INTRODUCTION

It is beyond doubt that Anita Desai is one of the most popular contemporary Indian
novelists writing in English. It is she who has enriched the tradition of the Indian novel in
English. Her contribution to Indian English ction has earned both name and fame for her. Man-
Woman relationship, Fast- West encounter, alienation, feminine sensibility etc. are the common
themes that we find in her ction, Anita Desais novels like Cry, the Peacock (l963), Voice in
the City'(l965l), Bye-Bye, Blackbird'(l97l), Where Shall We GoTthis Summer?(l975), re
on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day? (I 980), In Custody (I984, etc. have explored
new horizons in the helm of creative writing.
Anita Desai is the vanguard of a new generation of Indian writers who are
experimenting with themes of inner consciousness she gives her readers valuable insights into
the feminine consciousness through her memorable protagonists.
Anita Desai is one of the world famous and of Indias best modern novelists in English.
She is an Indian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and story writer. She is a writer who
has influenced generations of writers. She has enriched Indian fictional world with her
significant literary outputs. Anita Desai, originally an Indian citizen, migrated to America. She
has been living in America. She can be considered to be an expatriate writer of the Indian origin.
The Article discusses the numerous ways that help a novelist to represent his/her story to the
readers with special reference to Anita Desais Cry, the Peacock and Fire on the Mountain. The
telling of stories is such a pervasive aspect of our environment that we sometimes forget that
stories provide the initial and continuing means for shaping our experience.
Thus, it is not surprising that a great deal of scholarly investigation has focused on both
the nature of stories and their central role in human affairs.
This Article describes how Anita Desai enriches the novel and lifts it above the mere
narration of a story or depiction of a character and provides it the very life blood and the soul.
Form and structure in the novels Anita Desai take the shape of an exquisitely designed tapestry.
The article explains that the aspects of theme and technique in Anita Desais novels are not
isolated elements. They are inter-related at many levels of structure and texture. In order to
convey her theme the novelist judiciously uses character, situation, dialogues and other elements
in relation to the plot. Narrating a story is a primitive instinct of every novelist and in this Article
we will see how story is narrated in Anita Desais Cry, the Peacock and Fire on the Mountain.
Anita Desai was born on 24th, June, 1937, in Mussoorie, a hill station situated in the
foothills of the Himalayan ranges, near Dehradun, in the North Indian State of Uttaranchal, India.
It is conveniently connected by road to Delhi and major cities. It is called Gateway to
Yammunotri and Gangotri, Shrines of Northern India. She was formerly known as Anita
Mazumdar,
a daughter of Dhiren N. Mazumdar, a Bengali business executive, and the former Toni Nime, a
German expatriate, a teacher, while an engineering student in pre-war Berlin, of German origin.
Anita Desais mother was a German Christian and her father was a Bengali Indian. She
was dark and did not have the Teutonic fair looks. She also had an un-German Name: Nime. She
used to claim that the ancestors had come from France, from Nime. Her first name was also very
French: Antoinette, later shortened to Toni. Her mother, Antoinette Nime, could trace her origin
to France, and her father, Dhiren Mazumdars native place was Dhaka (now in Bangladesh) but
he had settled in New Delhi. He spoke German very well. This mixed parentage of complex
origin gives Anita Desai the advantage of having double perspective whenwriting about India
and Indians as well as about migrants in India and Indian migrants to the West. If seen from her
mothers side she is an outsider and if seen from her fathers side she is a native. She was
educated in Delhi. She married on 13-12-1958 to Ashwin Desai a Gujarati businessman and
gave to four children. About her husband she comments My writing carrier was entirely
subservient to being a wife and a mother. I lived the life of the typical Indian housewives: wrote
in the gaps and hid it away, kept it secret. Later the family moved to Mumbai where she raised
two sons, Arjun and Rahul, and two daughters, Tani and Kiran.
Wide! in lilts Monishas plight and psychic life and intimately shows the women like
female birds in the eases. Monisha dies screaming for life, for the first experience of real feeling
of pain awakens in her a desire to live. She loves to see herself as an unfettered individual and
not to Lissome at any stage a complacent. Same wife who adjusts herself to a gilded cage. She
is too silent for the family and the world distrusts her silence. She wants to be herself and not to
compromise.
Having grown up in a houseful of books led her to the early decision that writing would be her
life. While studying English at the University of New Delhi, Anita Desai dedicated herself to
writing. At a tender age of nine, she had studied Wuthering Heights. Her career started with
short stories which got printed in leading Indian magazines. Her first story was Circus Cat. Then
she wrote one after another stories followed by him first novel Cry the Peacock in 1963 and
many more.
In Where shall We Go This Summer there is aching void in the life of Sita as a woman, a wife
and I mother. Anita Desais fiction inextricably fuses the tension between tradition and
modernity, individualism and social unity. Convention and innovation and determines the
dimension and direction of the themes. The plot is replete with symmetry and harmony
pervading the events of the story. Sits and her husband receive and react as if they were the
denizens of different worlds. Sita is badly disturbed by having a bitter experience of insular and
unimaghative way of life of her husband and his people.
Anita Desai marks n revolutionary departure without transpiring into terra incognita and
is happy to have women protagonists in her novels. Nanda Kaul's withdrawal from life and
family is not the result of any existential retaliation of man's ultimate loneliness She has just
been reduced' to such astute. Anita Desai looks at the rudiment of women and visualizes lisle for
A woman as a series of obligations and commitments. Broadly speaking. Desais themes,
characterization and images deal with connement and lack of freedom. ln addition to
existentialistic reality of life she evokes the sentiment and sensibility ofwornen for their role and
respect in society. The allots of the feminist critics resulted in a massive recovery of almost
forgotten women writers and also re-reading of literature by women with a view to understand
the evolution of the female aesthetic.
Anita Desais all young characters crave for women's lib. Maya in Cry, lilt Pricks who is
not mature and intelligent enough complains of treated as a wild beast on a. leash which
induces in her humiliating sense ofa neglect Maya is shocked by having a far-fetched difference
between her lot and that of her brother, Arjuna who is set frm and enjoys liberty like a young
hawk that could not be tuned, that fought for its liberty. Similarly Moniaha in Witts in the City
longs to thrust her head out old the windowbut the bars are closely set". '11ss entire novel is
littered with meaningful] suggestions about Monishas identity crisis X am all exterior and l
done with most things". Meaningless, uninvolveddoes this not amount to non-eldest-nee"?
Sita in Where Skull Ws Ga 17s1s Simmer wishes to have freedom and it is manifested in her
fascination with the foreigner who the meets on the roadside. Sita always has the feeling of being
tied with a chain, which can only throttle, choke and enslave.
Also living at the house is Pappachis sister: Baby Kochamma (Kochamma is an honorific
name for a female). As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young
Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem to study Hindu scriptures. In order to get closer to him,
Baby Kochamma became a Roman Catholic and joined a convent against her fathers wishes.
After a few lonely months in the convent, Baby Kochamma realized thtat her vows brought her
no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescues her from the convent and sends her
to America for an education , where she obtains a diploma in ornamental gardening . She
remains unmarried for the rest of her life, her unrequited Mulligan turning to bitterness.
Throughout the book, Baby Kochamma delights in the misfortune of others and manipulates
events to bring down calamity upon Ammu and the twins.
In Fire on the Mountain there develops a critical situation when Nanda Kaul retreats tn
Carignano alert allowing lilt husband to have a lifelong all air with another women. Shrs does
not follow the revolutionary path of Sita but feels that she could be shipwrecked. No doubt,
Anita Desais novels epitomize the of the spin]s of power-knowledge pleasure. Power for
Foucault is not something acquired, seized or up-taped", it is " an institution and not a structure;
neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with, it is the name that one attributes to a
complex strategic situation in a particular society."

Throughout her novels, Desai focuses on personal struggles and problems of
contemporary life that her Indian character must cope with. She maintains that her primary goal
is to discover the truth that is nine- tenth of the iceberg that lies submerged beneath the one-
tenth visible portion we call Reality.1 She portrays the cultural and social changes that India has
undergone as she focuses on incredible power of family and society and the relationship between
family members, paying close attention to the trials of women suppressed by Indian society.
Prasad rightly says, "Anita Desai took the literary world by storm with her very first
novel, Cry, the Peacock, which apparently strikes the reader as a poetic place."Apart from her
poetic sensibility, it is her keen perception of reality and her powerful imagination that have gone
a long way to shape and fashion the nature and extent of her theme of pessimism within the
limits of life in India. Nevertheless, Naik holds that if Anita Desais fiction is "able to advance
from the vision of aloneness as a psychological state of mind to that of pessimism as a
metaphysical enigma -and one hopes it will - Anita Desai may one day achieve an amplified
pattern of significant exploration of consciousness comparable to Virginia Woolf at her best."
In her criss-cross examination of the theme Anita Desai shows that power and sex are
two well-known aspects of interpersonal relationships. Even Atlas of Fatter in the City is not
fortunate enough to free herself from the shackles of feminist. Desai has explained to an
interviewer, that every human being's territory is really very small and that all one can explore
is "a very tiny section of this territory. It is generally believed that critics adopt double standard
in literary criticism to evaluate the work of men and women. As Virginia Wool! puts it, very
often books are evaluated thus "This is an important boot....because it deals with war. This is an
insignicant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room."" The critical
review of the contemponry criticism on Indian women writers would therefore fun a legitimate
area for research. This would help us identify the presence. if any, of gender bias. Elaine
Showalter rightly says, One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it it male oriented.
Besides the recurrent themes common to women writers, feminist literary criticism also
examines the gender-genre relationship and the language used by women write-rs. There is a
quest for a feminine style and syntax.
Anita Desais Cry, the Peacock is the story of a hypersensitive young woman, Maya,
who cannot get over the trauma of a prediction. An albino priest forecasts death for Maya or her
husband, in the fourth year of their marriage. Hearing this prophecy she loses her peace of mind.
And this is the reason that Gautamas long discourses on detachment appear to her life-negating.
In a fit of insanity she kills him in order to find life for herself. So the philosophy of detachment
is the main cause of the failure of their married life. In her second novel Voices I n The City
Desai tries to present a touching account of the life of Monisha, the married sister of Nirode.
Monishas miserable life is empty from within and without. She is married to Jiban and her
relationship with him is marked only by loneliness because of the carelessness of Jiban, or
their misunderstanding. Monisha tries to search for a real meaning of her life but at the end, she
feels frustration. Monisha is always suffering from mental agony. The absence of love in her life,
mal-adjustment with husband, loneliness- all these torture her mentally and make her shriek in
agony.
Bye-Bye Blackbird is the third and different kind of novel by Anita Desai. Though the
theme of loneliness is explored in this novel also yet the technique and the intention are different.
Sarah, the heroine of the novel has withdrawn from the world of her childhood. She does not ant
to look back and in this respect she is different from Maya and Sita. The sense of nostalgia is
become a narrative technique in this novel. Anita Desai depicts the theme of love and marriage
very beautifully and minutely in her fourth novel Where Shall We Go This Summer? It seems to
be an epitome of an irresistible yearning for a purposeful life. The heroine of the novel Sita, is a
highly sensitive girl. With the help of marriage one cannot revive the heart-beating troubles or
pains or the happiest moments of others life. Marriage needs more faith. Anita Desai studies the
marital discords resulting from the conflict between two untouchable temperaments and two
diametrically different ideas represented by Sita and her husband Raman. The conflict is going
on from beginning to end between Sita and Raman. Thus Anita Desai has dwelt upon the
problem of marriage, love and sex in her own way. She thinks that marriage alone does not
provide a solution of lifes tension and chaos. Mental satisfaction and happy married life means
better understanding between husband and wife. But Sita and Raman fail to come to a
harmonious whole.
In her fifth novel, Fire on the Mountain Anita Desai paints wonderfully observed
pictures of Indian life, and an unforgettable portrait of old age. The novel explores the alienation
of Nanda Kaul and her grand-daughter Raka. In comparison with other novels isolation plays an
important role in this novel. That is why the heroine of this novel Nanda Kaul always likes
loneliness after the death of her husband. The married life of Nanda Kaul is not life of the
ordinary people because there are no emotions and feelings. Her relationship with her husband
was nothing beyond the duties and obligations they had for each other. Anita Desai in the novel,
In Custody, presents the thematic problem of love and marriage in a very exquisite manner,
analyses the problem of Deven Sharma, an impoverished college lecturer. After his marriage
with a sullen and dull wife, Deven sees a way to escape from the meanness and hopelessness of
his daily life. Anita Desai deals with such common problem of post-marital life in this novel.
Deven often feels as if his marriage has stood behind his imagination like a heavy weight. As
regards her problems of love Anita Desai has tried her best in her novel The Village By The Sea.
In this novel she deals with such a traditional community of fishermen. The story of the
novel is woven around an alcoholic fisherman, his sick wife and their four children Lila, Bela,
Kamal and Hari. Anita Desai describes human relations, mans relation with woman, mans
relation with God in the real village Thul, situated in the western coast of India.
Anita Desais sixth novel, Clear Light of the Day, describes the emotional relations, the
emotional reactions of two main characters- Bim and her younger sister Tara, who are haunted
by the memories of the past. The novel highlights the theme of the effect of the remembrance of
the past on the chief protagonists. The novel deals with the theme in relation to eternity.
Desais vision and art centers round her preoccupation with the individual and his inner
world of sensibility- the chaos inside his mind. This is the keynote of her unique vision of the
predicament of the individual is contemporary Indo-English fiction. This distinguishes her from
other Indian women novelists. Anita Desai, among all women Indian-English novelists has
discussed the art of fiction most comprehensively. She is not only well-versed in the theory and
practice of the novel but also in vision and art. She analyses her creative self and explores the
inner dilemmas and resources of her characters. Dealing with inner world, her fiction grapples
with the intangible realities of life. She delves deep into the inner most depth of human psyche
and discovers the inner turmoil and the chaotic layer of mind. Desai looks into the inner world of
reality and prefers it to the outer world of reality. She reiterates the difference between truth and
reality. For her truth is synonymous of Art, not of reality, so her novels discover and convey the
significance of things. The search for truth, she believes, consists in the life of the mind and the
soul- the inner life. She captures the prismatic quality of life in her fiction. With this vision and
art of Anita Desai, her novels deal with the problems of love and marriage along with other
human problems.
Vision of life centers round the nucleus of internal states of mind of her characters.
Therefore her images, symbolic and myths are written in the language of interior thoughts. All
these images reveal the inner nature of her character with their obsessions, changing moods and
psychic aberration. Her novels bear the testimony of this fact. All this illustrates her handling of
situations and the problems of love and marriage, along with other human problems.
Her novels include Fire on the Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holt by
MemorialPrize,and Clear Light of Day (1980), I n Custody (1984),and Fasting, Feasting (1999),
each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by
Merchant Ivory productions. Her children's book The Village by the Sea (1982), won
the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Her most recent novel is The Zig Zag Way (2004), set in 20th century Mexico.

