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
Each day, Raka explores the ravine, fascinated by the trash that clogs it. One day, she finds a giant yellow snake sunning on a rock. She stands and looks at it for a long time before moving on. The Pasteur Institute’s sky-piercing chimneys emit a medicinal smell from the boiling serum. Dust chokes the plains below. One day, Raka scrambles up the hill in the wrong place, accidentally coming up in the garden of the Kasauli Club. She’s dismayed, but in the heat of the day no one is outside to notice her slipping under Carignano’s fence.
Earlier, Nanda Kaul read Sei Shonagon’s description of the isolated woman’s dilapidated house and thought with pleasure about how controlled and orderly Carignano is. The messiness and trash of the ravine, however, suggest that real freedom—the kind Raka has and the kind Nanda Kaul aspires to—is more like Shonagon’s vision. It’s messy and a little dangerous. Nanda Kaul’s ideal is more like the country-club version of reality Raka runs away from in dismay.
Themes
