The animals that roam the countryside around Carignano represent both freedom and chaos. On the one hand, they’re unencumbered by human emotions or connections—at least those that remain wild, like the cuckoos at the burned cottage, the hoopoes in the eaves of the house, or the wild monkeys and jackals that live in the ravine. Caged animals, on the other hand, like the bears and leopards Nanda Kaul claims her father kept, stand for people imprisoned by convention and the stories they tell about themselves. Nanda Kaul herself relates to these animals, having long felt trapped and unfulfilled in life. Because she instinctively identifies with—and longs for—the kind of freedom wild animals possess, Raka becomes upset when the stories feature caged bears or leopards.
But the animals also represent the chaotic forces that shape a person’s life without their input or control. The langur monkeys descend from the trees on unsuspecting homes, where they are capable of great destruction if no one stops them. The jackals in the ravine frustrate the attempts of the scientists and doctors at the Pasteur Institute to eradicate rabies precisely because they cannot be controlled. These animals shape the lives of the humans in their vicinity, just as the events that lie outside of a person’s control—the illness of a parent, the loss of a family fortune, or the loneliness of being misunderstood and unappreciated, for instance—shape the lives of Raka, Ila Das, and Nanda Kaul.
Animals Quotes in Fire on the Mountain
Commotion preceded her like a band of langurs. Only it took the form of schoolboys who were unfortunately let out from school at just the same time as Ila das was proceeding toward Carignano with her uneven, rushing step, in her ancient white court shoes, prodding the tip of her great brown umbrella into the dust with an air of faked determination. Like langurs, the boys swung about her, long-armed, careless, insulting. They hooted at her little grey topknot that wobbled on top of her head, at her spectacles that slipped down to the tip of her nose and were only prevented from falling off by an ancient purple ribbon looped over her ears, at the grey rag of the petticoat that gaped dismally beneath the lace hem of her sari—at everything, in short, that was Ila Das. […] She said only harmless things like “I’ll tell your teacher—I know your Principal […]”
The refuse that the folds of the gorge held and slowly ate and digested was of interest too. There were splotches of blood, there were yellow stains oozing through paper, there were bones and the mealy ashes of bones. Tins of Tulip ham and Kissan jam. Broken china, burnt kettles, rubber tyres and bent wheels.
Once she came upon a great, thick yellow snake poured in rings upon itself, basking on the sunned top of a flat rock. She watched it for a long while, digging her toes into the slipping red soil, keeping still the long wand of broom she held in her hand. She had seen the tips of snakes’ tails parting the cracks of rocks, she had seen slit eyes watching her from grottoes of shade, but she had never seen the whole creature before.
Somewhere behind them, behind it all, was her father, home from a party, stumbling and crashing through the curtains of night, his mouth opening to let out a flood of rotten stench, beating at her mother with hammers and fists of abuse—harsh, filthy abuse that made Raka cower under her bedclothes and wet the mattress in fright, feeling the stream of urine warm and weakening between her legs like a stream of blood, and her mother lay down on the floor and shut her eyes and wept. Under her feet, in the dark, Raka felt that flat, wet jelly of her mother’s being squelching and quivering, so that she didn’t know where to put her feet and wept as she tried to get free of it. Ahead of her, no longer on the ground but at some distance now, her mother was crying. Then it was a jackal crying.
It was the ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces in Kasauli that drew her: the ravine where yellow snakes slept under grey rocks and agaves growing out of the dust and rubble, the skeletal pines that rattled in the wind, the wind-levelled hilltops and the seared remains of the safe, cozy, civilized world in which Raka had no part and to which she owed no attachment.
Here she stood, in the blackened shell of a house that the next storm would bring down, looking down the ravine to the tawny plains […] She raised herself on to the tips of her toes—tall, tall as a pine—stretched out her arms till she felt the yellow light strike a spark down her fingertips and along her arms till she was alight, ablaze.
Then she broke loose, raced out on to the hillside, up the ridge, through the pines, in blazing silence.
“Oh yes, all my father’s animals lived inside. I really believe he cared for them as much as for us. Even the pangolin. You wouldn’t think anyone could be attached to that hard, scaly creature, always curled up inside its armour, but somehow my father was. He admired it, you see—he admired anything uncommon, extraordinary…”
As she murmured on, touching the knives and forks on the table, her eyes wandering in a kind of grey thicket of dreams, the child squirmed, looked over her shoulder at the window, at the sun glistening on the knoll, the pine boughs dipping as the parrots sprang on them, screaming, and longed to get away. She could not understand this new talkativeness of her great-grandmother’s who had preferred, till lately, not to talk to her at all, nor had wanted to be talked to. Now she was unable to stop.
The last of the light had left the valley. It was already a deep violet and only the Kasauli ridge, where Carignano stood invisibly, was still bright with sunlight, russet and auburn, copper and brass. An eagle took off from the peak of Monkey Point, lit up like a torch in the sky, and dropped slowly down into the valley, lower and lower, till it was no more than a sere leaf, a scrap of burnt paper, drifting on currents of air, silently.
Animals Symbol Timeline in Fire on the Mountain