Anita Desai lives in the United States, where she is the John E. Bur chard Professor of
Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Her most recent book is The
Artist of Disappearance (2011), a trio of linked novellas about the art world, each featuring a
different kind of disappearance.
As the very title suggests, Cry, the Peacock is about Maya's cries for love and
understanding in her loveless marriage with Gautama.
Most of Anita Desais works engage the complexities of modern India culture from a
feminine perspective while highlighting the female Indian predicament of maintaining-self-
identify as an individual woman.
Desai works rightly focus on these sensitive issues.








MAYA IN CRY, THE PEACOCK
Anita Desai is one of the most powerful contemporary lentil novelists in English. She is
more conceded with thought, emotion and sertsuion than with action. Experience and
achievement. She concentrates on the predicament of modern woman in this maledominated
society and her destruction at the altar of marriage. According to Desai, most marriages prove to
be union of incompatibility.
Desais protagonists, structures the way in which all violence and disturbing things are
due to man and patria dial power. Her women know how they have been trapped and how they
can begin to live afresh but the obstacle is man. Man enters her world as disturbing factor. But in
the process, she reduces
The patriamlul discourse to a set of clichs and soon her women are caught by fantasy.

The novels of Anita Desai normally employ: the protagonist to narrate the story. The
main character while telling the story presents her own view point as seen in the narration of
Maya in. As the characters are not omniscient, it is subjective and personal. Any person can see
only a bit of the landscape from a window
but not the whole. Similarly the protagonist. Maya in Cry, the Peacock the people around her
especially her husband from her own personal point of vision which leads to misunderstanding
and destruction.

The novel Cry, the Peacock, portrays the inner emotional world of only one chanter,
Maya. This novel deals with Mayas mental uphmvals, her inner struggle, her desire for warmth,
love and companionship and her obsession with death. Thus, Cry, the Peacock, an
externalization the interior of Maya's cocoon. Maya is sensitive and solitary to the point of
being neurotic. She from her childhood regards the world as a toy specially made for her painter
in her favorite colors and set to dance to her favorite tunics.Thus, Maya has
Strange childhood from which she develops s negative sells image and aversion the immediate
reality is her fragmented psyche to view world as a hostile place.

Anita Desai probes the heart of a woman who sulkers from a mysterious premonition
about the tragic end of her marriage. She is made to believe that either she or her husband would
die in i.e. fourth year of their marriage. The corneous prediction also suggests the death to be
produced by unnatural causes. When the novel opens, Mayas marriage with Gautarna is
inning in its fourth year and the emotional woman, Maya, issuant beginning to reel under the
pressure of the prophecy that threatens to shatter her
Married life.

Mayas fear is aggravated as she fails to relate to Gautama, her husband. Between the
husband and the wile there exists 1 terrible communication gap as both of them seem to live in
different worlds. Maya is an instinctive woman of pinion: and emotions. Gautama. on the other
hand, is st philosophical intellectual. Driven by an instinctive nature Maya expect: some
emotional and physical satisfaction in married life but
both of them are denied her, one by Gautamas cold intellectuality and the other by his age."
Love ? Love that in without any ambition, without my desire. without any late except that
which keep; it alive burning, yes, that is well But do you not mistake attachment for love ? And
there lie: egoism after all. To meditate upon the garden on n one evening-well, that is net indeed.
To throw oneself into a passion of wonder and excitement you are led surely to a passion of
unhappiness in its los. Depression and disillusionment Therefore to train yourself to remain
detached- untouched, a you yourself called it is worth a try.
Isnt is? To train yourself. Yet to discipline oneself. Our yogi: do it. And our sunny sis,
the true ones. And so they are free from disillusionment, and being free from that, are also free
from any danger of perishing. That I expect. Let the catamite each religion yearns for, visualizing
it with varying degrees of perspicacity...

Among the post- independence Indo- English writers Anita Desai holds a prominent
place because of the immense popularity she commands as a novelist of human predicament of
anxiety, frustration and loneliness in the insensitive and inconsiderate contemporary world. This
paper aims at tracing the theme of alienation in the novels of Anita Desai. Alienation refers to
estrangement that occurs in the relation between an individual and that to which he or she is
relating to. It is a feeling of not belonging.

This feeling can be physical, mental, religious, spiritual, political or economical. At one
time or the other each one of us has experienced alienation in one form or other whether in
school, college, among our family members, in religion, in politics or in society .This aloneness
alone for them is the treasure worth treasuring. This kind of situation more or less prevails in
Desai's first novel Cry, the Peacock. Cry the Peacock, published in 1963 can be considered as a
trendsetting novel as it deals with the mental rather than the physical aspects of its character.
It also deals with the total alienation of Maya from her husband, Gautama and from her
surroundings and even from herself. Both husband and wife had different attitude towards life.
She wants to be attached to the world and its abounding charms, while Gautama wants to remain
aloof and detached so as to attain 'peace of mind' this attitude alienates them from each other.
This incompatibility of nature causes deep alienation in the mind of the protagonist, Maya and
she becomes intensely abnormal. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar writes: * her intensity-whether she is
sane, hysterical or insane-fills the whole book and gives it form as well as life".1 Maya was
born in an old orthodox family enjoyed life in her parents' house. In her husbands house the
situation is totally different .She faces there a totally different code of conduct. She finds that her
feelings are not cared for and that she is being neglected, isolated and alienated in her own home.
This disturb her terribly and so she feels herself utterly defenseless and alone. For Gautama,
Maya is in unnatural situation and he attributes it to her father- fixation. This novel gives an
impression of indifference in the married life of Maya and Gautama. The death of Toto, the dog
makes the situation worse. Maya feels alienation due to the death of Toto. It was intolerable to
her.
it looks painfully comic and absurd to be told how to be a yogi or a sunny' and to achieve
'detachment' when what one craves for is the conjugal love and an emotional with a natural,
mutual attachment. This stolid and philosophical speech in fact underlines the predicament of not
just Maya and Gautama but most of other pairs in Anita Distaffs work. Most importantly it is
their choice of living on separate planes that
denies them a real understanding. Their diversity disjunction them from each other and
condemns luck to at lifeless relationship.
Maya and Gautama just continue to chase their disparate visions about life. To Maya lift:
is a pulsating, throbbing possibility while for Gautama it is a clear. Precise and concrete truth.
Mayas approach thus is instinctively.
To make matters worse, all the Maya ever pines for, perishes quickly. Her life appears to
be an endless tale of separation and lifelessness as she begins to lose everything just after her
marriage. Having once enjoyed a princess like, a sumptuous fate of the fantasies of the Arabian
Nights, the glories and bravado of Indian mythology, long and astounding tales of princes and
regal queens", she now seems to face the quilt revered of fortunes. She misses the company of
her father. his positive, affectionate attitude but is painfully shocked to see him turning immune
to her after her marriage to Gautama. Defeated by human beings. She tries to latch on to
Her pet Tote, but it too dies suddenly.

She plunges deeper into problems as she fails to do or deliver anything meaningful. Her
household is mo by the servants around leaving her idle and more tuned to developing her
neurosis. The lack of activity thus renders her unoccupied and more conducive to mental
nervousness and anxieties.
To add to her misery, she happens to be childless woman, deprived thus of an oppornmity
of a healthy, spontaneous outlet of her feelings. Her life thus suffers from a terrible
eventlessncrs. Unoccupied, unloved and alone Maya in the things. The world of her aspirations
falls apart around her and she begins to lose her sanity:

l am going insane. I am moving further and further from all wisdom, all calm, and I shall
soon be mud, if I am not that already. Perhaps it is my madness that leads me to imagine that
horoscope, that encounter with the Albino, his predictions, my fate? Perhaps it is only a
phenomenon of insanity?

A sense of gloom, a threat for an imminent disaster chokes her as already insecure and
alienated, she is dogged by the prophecy clan albino astrologer who predicted her husbands or
her own death in the fourth year fool their manned life. It is noteworthy that given a healthy,
spontaneous and occupied routine. Maya would have shrugged aside the fears of the prophecy.
But the {ant that her life seems to be an endless tedium with nothing signicant taking place at
any time leaves her extremely vulnerable plunging her deep into a. life of miserable existence of
bizarre fantasies and nightmares.

