Much of Fire on the Mountain centers on the lives of its privileged (or formerly privileged) trio of main characters. Nanda Kaul and Ila Das are coddled daughters of the Indian upper class that flourished under the British Raj. They lived on lovely estates with nannies, governesses, and tutors to tend to their needs. Nanda Kaul continued to live a privileged existence as the wife of a university Vice-Chancellor who made sure that his table was set with real silver and fine china and that his wife wore silk and jewels. Raka’s family also has high class status because her father is a diplomat. But the book touches on the poverty and needs of the lower classes, too. When their brothers squander the family fortune, Rima and Ila Das become destitute. As a government welfare worker, Ila Das works and lives among poor and uneducated rural villagers, some of whom are so desperate that they’re willing to marry their daughters off as child brides in exchange for more livestock.
High on her ridge, Nanda Kaul lives above the difficulty that traps Ila Das and her clients. But even in the depths of her poverty, Ila clings to a sense of propriety instilled in her by her parents. She considers asking for begging, something she’s too proud to do. She reflexively judges the villagers for their lack of education and considers the grainseller a brute because he belongs to a lower class than she once did—even though they are better off economically than she is. Fire on the Mountain only gestures toward India’s caste system and history of British colonization. But it nevertheless explores some of the ways in which that history continued to mark 20th-century Indian society, and it critiques both how Nanda Kaul considers herself above difficulty and how the attitudes of people like Ila Das continue to perpetuate class-based distinctions despite social, economic, and cultural changes.
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Class and Privilege 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.
She had practised this stillness, this composure, for years, for an hour every afternoon: it was an art, not easily acquired. The most difficult had been those years in that busy house where doors were never shut […] She remembered how […] she had spent the sleepless hour making out the direction from which a shout came, or a burst of giggles, an ominous growling from the dogs, a contest of squirrels under the guavas in the orchard […]All was subdued, but nothing was ever still. […]
This would go on for an hour and she would keep her eyes tightly clenched, her hands folded on her chest […] determinedly not responding. The effort to not respond would grow longer by the minute, heavier, more unendurable, till at last it was sitting on her chest, grasping her by the neck. At four o’clock she would break out from under it with a gasp.
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 […]”
“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.
Raka wilted. She hung her arms between her knees and drooped her head on its thin stalk. It seemed the old ladies were going to play, all afternoon, that game of old age—that reconstructing, block by gilded block, of the castle of childhood, so ramshackle and precarious, and of stuffing it with that dolls’ house furniture, those impossibly gilded red velvet sofas and painted bedsteads, that always smelt of dust and mice and that she had never cared to play with. She very much wanted to eat her tea, for once to have something to eat at tea, but it seemed she would have to pay for it. She gazed at a small ant under the table, crawling off with a crystal of sugar loaded on to its back, and sighed.
“Isn’t it absurd,” she rattled on, “how helpless our upbringing made us, Nanda. We thought we were being equipped with the very best—French lessons, piano lessons, English governesses—my, all that only to find it left us helpless, positively handicapped!” She cracked with laughter like an old egg, “Now if I were only of the peasants in my village, perhaps I’d manage quite well. Grow a pumpkin vine, keep a goat, pick up kindling in the forest for fire—and perhaps I could cut down those thirty rupees I need to twenty-five, to twenty—but not, I think, less.” Almost crying, she turned to Nanda Kaul. “Do you think I could do with less?”
Once under the chestnut trees of the Lower Mall, Ila Das tried to tease herself out of her panic. Why was she afraid? Of whom? She was not in debt to anyone in the bazaar. No, Ila Das would never take a loan, never. Ooh, what would her father have thought if she had? She gave a little spurting giggle at the thought of her father, in his fawn waistcoat with the gold watch chain cascading out of his pocket, knowing his daughter, groomed by a long line of governesses and ayahs, to be in debt to some hairy, half-dressed shopkeeper.
But here she stopped herself. Why did she think of that kindly concerned man in the grainshop as hairy, half-dressed? Now when would she ever get over that pompous education of her, leave it all behind and learn to deal with the world, now her world, as it was?
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.
