The burned cottage that lies a little way up the mountain from Carignano represents Raka. It went through the crucible of a wildfire, just as illness and the trauma of witnessing her father abuse her mother, Tara, have so tested Raka. The cottage is also isolated and solitary—its potential neighbors abandoned their plan to build when they saw the burned cottage’s fate. Raka, meanwhile, likes nothing more than to be left alone and she spends most of her time by herself, resenting the few occasions on which Nanda Kaul imposes herself on her great-granddaughter.
Although Raka’s visits to the burned cottage bring her momentary peace, the cottage’s extreme isolation and emptiness is tragic, just as Raka’s inability to connect with the people around her represents the tragic consequences of the trauma she’s suffered. The burned cottage also suggests the ways in which true isolation begets a stasis that is impossible for living creatures to aspire to. The cottage is dead, empty, and frozen in time, while Raka and Nanda Kaul are living human beings who cannot survive in such a suspended state. In fact, Nanda Kaul’s attempts to keep her life frozen ultimately end in tragedy. This suggests that if she is to persist and eventually thrive, Raka must eventually learn to cope with the personal struggles she runs to isolation to avoid.
Burned Cottage Quotes in Fire on the Mountain
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.
But now Raka sighed and twisted aside to see if Ram Lal would not come and release her from this disagreeable intimacy. He did not come. She would have to do something. She would have to break out into freedom again. She could not bear to be confined to the old lady’s fantasy world when the reality outside appealed so strongly.
She thought desperately, with longing, of the charred house on the ridge, of the fire-blasted hilltop where nothing sounded, mercifully, but the creaking of the pines in the wind and the demented cuckoos, wildly calling.
And here she was, hedged, smothered, stifled inside the old lady’s words, dreams and more words. She yawned with boredom.
“You are tired,” said Nanda Kaul, sadly.
Burned Cottage Symbol Timeline in Fire on the Mountain