The opening part of the novel depicts the causes of Maya's neurosis; All day the body
lay rotting in the sun. It could not be moved onto the verandah for, in that April best, the reek of
dead flesh was overpowering and would soon have penetrated the rooms. So she moved the little
string bed on which it lay under the lime trees, where there was a cool shade, say its eyes open
and staring still, screamed and rushed to the garden tap to wash the vision from her eyes,
continued to cry and ran, defeated, into the house."5 The dead body of the dog, Toto, was
removed by the public Works Department, and Maya's husband, Gautam, said to her, "Its all
over, Come, won 't you pour out my tea?(CTP p. 6). But she was lost in what had been of the
dog; as such, Gautam again said, "Maya, do sit down. You look so hot and born out. You need a
cup of tea."(CTP p. 6). Maya cried No and "fled to the bedroom to fling her onto the bed and
lie there, thinking of the small, still body stiffened into the panic-stricken posture of the moment
of death, and of the small sharp yield in the throat as it suddenly contracted." (CTP p. 7)
Maya headed towards pessimism just because she could not bear with the death of Toto.
She sat there, sobbing, and waiting for her husband to come home. "Now and then she went out
onto the verandah, and looked to see if he were coming up the drive which lay shrivelling,
melting and then shriveling again, like molten lead in a grove cut into the earth, and, out of the
corner of her eye, could not help glancing, as one cannot help a test the small units corpse laying
at one end of the lawn, under a sheet, under the limes."(CTPpp.5- 6).Nevertheless, she could not
help throwing a casual but conscious glance at the phenomenon that had made her sick and
abnormal. All day it had come in with the slow breeze that sucked the curtains in, then slowly
drew them out." (CTP p. 6)
Her obsession with the prophecy gains further consolidation as Gautama remains
jealously indifferent to her feelings and fears. When Maya attempts to share her growing anxiety
over the prophecy that threatens to end her or Gautamas life, he just. Can slip into his favorite
preaching mould:

Maya's abnormal psychology; There remained certain unease, a hesitance in the air,
which kept the tears swimming in my eyes, and prevented their release. I was not allowed the
healing passion of a fit of crying that would have left me exhausted, sleep-washed and
becalmed."(CTP p. 8).This unremembered sorrow projected itself on the death of Toto; "the
strange horror had not yet been recognized even though it was, surely, connected with the corpse,
the small, soft corpse and the odor of flesh, once sweet, once loved, then, suddenly, rotten-
repulsive.(CTP p. 8).This sort of emphasis on the gulf between life and death is the cornerstone
of alienation, despair, and introversion. It is unfortunate that Maya's husband, Gautam, could not
think in terms of death and its ugliness; "I crept into a corner of the bed, crouched there, thinking
that it perhaps because of Gautam not understanding."(CTP p. 9)
Gautam never tried to know that concerned Maya. He could not know her misery, nor did
he know how to comfort her. Maya rightly says, But then, he knew nothing that concerned me.
Giving me an opal ring to wear on my finger, he did not notice the translucent skin beneath, the
blue flashing veins that ran under and out of the bridge of gold and jolted me into smiling with
pleasure each time I saw it. Telling me to go to sleep while he worked at his papers, he did not
give another thought to me, to either the soft, willing body or the lonely, wanting mind that
waited near his bed."(CTP p. 9).Maya says that "it is his (Gautam's) hardness - no, no, not
hardness, but the distance he coldly keeps from me. His coldness and incessant talks and, talking
reveal myself. It is that - my loneliness in this house."(CTP p. 10)
This life you speak, of this little episode, this brief ash in the pm, how in and trivial it
appears compared with this immortal cycle to which all humanity is bound. Living or dying and
which turns without stop, without point. You might say.

"Childless women," says Maya, "do develop fanatic attachments to their pets, they say. It
is no less a relationship than that of a woman and her child, no less worthy of reverence, and
agonized remembrance.(CTP p.10). Maya was doubtful about the future; she could not hope for
having a child in future. She knew how closely linked to the chain of time was the inevitable
order of attachment, its disintegration, and then, the deluge."(CTP p. 10). Maya was flooded with
tenderness and gratitude; her tenderness was "the cathartic I desired, and now at last I began to
cry again, pressing my face against him."(CTP p. 11). This made Maya feel agreeably like a
child. She was not hurt, and she took his arm, even though she knew that he wanted her to do so.
When Maya and Gautam strolled up and down, they felt of "the peace that comes from
companion life alone, from brother flesh."(CTP p. 18).Maya feels that contact, relationship, and
communion are necessary for eluding the nets of negation, "these warm, tender sensations bathe
me in their lambency, smooth me till the disturbed murmurs of my agitation grow calmer, and I
could step out of the painful seclusion of my feelings into an evening world where the lawn had
just been trimmed, the flower-beds just watered."(CTP p. 18). Nevertheless, Maya rightly caught
her husband in his act of indifference toward her - her life and feelings. She asked, what are you
thinking of? That man who came to see you this evening? He kept you in the office for an hour -
or more, I 'm sure, what did he want? Oh, you don't need to tell me- it must have been about
some musty old case, about money, or property, or something dreary like that, Wasn't it?"(CTP
p. 20)
Maya emphatically says, Though I 'm sure I dont know if money is basic. And why
must it always be money? It's always money, or poverty - never is case of passion and revenge,
murder, and exciting things like that - basic things. Why?"(CTP p. 20).Quickly Gautam
interrupted, cutting Maya's thoughts away, and he swiftly said, You feel the world will die for
what is known to us as reality, not for ideals. Like most young people, you cannot understand
that reality and idealism are one end the same things. Life is not a matter of distinguishing
between the two, but of reconciling them."(CTP pp. 20-21).Love and death, Gautam thinks, are
mundane superfluities, and these superfluities are the ideals of worldly life. "Death lurked in
those spaces, the darkness spoke of distance, separation, loneliness -loneliness of such proportion
that it broke the bounds of that single word and all its associations, and went spilling and
spreading out and about lapping the stars, each one isolated from the other by so much."(CTP p.
22)
Maya could not help thinking of the long journey of the dead from one birth into another
- "the brave traversing of mute darkness, the blind search for another realm of lucidity in the
midst of chaos."(CTP p. 22).Her thought reached a point where the idea of Totos death over-
powered her associations with the world of her emotional involvements. She cried, I miss him
so - terribly."(CTP p. 22).The confession out of her in a stormy rush, and even as she wiped
away her quick tears, and wept more, she cried to herself - "what is the use? I am alone."(CTP p.
22).So when Gautam quoted an Urdu couplet, she heard it, "And my heart stretched, stretched
painfully, agonizingly, agonizingly, expending and swelling with the vastness of a single
moment of absolute happiness, and my body followed its long, sweet curve, arching with the
searing, annihilating torture of it."(CTP p. 23)
Exhibiting thus a cruel aloofness towards Mayas apprehension, Gautama aggravates her
frustration. He refuses to come out of his cocooned shell of intellectuality and fails to sec Mayas
growing desperation. Placed on a rake of helpless, Maya's visions become chaotic and her
dreams tummy nightmarish. Condemned to live a life of physical, emotional and spiritual
loneliness, Mayas whole being gets convened in a hysterical sell'..... Pining for
companionship.

"Gautam almost a protg of my father, who had admired him, and, I believe, still did,
coming slowly up on his bicycle, in the evenings, it was my father,Gautam used to call upon, and
had it not been for the quickening passion with which I met, half-way, my father's proposal that I
marry this tall, stooped and knowledgeable friend of his, one might have said that our marriage
was grounded upon the friendship of the two men, and the mutual respect in which they held
each other, rather than upon anything else."(CTP p. 40).The prophecy too was responsible for
making plays morbid and negative. Now she comes to recollect what was prophesied; "Four
years it was now, we had been married four years. It was as though the moonlight had withered
the shadows in my mind as well. Leaving it all dead-white, or dead-black. When the drums fell
silent and the moon began to sink over the trees, I knew the time had come. It was now to be
either Gautam, or I,"(CTP pp. 32-33)
Maya in her pessimistic condition, reads the omens of ill fortune and separation in
whatever object comes in her meditation and introspection. She was exasperated by doves, in a
mood for mating, until she was distracted; "I counted them as omens of ill fortune, of separation,
for their coo was a tedious repetition of the fatal words, 'Go away till day they repeated their
warning, and I longed to drive them away, yet dared not disturbed them."(CTP p. 33).She found
the atmosphere charged with restlessness, as her hair, suddenly grown drier and finer - charged
with electricity end crackled sharply when she brushed it. "Something similar heaved inside me -
a longing, a dread, a search for solution, despair, and my head throbbed and spun as I lay flat on
my back through the long afternoons, under the fan that turned restlessly, and sent a small
quivering breeze over my body, blowing my hair across my lamp face, then blowing it away
again."(CTP p. 35)
Maya and Gautam had innumerable subjects to speak on, and they spoke incessantly.
Gautams mother, father, and brothers too had nothing to console Maya; they, on the contrary,
were indifferent to her life. Naturally, Maya had to fall back on what her father had told her
once; "The source of disintegration is the human beings vanity in his power to act. The world is
full of destruction that is born of Western theory of life, not an Asian one. We have been taught
for generations to believe that the merit of accepting ones limitations and acting within them is
greater than that of destroying them and trying to act beyond them. One must... accept."(CTP p.
35).The question before Maya is if she should accept her predicament of revolt against it. Then
Maya turned down a line of friends - she shifted them through her mind and came to, "the pink,
plump, pretty who did not speak of fate, who had never been ill, or overworked, or bitter,"(CTP
p. 54-55). Therefore, "I ceased to hunt then, ceased to plan, and merely laid my face into those
cool cloths, odorous with camphor and lavender that recalled mountain waters to me ferns, and
nights full of stars, for I found myself alone with them after, all. There was not one of my friends
who could act as an anchor any more, and to whomsoever I turned for assurance, betrayed me
now."(CTP p. 60).She felt that God, Gautam, and her father could not afford her any kind of
solace -"surely it is nothing but a hallucination."(CTP p. 64)
Gautams wretchedness and boredom made it clear that "no man wants to react to the
sight of pregnancy by bursting into tears, Maya, no court of law would consider him sane or
sober."(CTP p. 64). Maya, nevertheless, went on arguing on the wrong lines; and this chain of
wrong arguments made Gautama Flays to be sane and reasonable. "You are a grown woman
now, Maya, no light-headed child. You must not allow growing upset about these things. What if
they do live in a grubby house? What if she is pregnant again? What if they were so dull? Why
should you allow it to affect you in this manner? Tell me, is any part of your life as drab or as
depressing as theirs? You must not allow yourself to grow so painfully involved."(CTP p. 65).
Fortunately, shetoo feelsthat she has grown too involved in things that have no relationship with
her life: "He was so perfectly right. Here lay the catalysis of my unrest. I had grown too
involved."(CTP p. 67)
Maya wanted Gautamto share her happiness. She looked down at him with tenderness: "I
melted with tenderness, my arms curled into an instinctive cradle, a possessive embrace, as I
want over thoughts of him leaving his clothes on the floor because he never had a thought to
spare for such matters, nor time and of horn on tender-books for a cup of tea, yet helpless
because he could not make it himself nor had to found anyone to make it for him."(CTP p. 67).
Maya has solid arguments in support of her belief, "if mothers enjoy watching the clumsy
drooling of their babes while they eat, or of their faltering attempts at walking, then I enjoyed,
similarly, his (Gautams) helplessness in matters practical, his vulnerability when it came to
ideas, his speechless need of me - and all this set off by an aloofness, a vast and serious
knowledge based on self-sacrificing years of study and hard work, his refusal to concede, to
compromise; all this I admired, perhaps envied."(CTP pp. 92-93)
When she went to rouse Gautam from the couch, with a touch, she saw that he had closed
his eyes not with mere tiredness, but in profound, invulnerable sleep, and was very far from any
world of hers, however enticing. "I hesitated, wishing to summon him to me, yet knowing he
could never join me. It was of no use. After all I sighed - and, once more, was sad."(CTP p. 93).
Maya heard peacocks calling in the wilds, and the idea of their love-life flashed before her
mind's eye: "Before they mate, they fight... Living, they are aware of death. Dying, they are in
love with life."(CTP p. 93)
Maya was too ugly to fascinate Gautam. "He might be charmed by it, momentarily,
diverted by it, for a while, but to capture him entirely, if a fleshly face could do it, it would have
to be a finer one, the elongated, etiolated one of an intellectual, refined by thought and reflection,
bereft of the weakness of impulse, aloof from coarseness and freshness."(CTP p. 102). However,
in intervals of rebellion, and she felt that she was heading towards insanity: "I am moving further
and further from all wisdom, all calm, and I shall soon be mad, if I am not that already. Perhaps
it is my madness that leads me to imagine that horoscope that encounter with the albino, his
predictions, my fate? Perhaps it is only a phenomenon of insanity?"(CTP p. 104).What calmed
Maya was cool and steadfast wisdom; "He whose mind is not agitated . . . who has no longing
for pleasure, free from attachment, fear, and anger, he indeed is said to be of steady
wisdom.(CTP p. 105)
With a remarkable psychological accuracy, Anita Desai demonstrates to us how Maya
lunches to a. macabre imagination for her ideal aspiration ofa conjugal bliss are met with a
terrible reality. On Maya, Anita Desai portrays an unfortunate woman who lives on a borrowed
optimism before marriage.

So Maya hurls down her husband into death in a blinding moment of unbeatable agony.
She has proved the albino astrologer right. And has become the instrument of her own crazy
destiny! Three days later, in a of insanity, Maya jumps off the balcony other ancestral house in
and meets with an instantaneous death.

