The ravine that lies below Carignano, cluttered with detritus, symbolizes the messiness and drama of life. It is a place populated by ghosts and ghouls. It is also a dangerous place, full of crumbling land, rabid jackals, and the biological waste of the Pasteur Institute. Early in the book, Nanda Kaul looks down at the clutter of trash, brambles, and rocks, and it reminds her of the house she shared with the Vice-Chancellor and their children—of all the demands and unhappiness that characterized that period of her life. Raka is drawn to the ravine, but she prefers to limit her explorations to its periphery. Her ability to explore the ravine daily but to return home with little more than a covering of dust and a few scrapes suggests how hard she’s working to avoid entanglements with others. This makes sense, on one level, because there’s a lot to fear in life: Ila Das can’t escape her life of misery and suffering in the valley—life’s messiness cannot be ignored or avoided entirely. But ultimately, no one can avoid life’s chaos indefinitely. Unwilling to sacrifice her peace and solitude, Nanda Kaul holds her tongue against the urge to invite Ila Das to stay with her at Carignano. As Ila Das descends back toward her life of misery and trial in the valley, she’s killed by Preet Singh, an angry villager. Summoned by a police officer to identify her friend’s body, Nanda Kaul realizes that she, too, must descend the ridge into the valley below to confront the consequences of the choices that she—and others—made.
Ravine Quotes in Fire on the Mountain
Getting up at last, she went slowly round to the back of the house and leant on the wooden railing on which the yellow rose creeper had blossomed so youthfully last month but was now reduced to an exhausted mass of grey creaks and groans again. She gazed down into the gorge with its gashes of red earth, its rocks and gullies and sharply spiked agaves […] and said Is it wrong? Have I not done enough and had enough? I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing? But there was no answer and of course she expected none.
Looking down, over all those years she had survived and borne, she saw them, not bare and shining as the plains below, but like the gorge, cluttered, choked and blackened with the heads of children and grandchildren, servants and guests, all restlessly surging, clamouring about her.
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.
“You should go in the evening, at the proper time,” he said primly, suddenly recalling better days, spent in service of richer, better homes. “You should have an ayah. Then she could wash you and dress you in clean clothes at four o’clock and take you down to the club. You would meet nice babas there. They come in the evenings with their ayahs. They play on the swings and their parents play bridge and tennis. Then they have lemonade and Vitmo in the garden. That is what you should do,” he told her, severely.
Raka listened to him create this bright picture of hill-station club life politely rather than curiously. It was a life she had observed from the outside—in Delhi, in Manila, in Madrid—but had never tried to enter. She had always seemed to lack the ticket. “Hmm,” she said, picking at a nicely crusty scab on her elbow.
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.
Ravine Symbol Timeline in Fire on the Mountain
