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
Ila Das continues shrieking out her sad story. Life is hard for everyone in the village to which she has been assigned. And she hates the Hindu priest—not just because she herself was raised as a Christian, but because he dissuades the villagers away from seeking modern medical care. They and their children suffer and die from conjunctivitis, trachoma, and tetanus. Then, she describes her most recent campaign, against child marriage. Nanda Kaul warns Ila Das to be careful, but Ila Das refuses to back down. One of the villagers, Preet Singh, plans to marry his seven-year-old daughter to an “old man” with six children from a neighboring village in exchange for two goats. It isn’t right, Ila Das insists.
Up to this point in the novel, readers have only been privy to the privileged world of Nanda Kaul—a world in which noisy hoopoes and chaotic monkeys are the biggest threats. Ila Das points to a much larger world with much more suffering than Nanda Kaul herself has had to endure, or even imagine. She felt trapped in her own marriage but at least she wasn’t married off as a child bride. The diseases Ila Das lists here are preventable and treatable but are also highly contagious and frequently lead to blindness (trachoma and conjunctivitis) or death (tetanus) if not treated. In this short chapter, the distance between Nanda Kaul’s mountaintop retreat and the rest of the world becomes inescapably clear.
Themes