Thus, there are ups and downs in the story as there are ups and downs in Mays mental
makeup. The way in which Anita Desai has depicted the story gives more psychological touch to
it. This novel probes the psychic dimensions of its protagonist, Maya. Mayas moods,
observations, dilemmas and abnormality are conveyed very effectively in it. Thus. Cry, The
Peacock, is n pioneering effort towards delineating the psychological problems of Maya. By
this exploration of Maya's mind through images. Conscious, unconscious, the author Anita Desai
has primly established the psychological novel in the annals of Indo-English ction"




SITA IN WHERE SHALL WE GO THIS SUMMER?

Anita Desais Where Shall We Go This Summer! (I975) dwells on the theme of
incertitude. Alienation and non-communication in married life. It is the alienation of a woman. a
wife and a mother. an alienation conditioned by society and family. The childless Maya's angst
in Cry, the Peacock is existential and psychic. Hut sita's anguish in this novel is domestic and
mundane.
Anita Desais Where Shall Go This Summer? too depicts before us a pate of
disappointment and disaster, but this time the pattern is reversed. In this novel we see Sita. the
Protagonist, returning almost from the brink of disaster to accept what to her has been the defeat
of her life. Lilac Maya. Sita too is an emotional woman who fails to relate to her husband.

Anita Desai is particularly remarkable for its intensity and depth. Sita, the protagonist
here. Suffers since she too, like many other women of Anita Desai, fails to communicate with
her husband. In many ways Satan is at reminder of Maya. She too, like Maya, suffers from an
existential neurosis. like Maya again, Sita too is obsessed with a bizarre thought about the
impending disaster. Highly sentimental and totally alienated from her husband. Sita too, quite
like Maya, suffers the pangs of an incoherent and fragmented matrimonial relation. But it is here
that the sita hilarities between these two women come to end and what looks more important to
the reader is their being dill rent Individuals.
Ill Maya is pewee and withdraws from action Tuttle she pushes Gautama in it outburst, Sita
believes in action right from the beginning.

ln fact the novel begins with her deciding, rather obstinately. to stage the most
unthinkable adventure of a womannot delivering the baby that she carries in her womb-at
Manori a utopian land where her late father once produced several minor miracles in his life.
Obviously expecting to do the unbelievable, Sita is quick to run herself into trouble and refuses
to wait for the tragedy to mike her. Again unlike the childless Maya, she happens to be the
mother of four children and carries the fifth one in the novel. Thus she seems to suffer from a
surfeit of something which Maya desires so Moreover. Maya fails to harry the disaster though
she triad hard to avoid it Where as Sita successfully negotiates a disaster by taking it by horns.

Indian women are imposed to all kinds of adversities, including, societal, religious,
sexual by the dominant male power of the society, so that, they can never use their reason and
always walk behind and remain the shadow of their male counterparts. Womens writings in
India, though not older than three or four decades, have explored all these adversities to which
the female minds are subjugated. Emphasizing the need of individuality in a hostile society,
womens writings have opened a new concept of Indian womanhood. It portrays the
metamorphosis of the traditional Indian subjugated female self into the struggle of maintaining
their self identity, and thus, highlights the changing concept of womens subjectivity.

Anita Desai is one such Indian writer whose work revolves around a female protagonist
reflecting her inner conflict and her predicament of maintaining self identity as an individual
woman as well as emphasizes the role played by nature and ecology in making her protagonists
quest for individuality successful. Self can be defined by the way of thinking, mode of
behavior, the ideology which an individual possesses and which differentiate him/her from the
other human beings and thus, become his/her identity. Ecology is the way in which each thing
in the world is related to other and thus, affects each other by their actions. The Oxford
dictionary defines Ecology as: The relation of plants and living creature to each other and to their
environment (P. 485)
In search of the miracles that her father has worked in Manori, Sita packs up her belongings in
order to retire to the island with two of her children, Menaka and Karan. For Sita, Manori Island
is symbolic of Elysium, but for her children it is just a place which has no light but only
darkness, which can provide only depression and gloominess but not enjoyment and this hurts
Sita. Though the ideal place of Sita, Manori, lacks in the privileges, that comfort the body
in city but it has ample of those things that soothe the soul.
Overwhelmed by reconnecting herself with nature after a long separation, Sita tries to
bring her children Menaka and Karan as closer to nature as she and her brother, Jeevan were in
their childhood but that never happens. Soon Sita realizes that the magic for which her father
was venerated by the islanders does not exist anymore. The cloud of mystery that hovers around
the Manori Island and Sitas father, never discloses itself. Her father always wanted to keep the
island aloof from technology and machines:
No, I will have no machines here. I can prove that machinery is not essential to
civilization, even that it is inimical (P.62)
Maya know that the disaster is one day going to swallow either Gautama or herself. but
rather than doing anything to avert it, she becomes an instrument in its execution. Thus Maya
waits for the things to happen. She even allows disaster In overwhelm her. But Sita refuses to
bow before a decided pattcm of life. She surprises one and all as in the normal course, it is
absurd for woman to believe that she can retain her child in her womb and not let it die or be
home. Of course, it illustrates not only Sitas obsessed vision and her unsettled psyche, but a
conceited revenge as well that she decides to take on her husband and his society. Further, it also
"The Reverse Patients of journey in Anita Desais demonstrates her will to ght out the
established patterns of human life.

Unlike many other women, Sita is endowed with a peculiar vision and sets henelfon a
search for self . She always questions the unlit unquestioned one. Her cynical but realistic
Observation cannot be missed out as she summaries the littleness of human existence saying:
They are nothing-nothing but appetite and sex only food. sex and money matter. In Sita, the
novelist exhibits the frustration of a woman who is sick it having to repeat the process of
delivering 1 baby in routine, uncomplaining manner. Angered at the callous immunity of her
husband, she decides lo slap on him her subtle, convoluted revenge which is neither to abort nor
to deliver the baby she carries.
Thus unlike Mays, she imposes her wishes on others rather than letting others impose their
wishes on her. Her revenge thus, though fantastic and psychic, looks convincing enough.

Anita Desai is one of the most popular novelists of India and she can be rightly compared
with Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Margaret Lawrence, Margaret Atwood and Flora Nwapa. In
the most of her novels, Desai explores the sensibility, the inner workings of the mind of her
characters. The conspicuous influence of Virginia Woolf remains deeply embedded in her
novels. These provide a kind of microcosm of life, a sort of 'phyche Theatre' where her heroine
can see her infinite variety. Even a gentle drilling into the mystical crusts of the phyche of her
heroines reflects the oceanic vacuity, a never ending all pervasive loneliness and an abysmal
despair from which they suffer. Like all her earlier novels this particular novel also illustrates the
tenseness's between family members and the loneliness, isolation and alienation of the middle
class woman, Sita, the female protagonist of the story, due to which there comes marital
disharmony in her life. Sita is highly emotional, sensitive and intellectual and freedom loving,
finds it very difficult to live in patriarchal culture as well as in this practical civilized world. Sita
felt alienated and suffocated due to the "vegetarian complacence, the stolidity", 'insularity' and
unimaginative way of life of her husband, children and other people around her. As a result of
her experiences, her life becomes boring and monotonous. She could not inwardly accept that
this was all called as life, which life would continue thus, inside this small, enclosed arena, with
these few characters churning around and then past her leaving her always in this gray, dull-lit,
empty shell.
After her marriage Sita feels alienated and unbearable to live with her husband in, 'their
age rotted flat's, unbearable in that it is marked by 'sub-human placidity, calmness and
sluggishness' and feels that 'their sub humanity might swamp her'. To remove her loneliness,
alienation and to preserve her individuality, she behaves in a way, which appears to be
outrageous to the other members of the family by smoking openly and talking 'in sudden rushes
of emotion, as though flinging darts at their smooth, unscarred faces'.
Anita Desai symbolically shows the conflict in Sita's life through the image of a crowd of
crows attacking an eagle, 'wounded or else too young to fly'. This trivial incident serves as an apt
objective correlative to Sita's alienation from life as well as it explains her oversensitive nature
and her disliking of violence in any form. Then Sita, Raman and children moved to a small flat
but she doesn't find life any better as she has to endure visits by people whose "insularity and
complacence as well as the aggression and violence of others" act as "affronts upon her tiring
nerves". Further Sita becomes increasingly alienated from the world as she is paid little attention
by her husband of his being absorbed in the management of his business and her children
because of their growing independent with the result that she is faced with intolerable boredom
that can prove destructive. And the martial disharmony in her life is thus increased.
Accompanied by two her children, Sita escapes to Manori, the island of miracles, in desperation
and disillusionment. Unable to bear the anguish of another pregnancy, she comes here in order
not to give birth. The island house, deserted for twenty years, symbolizes her temperamental
condition. As the island concretizes the feeling of isolation for Sita, she retreats into it as into a
womb, with an obsessive desire to recapture once again her childhood innocence and purity.
Obviously, her own frustration with her life in Bombay drives her in desire to provide her unborn
infant with a world that is incorrupt. Sita is obsessed with her loveless marriage with Raman.
Here marital relations as well as abnormal man-woman relationship have been portrayed with a
remarkable poignancy.
Sita is married woman and has four children, but in the very picture of misery and
dejection. She feels herself to be a prisoner in a house which offers her nothing but a crust of dull
tedium, of hopeless disappointment. Her unhappiness in married life finds expression in feelings
of contempt for the friends and colleagues of her husband. After unpacking her things and lying
down with her children, Sita ruminates recalling her unhappy married life and her childhood
spent on the island with her father who had become a legend in his lifetime having brought water
from the well to the inhabitants of the island and taught them more profitable ways of framing.
Her frequent return to her childhood days implies her refusal to grow up and accept the
responsibilities of adult life and her inability to comprehend the past conspires against her
marital harmony. Her alienation from all experience is due to her love for life and her reluctance
to accept violence in any form. This trip for her is a trip of self identity and recognition of reality.
Her memories of past and uncertainty of future have created a sense of dismay and disgust in her
heart.
Sita's attempt to overcome her existential despair stemming from her alienation from her
husband and her children, who long for the comforts and excitement of city life, proves abortive.
Menaka writes to her father asking him to take them back as she has to apply for admission t the
Medical College. Seeing how excited her children at the time of her husband's arrival Sita feels
that they were being disloyal to her, disloyal to the island and its wild nature. Raman's arrival
and the conversation that she has with him have the effect of confronting her with the stark
actualities of life, which cannot be wished away. When Raman comes she wants to lay down her
head and weep, but she is told that he has come not for her but for children.
The relations with the in-laws is another yardstick that determines the difference between
Mays and Sita. While Nosy craves for the company of her mother and sister-in-law. Sita. It
Seems, does not get along well with them. She soon and the atmosphere at home too stifling
and her husband buy: another flat for them to live separately. But it fails to give her pence as
she continues to realize the futility of her life and feels bored with it. Fed up with the repetitive
pattern of life she is pled to see what s farce was, all human relationship were. The chasm
between her husband Roman and Sita widens as he fails to comprehend the meaning of her
boredom and exclaims "Bored... Why? How? With What? it is the moment when Sita realizes
that they both belong to deferent worlds. The novelist clinically portrays her alienation in the
following words.
Then it was her turn to be pulled, so pained-the could not believe that he had really
believed that all was well not known that she was bored, dull, unhappy. Frantic.
She could hardly believe that although they live so close together, he did not even low
this basic fact of her existence.

