Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain: Divulgence of Characters

Abstract

British Guardian Prize winner and thrice nominated for Booker Prize, famous Indian novelist writing in English Anita Desai’s Sahitya Academy Award winning one of the masterpieces Fire on the Mountain published in1977. The book focuses on an elderly widow’s isolation and loneliness as it tells the story of Nanda Kaul who lives in Kasauli and leads a solitary existence. The old lady, Nanda lives alone in a colonial house on a slope. She gives nobody a chance to interfere with her secluded life. She had spent numerous years thinking about her husband, their kids, and numerous grandkids. She has turned into a loner and remains confined from everybody including an incredible grandkid. This is her circumstance until the point that the colossal grandkid touches base on her doorstep. Raka,a young girl who is wiped out and is as withdrawn as Nanda. The child lives in her very own kind of disconnection as she withdraws into a universe of inward dream where she makes undertakings of pursuing snakes, creatures, and phantoms in the serene slopes that encompass her and her incredible grandma. The old lady sees that both of them share things for all intents and purpose however that a noteworthy distinction exists also. Nanda has been a solitary person while the young lady was naturally introduced to that sort of presence. Nanda gradually starts to need to be a piece of the kid's life and needs to impart her reality to her. Her endeavours, be that as it may, seem, by all accounts, to be futile. Her awesome granddaughter will give nobody a chance to enter her life. Nanda is not debilitated and endeavours to associate with the child by imparting stories to her. Anita Desai talks of her writing as simply ‘stories,’ and of herself as a ‘storyteller’. In this very simple way she has beautifully painted the female characters and their sufferings in the novel Fire on the Mountain which is the focused area of this research article.