped) rather than because she truly likes it this way.
Themes