Already dissatisfy led, and bow totally disillusioned, Sita decides to subtly avenge the
futility of human relations. She decides neither to abort not to deliver the baby she is expecting.
When she tells Raman ...l don't want to have a baby, he is stunned and thinks that Sita has
suggested an abortion as he asks in a surprised tone What do you mean-abortion ? But he goes
nonplussed as Sita brushes the idea all I want! I want to keep it, don't you understand?" Raman
can just express his exasperation : What's up? What is up! At this bizarre proposition from his
wife. Ramon is formed to conclude in a bitter Youve gone mad. But Sita retorts: l
thinly...what lama doing is trying to escape from the Madness here, escape to a place where it
might be possible to be sane again"(35). Sita has set her eyes on Manoli village where once her
charismatic father produced mintzles like removing women's sterility and curing people of their
deadly ailments. Sita believes that Manoli. once being the land of her fathers miracles, would
not disappoint her as well. With its touch Mannli would help her produce a miracle herself-her
not delivering the conceived and developing baby inside her. She seems almost obsessed with
the idea of doing the un think able- by neither terminating her pregnancy, nor letting her produce
a baby. But just by retaining it inside her.
Driven by such rt. bizarre passion Sita taltes her two children Menalra and Kant: with her
and sets out for Mnnoli village. Roman can spot this cause and tries to mock away her bravado
So, you're running away-like the bored runaway wife in-in n lm. But Sita her with a glare? It
can happen in real life, Raman, and declares stoutly: I will go. leaving tomorrow.
The protagonist of Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Sita, has all the material comforts which
may establish her as a happily married woman in her society and her escape to Manori island,
abandoning all those comforts might be labeled by other persons as madness or insanity. She is
blessed with city life boredom and monotony but the quality she does not possess is the
carelessness and indifferent attitude towards nature and the other creatures of the ecological
system. But this devastating gift is present there in abundance in the lives of most of the urban
characters of the novel, as in her daughter Menaka, who crumbles a sheaf of new buds
unconsciously, who destroys her beautiful drawings as they seem low graded to her, also, in her
son Karan who crashes the toy building just for the sake of enjoyment. Sita becomes heart
broken by the daily chores of kids fight and their pleasure in fighting, the maid servants duel,
neighbours meaningless gossip, the hurried city life and above all the thing that turns her
desperate to escape from such insensitive society is Ramans silent toleration of all these. Sita,
the mother of four children, is again in an advanced state of pregnancy and is greatly affected by
all these chaos. Being appalled by all these things she becomes unwilling to give birth to her fifth
child in such an insipid world. She wants to keep it in a protected place and that is, her womb.
What differentiates her from the other so called practical and sane characters of the novel is her
sensitivity, her concern for nature as well as for the basic human feelings and emotions. This
concern creates a tumult in her mind regarding her existence in such a chaotic world to which
she belongs, leading her journey towards the protective shield of ecology and nature, which is
Manori island, and thus processing her towards the ultimate realization of her inner mind as well
as providing enough reason for Raman to appreciate her existence, to applaud her wholeness.

Desai dramatizes the convict between two irreconcilable Temperaments and two
dirrnetrictlly opposed attitudes to Life. Sita. The protagonist is a nervous. Sensitive. Middle-aged
Woman who finds herself isolated from her husband and Children because of her emotional
reactions to many things That happens to her. She is an introverted character, whose Suffering
prings from her constitutional inability to accept the authority of the society. Hence her
alienation ls natural and dispositional. Utile to put up with her in-laws. she withrlraws herself
from the milieu into her own protective shell. She withdraws herself from her husband which is
suggested through the crows preying on the eagle. Thus her alienation is biological and physical.
Roman. Sita's husband. like Gutama in Cry. the Peacock. Fails to understand her violence and
passion. Raman is sane. Rational and passive. Sita is irrational and. Through Sita. Anita Desai
voices the awe of facing all alone the ferocious assaults of existence". The illicit between two
polarized temperaments and two discordant view- points represented by Sita and Raman. Sets up
marital discord and cortiugul misunderstanding as the of Desai's novels. 'The interrogative and
inquisitive title of the novel is a pointer to the ennui of Site's anguished soul. leer introversion.
When Raman asks her about abortion she shouts mad! Youre quite mad. Kill the baby?
It s all I want. I want to keep it, dont you understand.(35) Raman is totally confused with her
words and says, You just said you dont want it. Now you say you do want it. Whats up?
Whats up?(35) Raman is an ordinary husband who like any other man has great care for his
family. He is indeed an affectionate husband who cares for his wife and this is evident in his
reluctance to send Sita to Manori. When she wants to escape to Manori, Raman with all care for
his wife and baby says, you must stay where there is a doctor, a Hospital, and a telephone. You
cant go The island in the middle of the monsoon. You cant have a baby there. (33)
As women and nature shares the same sensitivity, the insensitivity of her children, their
divorce from nature and natural human qualities affect Sita much more than her husband,
Raman. For practical Raman the reason behind Sitas desperate willingness to keep the baby
unborn is a puzzle. The idea of escaping was smoldering in Sitas mind for a long time. As Desai
states about her mental condition.
Strange, she thought- the man so passive, so grey, how could the very mention of him
arouse such a tumult of life and welcome. She felt it herself unwillingly, unexpectedly- but she
felt it. (P.118)
She has no longer the nerve or the optimism to continue. No, she refused to walk another
step. She would turn, go back and find the island once more. (P.39)
Like Maya's in Cry, the Peacock. leads to her psychic odyssey. Fed up with the dreary
metropolitan life in Bombay and tormented by the paranoid fear of her sloth and reluctant
pregnancy. she leaves for Manori island off the Marne mainland. Sita's father-exertion hinders
her contact with her husband. Here are once again Desai returns to the elusive. She demonstrates
Sita's temperamental disability with Raman through the scene where they talk about the stranger
encountered en route from Atlanta and Eldora: "lie seemed to be brave." she observed when
Raman asked her why she had once more brought up the subject of the hitch-hiking foreigner
months later.
Sitas character can be evaluated in the light of her childhood experiences. She is a
motherless child and she experienced partiality, neglect, indifference right from the beginning of
her childhood. Sitas father has no time for his children and especially Sita did not get even a
drop of his love and care. It was Rekha, Sitas sister who was close to his heart. She always has a
doubt about Rekha and her relationship with her, for there is no resemblance between the two
sisters. When she learns that Rekha is not her sister, from Jivan she is upset that his words had
dropped on her skin like acid(79) Sita always feels discarded and unwanted. Due to her
fathers partiality she is deprived of Rekhas company also. Her much suppressed emotions in
her childhood is responsible for her perturbed mental state in future. The indifference of her
father, alienation from sister, lack of love and care from her mother has made many
psychological changes in her. Soon after their fathers death the family disintegrates. Rekha,
leaves,
without even shedding a drop of tear, Jivan vanishes without any sign and only Sita remains to
marry Raman. Family plays a vital role in the growth and development of individual and broken
homes definitely has its worse effect on an individual. Sita is one such victim who because of her
bitter experiences in her childhood alienates herself from everything around her.
In the mechanical and puppet like life of modern civilization Sita is a rebel. If we edit ate
over her smoking episode (P.43), we confront with not at all her desperate addiction to smoking
but more with her inner desire to make the other female members of her family realize their own
predicament as individual human beings, about their self identities which they have lost in the
smoky, mechanical lives of their household works. As the author describes:
Raman seems to have a very practical view of life and nothing disturbs him in anyway.
His nature is exactly opposite to that of Sitas who takes anything and everything seriously. She
feels that the outside world is filled with cruelty and destructions .For her ,the city is nothing but
a place of madness where children enact scenes from movies, fight with each other , even the
grown up quarrel in the road side dumps. She is shocked at the behavior of ayahs, who in an
uncivilized manner indulge in cheap quarrels in the streets. She is shocked when she sees the
destructive element in her childrens behavior. She watches Menaka, her daughter crumble a
sheet of new buds and unable to bear the sight of such destruction shouts at her. She is upset
when Menaka destroys her paintings which she has drawn with great care and were really good
too.
When they lived, in the first years of their married lives, with his family in their age-toted
flat of Queens Road, she had vibrated and throbbed in revolt against their subhuman placidity,
calmness, and sluggishness.(P.43)
Part two of the novel describes her life before marriage in the island. She spent her
childhood with her father in a big house in Manori. As her father was a freedom fighter, he did
not remain in one place and at last when freedom was achieved, they settled down in Manori.
Everybody in the island had great respects for him. He set an ashram in his house and many
followed his ideals and principles. He was considered to be a legend in Manori with his new
ideas and magic cures. The people of Manori had immense faith on Sitas father and approached
him for all their problems. As Sitas mother had deserted them, it is her father took care of Sita,
her sister Rekha and brother Jeevan. The children lived in the midst of the crowd, as their house
would be always crowded by men and women who come to their father for medicines.
Brave? Him?" Raman was honestly amused. ". He did not even know which side of the
road to wait on."
Sita is a mythical name which bears with it the qualities like, loyalty, sacrifice,
compromise, love, patience and these qualities define Indian womanhood as well. Attribution of
all these conventional qualities to the mythical character of Sita, Lord Ramas wife in the great
epic Ramayana, is the example of male hegemony and exploitation. The mythical Sita along with
all those above mentioned qualities also possesses the potential to rebel, to protest the injustice
implemented by the male dominated society. Being again and again questioned about her
chastity, the mythical Sita asks mother Earth to get divide and she takes permanent refuge in her
lap. In this way she asserts her identity, her self-respect in a society which hardly considers
women as individuals. Nature and ecology has always helped women in achieving their self
quest and in voicing their protest. Complimenting the mythical Sita, Anita Desais Sita reasserts
her individuality and reestablishes womans age old connection with nature by abandoning
Bombay and taking shelter to Manori island.
Unlike the other works of Desai. here is a novel where the quest for Sita manages the
disaster by running into it deliberately. Maya, on the other hand, reel: under it and [ails to do
anything until it envelops her. Consequently then, she is overwhelmed by the tugged in the end.
For Sita the tasting of tinged beforehand, world is satietyvalve which releases her tensions,
relieves her of her darker, tragic, suicidal mood as she returns to embrace her disillusioned sell.
Broadly speaking. Desais themes, characterization and images deal with confinement
and lack of freedom. in addition to Existentialistic reality of life she evokes the sentiment and
Sensibility of worsen for their role and respect in society. The All sorts of the feminist critics
resulted in a massive recovery of Almost forgotten women writers and also re-reading of
literature By women with a view to understand the evolution of the female Aesthetic.





NANDA KAUL AND OTHERS IN
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

Anita Desai Starting from her first novel Cry the Peacock to the latest Baumgartners
Bombay, all her novels highlight the existentialists predilection for portraying the predicament
of man. Many critics have traced shades of existentialist thought in the novel of Anita Desai.
Time and again her themes and characters have been interpreted in the light of existential
philosophy. In this regard it has been pointed out:
Anita Desais characters are self-conscious of the reality around them and they carry a
sense of loneliness, alienation and pessimism. She adds a new dimension turning inward into the
realities of life and plunges into the deep-depths of the human psyche to score out its mysteries
and chaos in the minds of characters.
Fire on the Mountain deals with the life- long frustration caused by an unhappy marriage.
Nanda Kaul is an elderly lady-a great grandmother, but she has not overcome the shocks caused
to her by her husband who was a Vice-Chancellor. When the novel opens we nd that she is
thoroughly disillusioned with all her emotional bonds whether matrimonial or lial. She decided
that she had at lat earned the right to reject everyone and head her life alone. She had decided to
live in the solitude of Carignano, but even there she recalls how they had been ignored by her
husband. Inspire of having a Large number of children and grand children, she suffers from a
terrible sense of loneliness. The reason for the sense of neglect that she suffered from was her
husband carried on an affair with Miss Davida teacher of Mathematics. As a result of this
neglect Nanda Kaul had always looked up on herself as an alienated being. Nanda Kaul feels
relieved after her husbands death because she is free to live life according to her wishes and
desires. So deep is the scar left on Nanda Kaul by her husband's neglect of her and hi: affair with
Miss David that even on her death bed she is reminded of how bet husband
had only done enough to keep her quite while he carried on a life-long affair with Miss David,
whom he had loved all his life. She does not forget till the last moment of her life that her
children were all alien to her and naturally the neither understood nor loved them. lt is her
cramping sense of loneliness even in the midst of a large family that compels her to retire to
Carignnno.

Particularly Fire on the Mountain has been identified as the lyrical fictionalization of the
quintessence of existentialism (Gupta 185). A close study of the texture and theme of the novel
in relation to the tenets of existentialism justifies the above observation. It has been noted that
Fire on the Mountain displays skillful dramatisation of experiences of certain women embroiled
by the cross way of life (Choudhury 77). This novel deals with the existential angst experienced
by the female protagonist Nanda Kaul, an old lady living in isolation. It also projects the inner
turmoil of a small girl, Raka, who is haunted by a sense of futility. Thirdly, it presents the plight
of a helpless woman, Ila Das who is in conflict with forces that are too powerful to be
encountered, resulting in her tragic death. Thus, the existential themes of solitude, alienation, the
futility of human existence and struggle for survival form the major themes of the novel.


