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Part 2, Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fire on the Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Freedom
Honesty and Self-Reflection
Trauma and Suffering
Class and Privilege
Female Oppression
Summary
Analysis
What Raka sees is not what Ram Lal described. The summer dance is a costume party, but not realizing that, Raka sees a horrifying series of nightmarish images: a man-sized cricket; another man with a skull and crossbones emblazoned across his chest; a somersaulting monkey; a mouse-woman; a convict with an untightened noose round his neck; a frightening doctor; a clown. They leap, dance, sing loudly, and chase each other around the ballroom. Perhaps the worst is a headless character who walks toward the windows as if it’s seen Raka. Panicked, Raka flees, her mind clouded with memories of her father coming home drunk from parties to heap abuse on her mother Tara. She can almost hear her mother crying—then she realizes she hears a jackal crying in the ravine. She veers uphill toward Carignano.
The masquerade dance represents the height of cultivated contrivance. The partygoers hide their identities as a game, and this horrifies Raka in part because she herself seems incapable of such dishonesty. She cannot play the games of social nicety with Nanda Kaul, and she cannot understand the dancers as humans in costumes, instead seeing them as monsters. And the memories this moment awakens point to the trauma she endured in the context of her parents’ unhappy and abusive marriage. Now it starts to make sense that she is so good at keeping herself out of sight, and so afraid of human attention. Yet, she cannot abandon herself to the wilds of the ravine, either, for in the end, she is still a human being. So, she returns home.
Themes