Fire on the Mountain falls into three sections, each further divided into several short
chapters of unequal length. The first section titled Nand Kaul at Carignano runs into ten
chapters. This section deals with Nanda Kaul, the main protagonists lonely life in Kasauli.
Raka comes to Carignano forms the second section and it contains twenty one chapters. It
portrays Nanda Kauls change of attitude towards Raka, her great granddaughter. The final
section Ila Das leaves Carignano is divided into thirteen chapters. This section presents the
tragic end of Ila Da, Nanda Kauls childhood friend. In all, the book runs to 145 pages. The
structural unity, as suggested by the section captions is offered by Carignano, Nanda Kaul and
Raka, running counter to one another complemented by that of Ila Das also provide unity of
structure. Like the other works of Anita Desai, the present novel contains neither any story value
nor events that are interesting by themselves. The entire novel revolves round the existential
angst experienced by the women protagonists.
Fire on the Mountain is relatively brief and uncomplicated, the significant action
occurring within the psyches of Nanda and, to a lesser extent, Raka, her great-granddaughter.
When Ila Das is raped and killed, that violent action happens offstage at the end of the novel,
almost simultaneously with Rakas announcement that she has set the forest on fire. While there
are few important events in the rest of the novel, Anita Desai prepares the reader for the
horrific ending by carefully embedding violence in her imagery and in her symbolism. In effect,
the fire metaphorically smolders within her characters before it literally ignites at the end of
the novel.
Emotional deprivation is at the root ct Nanda Kaul's disillusionment with human bonds.
Her husband did not love her as-a wife. He treated her as some decorative yet useful mechanical
appliance needed fur the efficient running of his household She played the gracious hostess all
the time and enjoyed the comforts and social status of the wife of a dignitary. But she felt lonely
and neglected. Her husband carried on lifelong affair with Miss David, the Mathematics mistress.
This had been a source of agony throughout her lifeShe now believes every attachment to be the
preface of a new betrayal and all socialization as fake. It creates in Nanda Kaul such a sickness at
soul. that she distrusts all attachment and affairs.

Ila Das, Nanda Kauls childhood friend visits Carignano to meet Raka. A one time lecture
in the Punjab University, Ila Das had lost her job subsequent to Mr.Kauls retirement. She has
come to Kasauli now in her new capacity as an officer in the social welfare department. She
fights against child marriage by enlightening the local people about the evils of this practice.
This invites the wrath of many of the villagers of whom Preet Singh is one. His attempts to barter
his little daughter for a tiny piece of land and a few goats have been successfully thwarted by Ila
Das. He is lying in wait to settle his score with her. One evening, when Ila Das returns late from
Carignano to her humble house in the valleys, he waylays her, rapes and murders her. When the
news of Ila Dass death is conveyed to Nand Kaul over the phone, she is rudely shocked and falls
dead. Raka unaware of her great grandmothers death, rushes into the house proclaiming wildly
that she has set the forest of fire.
Nanda Kaul, Raka and to some extent Ila Das, are embodiments of the existential
predicament experienced by the individual in an un-understanding and even hostile universe. A
detailed examination of the characters of these protagonists brings to light how Anita Desai has
succeeded in giving expression to her existentialist world-view through these characters and by a
subtle use of imagery and symbols.
The interactionand lack of itbetween Nanda and Raka, who, despite the generational
gap, are quite similar in behavior. At first, Nanda considers Raka an intruder, an outsider, and
resists being drawn into the childs world. Nanda soon discovers, however, that she and her
great-granddaughter have much in common, primarily their aloofness and determination to
pursue their own secret lives. Raka is distant not only emotionally but also spatially, and her
Casual is not Nandas: Raka frequents, despite Ram Lals warning, the forbidden ravine behind
and below Carignano. In spite of their initial mutual rejection, Nanda comes to miss Raka during
the childs forays into the ravine; Nanda finds the childs long absences as perturbing as her
presence was irksome. Consequently, Nanda insists on accompanying Raka on some walks,
notably the one to a peak called Monkey Point, but Raka spurns Nandas overtures and prefers
her own secret world.
When her ploys prove unsuccessful, Nanda whets Rakas curiosity by telling the child
about her own childhood in Kashmir, where her idealized father had a zoo, including a pangolin,
a hard, scaly creature in its armour. (Nandas father, in direct contrast to Rakas brutish one,
obviously interests Raka, who resembles the pangolin, also the object of the fathers loving care.)
Nandas stories, however, succeed only temporarily, and she is reduced to thinking of giving
Carignano to Raka. Meanwhile, Raka continues her exploration of the ravine and also visits an
abandoned burned house near Carignano. When Raka leaves her ravine, which is associated with
nature and death, to visit the clubhouse, which is associated with civilization, she is, ironically,
threatened for the first time in Kasauli. At the club the masked revelers appear as caged,
clawed, tailed, headless male and female monsters who remind her of her father returning from
a party and beating her mother senseless. At this point, reality impinges upon her secret world
and transforms it into a nightmare.
The final part of the novel also concerns a visit: Ila Das arrives at Carignano after being
taunted and physically abused by a group of boys. Although she is aware of Ila Dass desperate
financial plight, Nanda adroitly steers the conversation away from any discussion of Ila Das
moving into Carignano. When the two old women persist in the game of old age, Raka slips
away and steals some matches. Finally, Ila Das leaves Carignano, and on her way home in the
dark is raped and killed by the father of a young girl whose marriage to an old landowner she had
opposed. When the police call Nanda with the news of the murder, Nanda realizes that it was all
a lie, that her stories about her father, her loving husband, and the circumstances leading to her
stay at Carignano were all fabrications. While she holds the phone, Raka announces, I have set
the forest on fire.

If Nanda Kaul was a recluse out of vengeance for a long life of duty and obligation, her
great grand daughter was a recluse by nature, by instinct. She had not arrived at this condition by
a long route of rejection and sacrifice [like Nanda Kaul], she was born to it, simply (FM 48).
Desais above observation about Rakas character at once brings out the similarity and difference
with that of Nanda Kauls in their mental makeup. Rakss character has been introduced by the
novelist as a foil to Nanda Kauls. If Nanda Kaul symbolises a particular aspect of existentialism,
which is examined elsewhere in this chapter, Raka epitomises another aspect of the existential
predicament: the influence of her parents on her life. Anita Desai makes Raka both young
temperamentally and solitude-loving. When Raka is first introduced, the reader is informed that
she is the granddaughter of Asha, the most problematic of Nanda Kauls daughters. That she is
an unwelcome intruder into Nanda Kauls life is suggested by an image. As Nanda Kaul first
looks at her great grand daughter who is walking towards her, she reminds the old lady of an
insect:
Raka slowed down, dragged her foot, then came towards her great grandmother with
something despairing in her attitude.. She turned a pair of extravagantly large and somewhat
bulging eyes about in a way that made the old lady feel more than ever her resemblance to an
insect. (FM 39).
However, the old lady is shocked to see the pale and gaunt little girl and is moved to pity.
But to Nanda Kaul she was still an intruder, an outsider, a mosquito flown up from the plains to
tease and worry (FM 40). Raka herself does not bother much about the blatant lack of warmth
(FM 40) exhibited by her great grandmother. She prefers to stay away from company. Like a
wild animal newly caged, she keeps prowling barefoot in her room, looking at the stone heaps.
She is not interested in flowers or playing as children of her age normally tend to do. By using
two reptile images successively in a span of two pages, and by a suggestive hint about Rakas
lack of interest in play and flowers, Desai impliedly establishes that there is something weird
about her. Soon through several interior monologues enacted in Rakas subconscious mind, the
reason for the abnormality in her is unfolded.
The daughter of an ill-matched couple, Raka has been witness to the brutality and futility
of human existence. She is haunted by the recollections of the nightmarish nights that have made
her almost a child-stoic. Somewhere behind them, behind it all was her father, home from a
party, stumbling and crashing through the curtains of the 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 her 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 mothers being squelching and quivering, so that she didnt 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.(FM 72)

Ila Das is the third female protagonist of the novel. Unlike Nanda Kaul and Raka who are central
to the story, her role is only marginal. Nonetheless, Anita Desai has projected yet another aspect
of the existentialist philosophy through her character. Her life suggests another dimension of
misery and meaningless existence (Jena 30). She is first introduced to the readers, when she
calls Nanda Kaul on the phone and informs her of her intended visit to Kasauli to meet Raka.
She speaks in a hideous voice (FM 21) and is rather plain in her looks. Through a long interior
monologue in Nanda Kauls mind, the readers are informed of her past. She was Nanda Kauls
childhood friend. She had also served in the university as a lecturer, thanks to Nanda Kauls
good offices. But soon after the death of Mr.Kaul she had been ousted and had struggled a lot
before finding the present employment as a social welfare officer. A poverty stricken loner of
aristocratic of child marriage, a practice rampant among the tribals. This lands her in an
unenviable situation. She finds herself fighting a lonely battle against a mindless multitude. But
she is not cowed down by adversity. She remains steadfast in her conviction and refuses to make
any compromises. Though she is aware of the dire consequences that she might be forced to
encounter, she remains faithful to her cause. She succeeds in stooping several such child-
marriage, the prominent one being the marriage of Preet Singhs seven year old daughter.
Sustaining herself on a meagre pay and putting up with the inevitable condition of loneliness, she
wages a valiant battle against the dictates of the society. Finally, she pays a dear price for her
convictions and refusal to compromise. She is raped and murdered by Preet Singh who has been
dying for revenge.
Though Ila Das plays a minor role in the novel, she is also an allegorical figure. She not
only lives in isolation but also braves the brute majority with conviction and commitment as her
tools. True, she meets with a tragic end but has made her existence significant in exhibiting
courage and determination in the face of stiff resistance and threat to life. Her real involvement
in peoples welfare assumes tremendous symbolic significance (Jena 30). She epitomises the
existentialist concept of struggle against the odds of life. For the existentialist, man is never just
part of the cosmos but always stands to it in a relationship of tension with possibilities of tragic
conflict She stands for the thinking individual who dares to exercise her free will and act
according to her choice rather than submit meekly to the odds of life. The mindless tribal society
in general, and Preet Singh in particular, represent the malevolent aspect to human existence-
forces that are bent upon thwarting the individuals purpose and undoing her. One of the many
ways of defining tragedy sees it as a clash between the aspiration of human freedom and
creativity with a cosmic order that is stronger and defeats man
Though Ila Das loses her chastity and life in the process of her struggle with such brute
forces, her life has nonetheless become meaningful by virtue of the fact that she chooses a cause,
fights for it and sacrifices herself in trying to accomplish her task.
In keeping with this concept, Anita Desai resorts to the effective employment of imagery
and symbolism in Fire on the Mountain. Her predilection for prey-predator imagery abounds in
this novel also. Images of ugliness, loneliness, destruction and annihilation are consistently used
in order to reflect the existential tone of the novel. An atmosphere of solitary introspection is
created with the help of several images. For example, when she receives a call from Ila Das,
Nanda Kual turned her head this way and that in an escape. She watched the white hen drag out
a worm inch by resisting inch from the ground till it snapped in two. She felt like the worm
herself, she winced at its mutilation (FM 21). The same is continued in the next page also: Still
starting at the hen which was greedily gulping down bits of worm, she thought of her husbands
face and the way he would plait his fingers across his stomach (FM 22). This prey-predator
image of hen pecking at a worm is suggestive of Nanda Kauls present inner turmoil. Her past
suffering at the hands of the adulterous husband and her present awareness about the harsh
realities of life are both successfully established by this image.
As is the case in Desais other novels, Fire on the Mountain is more memorable for its
characters than for its plot or action. In fact, plot is important only in terms of what it reveals
about the characters, Desais primary concern. Desai focuses not so much on physical
appearanceunless it reflects an inner reality or serves a symbolic purposeas on her
characters inner lives. Nanda, the protagonist, is a case in point, for Desai tells her readers little
about Nandas appearance but does tell the readers, through the use of a stream of consciousness
narrative technique, much about her thoughts, values, fears, suppressed hostility, and
unconscious need for love.
Carignano, Nandas retreat, suggests Nandas determination to withdraw from her
former active life, replete with its duties, obligations, and roles. Among the roles she rejects is
the role as sacrificing nurturer of others: The care of others . . . had been a religious calling she
had believed in till she found it fake. At the end of part 1, she pleads, Discharge me. Ive
discharged all my duties. In her desire to simplify her life, Nanda jettisons her past, strips it to
its necessities, and attempts to reject other people. Like Carignano, she is barren, and like the
garden, through age and withering away she has arrived at a state of elegant perfection. The
setting is both perfected and natural in that she has imposed her will on stubborn nature. Like
the apricot trees that flourish in stony soil, however, she cannot resist her natural impulse to
reach out to her great-granddaughter, Raka.
Although she resembles Nanda in her aloofness, Raka is not exactly like her great-
grandmother: While Nandas rejection of Raka is planned and wilful, Rakas rejection of
Nanda is natural, instinctive, and effortless, at least as Nanda sees it. Since Desai presents most
of the story through Nandas perspective, readers know more about Nanda than they do about
Raka, who remains, with the exception of the clubhouse revelations, an enigma throughout the
novel. As seen by Nanda, Raka is a part of nature, a child whose natural habitat is the ravine and
whose behavior is described in animal imagery. When she first meets Raka, Nanda compares her
to a dark cricket and a mosquito, comparisons that continue until Nanda discovers a rapport
between the two. In addition to the negative insect imagery, there are references to Raka as one
of the newly caged, which suggests that Nanda will not be able to domesticate her natural
great-granddaughter. Raka seeks her freedom, which is epitomized by the eagles with which she
identifies at Monkey Point. (Ironically, Nanda also identifies with eagles, but it is the low,
domestic call of the cuckoo that she hears just before Rakas visit.) Raka cannot really escape
from the civilized world, regardless of how much she attempts to repress her memories of her
parents behavior. Like Nanda, Raka fears human contact because it has brought her pain.
Like Raka, Ila Das tests Nandas commitment to physical and emotional isolation. A
pathetic creature whose most notable feature is her cackle, Ila Das appeals indirectly to
Nandas charity and compassion. Despite her desperate financial status and ridiculous
appearance, however, Ila Das has much in common with Nanda: Both are old, beaten, and
silent as they reenact the past. Ila Das, in fact, is superior to Nanda, in that she has not
withdrawn from life but has instead reached out to help the people she serves as a social worker.
The eagle symbol, like the house symbol, is repeatedly used in the course of the novel to
highlight another aspect of existential philosophy, namely quest. The sight of the eagle flying
high, makes Nanda long to be able to soar like the bird: An eagle swept over. its wings
outspread, gliding on currents of air without once moving its great muscular wings which
remained in repose, in control, She [Nanda Kaul] had wished, it occurred to her, to imitate the
eagle-gliding, with eyes closed (FM 19). This longing for soaring above the reach of
deterministic confines is the hall mark of Rakss characters. To emphasise this aspect, the
novelist employs the eagle symbol while describing Rakas walk to the Monkey Point. She was
higher than the eagles, higher than Kasauli and Sanwar and all the other hills(FM 61). Thus
Nanda Kauls wish and Rakas attempt merge in the eagle-symbol, which denoted their
existential angst and quest for values.
One of the themes of Fire on the Mountain is certainly withdrawal, with its associated
theme of loneliness, especially as embodied in Nanda and Raka. In Nandas case the withdrawal
results from a failed, if enduring, marriage, while in Rakas case the withdrawal is from domestic
violence; for both, a man causes the alienation. The violence of a predatory world cannot,
however, be escaped, as Ila Dass fate so forcefully indicates. Nor is the retreat without its
symbolic violence, which is played out in nature. As Nanda anticipates Rakas visit, she sees a
white hen drag out a worm until it snaps in two: She felt like the worm herself, she winced at its
mutilation. Nanda also sees herself as a predatory cat in pursuit of the lapwing, and later she
sees the hoopoe bird feeding its young with insects. While Desai tends to depict the ravine as a
symbol of nature and as a refuge for Raka, who cannot abide the civilization of Carignano and
the clubhouse, even the ravine is blighted by civilizations waste and polluted by the smoke
from the chimneys of the Pasteur Institute.
The Institute serves as an appropriate symbol for the contradictory nature of civilization
or progress, since it serves people through its production of serum, but at a cost: the smell of
dogs brains boiled in vats, of guinea pigs guts, of rabbits secreting fear in cages packed with
coiled snakes, watched by doctors in white. Desai does not, however, seem to be nostalgically
yearning for the past, even though colonialism offered a surface grandeur (the decline of Kasauli
seems attributable to the town going native). The colonial past is also marked by violence,
which the postman traces with black humor in his account of Carignanos various owners:
Colonel Macdougalls corrugated roof blows off, decapitating a coolie; the pastors wife
attempts to poison him and then to stab him; Miss Jane Shrewsbury pokes a fork into her cooks
neck, and he dies. In Desais fictional world, one simply cannot escape violence by retreating
from ones obligations to others. Nandas failure to connect with Ila Das and with Raka
indirectly causes the formers death, and Rakas refusal to connect with her great-grandmother
leads to her decision to destroy a world she can neither accept nor tolerate.

This poem has some connection with he character of Nanda Kaul who quotes it and the
poem signifies her desire to be away from the humdrum of life, to a heaven of nature far from the
madding crowd. By introducing this poignant stanza from Hopkins poem, Anita Desai
highlights the theme of alienation which is the central theme of the novel. The same effect is
achieved by introducing an allusion to a passage from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon which
begins with a title When a Woman lives Alone and through the image of a dilapidated house
with a poignantly desolate look (FM 27). This image has symbolic overtones as it suggests the
lonely and desolate life of Nanda Kaul herself. Again, when Nanda Kaul is in the company of
Raka, there is an allusion to The Travels of Macro Polo (FM 87). The reference to this book
reminds the Cape of Good Hope. This also adds to the symbolism of the novel. This is
miniature adventure like the one Marco Polo undertook in search of something new and
promising.
To sum up, Fire on the Mountain invites comparison with Shakespeares King
Lear. In this great tragedy, when he dramatises the agony of betrayed father, Shakespeare
removes Lear from the palace and places him in the wild heath- a hostile place- to
suggest that the plight of Lear is identical with the suffering of every wronged father.
Shakespeare employs animal imagery to indicate the rotten and corrupt world of the
dramatis personae of King Lear. Images of ugly and evil animals like jackals and wolves
are recurrently used creating an animal imagery that reinforces the thematic concern of
the play, namely the tragedy of human life, personified in the life of Lear, a victim of
indifference in old age. Anita Desais use of imagery of King Lear. By making use of the images
of insects and animals like mosquitoes, lizard and jackals, Desai hints at how her female
protagonists despise the absurdity of their existence. They either withdraw into a shell like
Nanda Kaul or like Raka, long for something new or is made miserable by the environment as in
the case of Ila Das. Similarly, by making Kasauli the location of her novel, Desai has endowed it
with a wider appeal where the boundaries of region, religion and time cease to exist. This novel
contains the core of the novelists existential world-view in that all the three characters are
nothing but the manifestations of her alter ego that gives expression to her outlook on life.









CONCLUSION
Desai probably derived this point of view from her German mother, whom she aptly
describes as carrying 'a European core in her which protested against certain Indian things, which
always maintained its independence and its separateness.' Her oeuvre has explored the lives of
outsiders within Indian society and, more recently, also within the West. Her fiction has covered
themes such as womens oppression and quest for a fulfilling identity, family relationship and
contrasts, the crumbling of traditions, and anti-Semitism. The Eurocentric and social biases that
are sometimes detected in her fiction, therefore, may be more productively read as the result of
the authors focus on uprooted and marginalized identities. Tellingly, the literary example which
Desai set off to emulate was that of another migrant to India of German origins: Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala. Though some critics detect a Western disdain for Indian social customs in her fiction,
ultimately Desais literary world is not sharply divided along Western and Eastern lines. On the
contrary, ever since her novel Baumgartners Bombay (1987), East and West have been treated
as mirror images of each other.
Desais novels and short-stories evoke characters, events and moods with recourse to a
rich use of visual imagery and details, which has led to comparisons with the modernist
sensibilities of T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. The origin of her stories, as
the writer explains, is itself rooted in images: 'there are so many images that remain in the mind
but they often are also forgotten, they pass through one's life and then they vanish. But there are
certain images, certain characters, certain words that you find you don't lose, you remember, they
stay with you and eventually these come together, you begin to see what the connection is
between them'. Thus, the immobility and frustration of the central female character in Clear
Light of Day (1980), Bim Das, an apparently independent woman who is hostage of her past
memories, are conveyed by zooming in on several details of the house where she lives,
signifying decay and dullness. Bims sister Tara, who is visiting her in the crumbling family
mansion in Delhi during the momentous days of Partition, observes that 'the dullness and the
boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red
rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the
yellowed photographs in the oval frames - everything, everything that she had so hated as a child
and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial
museum'.
The novels of Desai reveal her unique world view but at the same time they also reveal
the existing tendencies in modern fiction. Her novels are technical innovations and combine
features of both novel and lyrical poetry. They shift our attention from mere characters and
events to the formal or basic design of the novel. Anita Desai prefers the word pattern to plot
when she says: "I prefer the word 'pattern' to 'plot' as it sounds-more natural and even better, if I
dare use it, is Hopkins, word inscape while plot sounds arbitrary heavy handed and artificial, all
that I wish to avoid" (Rama, 1990). The city has been the focus of all modern literature and much
of the sensibility that has gone into the creation of great literary works. T.S. Eliot's Waste Land
and James Joyce's Ulysses have been shaped by an acute awareness of the decadence of human
values in the mechanical life of the modern metropolis.

The great Indian novelists such as R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Bhabani
Bhattacharya look at Indian life from the perspective of its traditions and valves that are rooted
essentially in villages and village folk. But Anita Desai, like her contemporaries Kamla
Markandaya, Arun Joshi, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala and NayantaraSahgal, look at life with its
essential rootlessness fostered by the growth of the metropolis. Desai's novels embody a realistic
view of the city but at the same time she presents it as a metaphor of existence. The city becomes
a symbol that reflects the existential dilemma of the tormented souls who are in constant quest of
selfhood. The characters constantly feel the pressure of the urban milieu which provides a sense
of vacuum and choose. At the same time this urban milieu intensifies the sense of despair and
alienation in the individual. The greatness of a novel as an artistic creation can be judged by
determining the extent to which its theme and the resultant structure are inevitable and
interdependent. Thus this principle of vital unity between form and content may be taken ask the
basis to measure the artistic worth of any work of art. The degree of their organic integration
determines the degree of its artistic success. The point is made clear by the writers of the book
Understanding Fiction in their observations, He (the novelist) knows that, when he sets out to
write a story, he is really engaged in a process of exploration and experiment: he is exploring the
nature of his characters and the meaning of their acts, and, too he is exploring his own feelings
about them. He knows that any shift in the organisation of his story, or any variation in style, will
alter, however slightly, the total response (Brooks & Warren, 1981).
The generational confrontation in Clear Light of Day is echoed in most of Desais other
works from the early Fire on the Mountain(1977), which considers the relationship between a
recluse grandmother and her granddaughter, to the later novels Journey to Ithaca (1995)
and Fasting, Feasting(1999). In the former, the spiritual pilgrimage to India of a young and
wealthy European couple, Matteo and Sophie, is a later version of that of their ageing guru, the
Mother, while the latter depicts the struggles of Uma, Aruna and Arun to strike a balance
between their parents expectations and their own personal realization. Typical of Desais other
fiction is also the use of the house as a place of confinement for women. Like Bim, Nanda Kaul
in Fire on the Mountain, Lotte in Baumgartners Bombay and Uma, her mother and Mrs Patton
in Fasting, Feasting rarely walk through the streets of their cities and towns. In her article 'A
Secret Connivance', Desai describes in similar terms the fate of Indian women who 'have had to
confine themselves to the domestic scene few women have had any experience of the world
outside their homes and families'.
As Desai herself admits, her novels are not populated by heroic characters, whether male
or female, at least in the traditional sense. Her protagonists are marked by certain passivity and
have been criticized as being swept away by historical and social forces rather than being able to
face and control them. Yet, Desai claims that 'my characters who appear like losers, victims
show a kind of heroism, of survival. I think if you can come through the experience of life with
the heart and mind intact, without compromising yourself, that to me is a heroic act that needs to
be celebrated.' In spite of the heroic nuances of these survivals, Desais characters often meet
tragic endings. Desai portrays a fictional world where, according to her own definition, 'History
is a kind of juggernaut' which completely drives over characters without mercy. Baumgartners
Bombay is a typical case in point. The protagonist, Hugo Baumgartner, is a Jew who fled from
Nazi Germany to India, only to find that he cannot be fully accepted by Indian society either: he
is first interned in a camp for Germans during the second world war, and then remains a firanghi,
a stranger, in post-independence India. In the end, his escape to India is pointless as he is killed
by a German drifter whom he is trying to set free from drug addiction. The novel is a powerful
literary embodiment of Desais claim that East and West are parallel, not contrasting, worlds: 'I
could have made a contrast of the way Europe treated Baumgartner and the way India treats him
but I always discover that there isn't a great contrast, there are always parallels: India too
excludes him because he is a foreigner, the way he was excluded in Europe.
Fasting, Feasting might have as its epigraph the authors assertion 'that different lives
are parallel lives', as constant correspondences are drawn between an Indian and an American
middle-class family. Umas traditional Indian parents, desperately trying to arrange a good
marriage for Uma with disastrous consequences, suffer from the same lack of communication
with their children as the Pattons, the American suburban family where Umas brother Arun is
staying while on vacation from his American University. Whether Desais characters live on the
banks of the Ganges or amidst the excesses of Massachusetts, they cannot find meaningful
personal relationships other than with their own solitude.
Women traditionally had been regarded as inferior to men physically and intellectually.
Both law and theology had ordered their subjection. Women could not possess property in their
own names, engage in business, or control the disposal of their children or even of their own
persons. Although Mary Astell and others had pleaded earlier for larger opportunities for
women, the first feminist document was Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of
Women (1792). In the French Revolution, women's republican clubs demanded that liberty,
equality, and fraternity be applied regardless of sex, but this movement was extinguished for the
time by the Code Napolon.
Little by little, women's demands for higher education, entrance into trades and
professions, married women's rights to property, and the right to vote were conceded. In the
United States after woman suffrage was won in 1920, women were divided on the question of
equal standing with men (advocated by the National Woman's party) versus some protective
legislation; various forms of protective legislation had been enacted in the 19th cent., e.g.,
limiting the number of hours women could work per week and excluding women from certain
high-risk occupations.
Anita Desai tries to show the anxiety of Sita who suffers because of her biased attitude
towards life. Sita is over-sensitive who finds herself confined in the urban life after leading a
carefree life in rural area under the protection of her father the artificialities , fast pace and
harshness of city life nauseate her to such an extent that she longs to go back to island where she
has cherished all the delicacies of rural life and where she thinks her roots are. After being taken
away from her father and her place , she feels the void and expects more love and care from her
husband Raman.
She feels insecure and finds everything wrong with Raman He had nothing more to give
her, or he was just unaware of her needs and demands. He raised his hand and stroked Karans
hair with a gentleness she herself ached to attract, and stared at him, bored into him with her
eyes, wanting and not being given what she wanted. (132)
Sita craves for love from Raman and wants him to pamper her like her father, whereas,
Raman who is pragmatic in his approach fails to understand her. Sita unable to understand this
continues accusing her husband and dislikes her kids for being like their father practical and
insensitive. She is a bit abnormal and introvert. She wants to escape from the brutal realities and
harsh facts of human life. She forgets that life is one part full of violence, suffering and pain.
Treasons, betrayals and treacheries are mixed up with pleasure, joy and happiness to colour it.
She is not satisfied with her present life that she decides to leave for Manori. Raman tries to
enlighten her mind about the contraries in life, saying other people put up with it its not so
so insufferable. (143) But she lacks courage, practical knowledge and wisdom which make
others believe that life must be continued, and all its businesswhy cant you? Perhaps one
should be grateful if life is only a matter of disappointment, not disaster.(143) Sita always
prefers to live alone with her husband away from his friends and relatives. She could never
tolerate Ramans friends visiting them for she feels appalled and frightened by the guests.
Their guests were his business associates who according to Raman are pleasant and tolerable.
He regards them with little humour and with restraint. But to Sita, they are nothing
nothing
but appetite and sex. Only food, sex and money matters. Animals (47). She uses harsh
words about her guests and calls them pariahs in the streets, hanging about drains and
dustbins waiting to pounce and kill and eat (47)
She never got used to anyone, not with his friends or with his relatives. When they lived
in the first years of their married lives with his family in Queens Road, she had great problem in
getting along with his relatives and even after moving to this new flat in the city, too she has not
changed itself.
She is a symbol of nature and cannot adjust with the mechanical world. She seems to be
an odd one where she is alienated from her family and society. She is upset by the sight of
crows feeding on a young eagle. Immediately she rushes for a toy gun of Karan and uses it on
the the poor eagle. Her childish behaviour that she has exhibited in this incident throws light on
her innocent nature. She failed in her attempts to save the eagle from the crows and later when
Raman came to know about this, he took it lightly. In the morning, there was nothing on the
ledge but some feathers and stains of blood. Raman said, Theyve made a good job of your
eagle. Look at the feathers sticking out of that crows beak.(41)
Raman seems to have a very practical view of life and nothing disturbs him in anyway.
His nature is exactly opposite to that of Sitas who takes anything and everything seriously. She
feels that the outside world is filled with cruelty and destructions .For her ,the city is nothing but
a place of madness where children
enact scenes from movies, fight with each other , even the grown up quarrel in the road
side dumps. She is shocked at the behavior of ayahs, who in an uncivilized manner indulge in
cheap quarrels in the streets. She is shocked when
she sees the destructive element in her childrens behaviour. She watches Menaka, her
daughter crumble a sheet of new buds and unable to bear the sight of such destruction shouts at
her. She is upset when Menaka destroys her paintings which she has drawn with great care and
were really good too.
Sita as s symbol of nature finds herself a stranger in that atmosphere. She feels disturbed
by this chaotic and violent society. She finds fault with everyone around her and even with her
own children and husband. She feels that the world around her is not moving according to her
whims and fancies and can no more offer security to her. As Jasbir Jain remarks, whole
aberrance of life in Bombay is triggered off by the violence around her.(79)
The husband wife alienation forms the basis of the novel as Raman and Sita differ a lot in
their temperaments. Sita always accuses Raman for his lack of understanding and Raman, could
never understand the emotional state of Sita and he considers her deeds as immature and foolish
ones. Sita appears to be a woman of contradictory thoughts. She is a woman of complex
character and even Raman her husband could not understand her. She does not want her child to
be born in this violence filled society. She says that she does not want her baby to be born.
When Raman asks her about abortion she shouts mad! Youre quite mad. Kill the baby?
It s all I want. I want to keep it, dont you understand.(35) Raman is totally confused with her
words and says, You just said you dont want it. Now you say you do want it. Whats up?
Whats up?(35) Raman is an ordinary husband who like any other man has great care for his
family. He is indeed an affectionate husband who cares for his wife and this is evident in his
reluctance to send Sita to Manori. When she wants to escape to Manori, Raman with all care for
his wife and baby says, You must stay where there is a doctor, a Hospital, and a telephone. You
cant go The island in the middle of the monsoon. You cant have a baby there.(33) Sita loses all
feminine, all maternal belief in child birth. She does not want her child to be born in this chaotic,
violent society. She fears it as one more act of violence and murder in the world. Srivastava
observes: The incident in which a number of crows assault and kill an eagle becomes symbolic
of Sitas own plight amid violence so much prevalent in society.
Her neurotic fears and anxieties make her aware of the violence around her that she wants
to escape to her island where, she believes a miracle could happen. When Raman, as usual asks
the question, Where shall we go this summer?, Sita immediately responds to Manori and Fed
up with the dreary metropolitan life in Bombay and tormented by the paranoiac fear of her fifth
and reluctant pregnancy she leaves for Manori islet off the Moris mainland. (Swain 21-22) Sitas
character can be evaluated in the light of her childhood experiences. She is a motherless child
and she experienced partiality, neglect, indifference right from the beginning of her childhood.
Sitas father has no time for his children and especially Sita did not get even a drop of his love
and care. It was Rekha, Sitas sister who was close to his heart. She always has a doubt about
Rekha and her relationship with her, for there is no resemblance between the two sisters. When
she learns that Rekha is not her sister, from Jivan she is upset that his words had dropped on her
skin like acid(79) Sita always feels discarded and unwanted. Due to her fathers partiality she
is deprived of Rekhas company also. Her much suppressed emotions in her childhood is
responsible for her perturbed mental state in future. The indifference of her father, alienation
from sister, lack of love and care from her mother has made many psychological changes in her.
Soon after their fathers death the family disintegrates. Rekha, leaves, without even shedding a
drop of tear, Jivan vanishes without any sign and only Sita remains to marry Raman. Family
plays a vital role in the growth and development of individual and broken homes definitely has
its worse effect on an individual.
Sita is one such victim who because of her bitter experiences in her childhood alienates
herself from everything around her. The betrayal of her husband, his family, her children and
acquaintances violently tears her apart only, later does she starts feeling bad about her doings.
Raman criticizes her for her wrong doings and tries to draw her attention to the trauma and
tensions she has caused her family. When Raman prepares to leave Manori, she mends her ways
and follows his footprints. She lowered her head and searched out his footprints so that she could
place her feet in them, as a kind of game to make walking back easier, and so her footprints,
mingled with his.(150) The magic and charm of the island has vanished and instead of silence
and peace Sita experiences unrest. They are frightened by the threatening weather and feels that
her visit to the island is an act of madness. She realizes that, life in Bombay is the reality, the
island represents a stage world, an act of imagination of make belief, a world which collapses on
close contact.(Jasbir 87) Sita is forced to accept the reality and she is confused. how could she
tell, how decide? Which half of her life was real and which unreal? which of her selves was true,
which false? All she knew was that there were two periods of her life, each in direct opposition
to the other.(153) She believed that she could get satisfaction in the island, but she could not
achieve it the island too. She is unable to achieve temeperamental compatibility with her
husband at home and now in Manori she is unable to achieve the same with her children. At last
wisdom dawns on her and she wants to return to reality.
She had come to the island, ...in search of some magical solution. But she realizes that
There cannot be a solution to mans indifference in the pervading Menace around, she chooses to
return and face life.(Singh 158) Finally, Sita realizes that illusion and reality are two sides of life
and they cannot be separated. Anita Desai in her interview observes that in order to survive in the
world, one has to compromise with life: of course if one is alive, in this world one cannot survive
without compromise, drawing the lines means certain death and in the end, Sita opts for life
with compromise.(21)
Unlike Maya in Cry, the peacock, Sita neither commits suicide nor kills anyone but she
simply gets compromised with her destiny. As Hariom Prasad observes: sita has come to accept
the prosaic nature of life which runs through difficult human situations in different ways. She
finds the courage to face life, in the end, with all its ups and downs.(119) Sitas character has
been portrayed in such a way that it represents the predicament of a modern married woman in
the society. She initially escapes from reality and later reconciles to the circumstances. Desais
heroines often act violently but in this novel there is a positive change. Sita reconciles herself to
her lot. She strikes a perfect balance between her inner self an outer world. Unlike Mayas her
alienation is not temperamental or environmental. Ramachandra Rao rightly observes: The novel
may, thus, be seen as a parable on the inability Of human beings, to relate the inner with the
outer, the individual with the society.(59)
Anita Desais novels are certainly reflective of socials realities. But she does not dwell
like others on social issues. She delves deep into the forces that condition the growth of a female
in this patriarchal male dominated society. She observes social realities from a psychological
perspective without posing herself as a social reformer. Her novels are studies of the inner life of
characters and her talent lies in the description of minute things that are usually unnoticed. The
novels of Anita Desai are modern in the very sense of the word suggested by Irwing Howe.
Meena Belliappa writes the focus of interest has shifted from girlish romance to a more
complex search for value in human relationship. (52)
Anita Desai has handled the theme of reconciliation skillfully in this novel that it reflects
our modern society in too many ways. Sitas character is a reflection of a modern woman in this
changing materialistic world.








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JOURNALS
Weir, Ann Lowry, The Illusions Of Maya: Feminine Consciousness In Anita Desais Cry, The
Peacock Journal Of South Asian Literature, XVI,No.2,1981