Part I · Chapters 1–10
Nanda Kaul at Carignano
Before anything happens, Desai teaches us to read one woman’s longing to be left utterly alone, and how much labour that emptiness has cost her.
What happens
Nanda Kaul, the aged widow of a university Vice-Chancellor, has withdrawn to Carignano, a square stone house on the ridge above Kasauli, to live in the solitude she feels she has earned. The opening chapter finds her watching the postman climb the hill and resenting him as an intruder, a bearer of ‘bags and letters, messages and demands’ that threaten her peace. Desai sketches the history of the house itself, built in 1843 and passed through a line of eccentric English maiden ladies, several of whom died oddly or violently, so that the barrenness Nanda Kaul loves comes to us already shadowed.
Her ordered days, her cook Ram Lal, her disciplined stillness: all of it is broken by a letter from her daughter Asha. Raka, her great-granddaughter, is recovering from typhoid while her mother Tara is unwell and her parents’ marriage falters, and the child must be sent to Carignano to convalesce. Nanda Kaul receives the news as an assault, crying inwardly that she wants no more and wants nothing. A telephone call from her old friend Ila Das, whose shrill voice she can barely tolerate, adds a second unwelcome approach.
Through these chapters Desai lets us into Nanda Kaul’s loathing of her former life in the crowded Vice-Chancellor’s house, its endless trees, servants and guests, and her groaned wish to be discharged of all duty. She reads The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and cultivates her calm. When she can no longer bear the thought of curious eyes watching the child arrive, she sends Ram Lal down to fetch Raka, and Part I closes on the edge of the invasion it has spent ten chapters dreading.
A closer look
Living inside Nanda Kaul’s mind
Desai writes almost entirely through free indirect discourse, sliding the narration so close to Nanda Kaul’s thoughts that we take her judgements as fact before we can weigh them. The postman is an intruder, the letter an outrage, the crowded past a servitude; we absorb her scorn as our own. This intimacy is the method that Part III will turn against her, because the voice we have trusted proves to have been lying to itself. Learning to read at this range, feeling with Nanda Kaul while noticing what she cannot admit, is the skill the whole novel asks of you.
The negative grammar of her wishes
Watch how every desire she voices is a subtraction. She wants ‘no more’, wants ‘nothing’, wishes to be left to the pines and cicadas alone, longs to be ‘a tree, no more and no less’. Desai builds Nanda Kaul’s ideal out of absence and refusal, so that her contentment reads as a will towards self-erasure rather than any positive joy. The effect is quietly unsettling: a peace defined only by what it keeps out cannot help but sound defensive, and we begin to suspect a wound the calm is dressed over.
Solitude, duty and the care refused
Part I sets the novel’s central tension in place: withdrawal against the claims of other people. Nanda Kaul’s cry to be ‘discharged’ treats a lifetime of marriage, motherhood and hospitality as a sentence served, and Desai’s remark that ‘the care of others was a habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid’ lands with a faint chill. Mislaid, not lost, suggests something set down carelessly and now missing when it will be needed. The line quietly forecasts the moral failure at the heart of Part III.
Key quotations
References are by Part and chapter; editions vary, so no page numbers are given.
| Quotation | Method | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ‘to be left to the pines and cicadas alone’ | Natural imagery, exclusion | Her ideal is defined by what she shuts out; solitude is aesthetic and defensive at once. |
| ‘To be a tree, no more and no less’ | Metaphor of self-erasure | The wish to dissolve into nature reads as a longing to stop being a person with a past. |
| ‘What pleased and satisfied her so, here at Carignano, was its barrenness’ | Free indirect discourse, paradox | Barrenness as contentment: Desai makes emptiness her heroine’s highest value. |
| ‘I want no more. I want nothing. Can I not be left with nothing?’ | Repetition, interior cry | The novel’s central plea, entirely negative in grammar, protests too much to be believed. |
| ‘Discharge me… I’ve discharged all my duties. Discharge.’ | Repetition, legal register | Duty framed as a sentence served turns her whole domestic past into servitude. |
| ‘The care of others was a habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid.’ | Understatement, foreshadowing | ‘Mislaid’ quietly forecasts the failure of care that will doom Ila Das in Part III. |
Think it through
- If we only ever see the crowded past through Nanda Kaul’s scorn, how far can we trust her account of it?
- Why might Desai spend a whole chapter on the strange history of Carignano before her plot begins?
- Is Nanda Kaul’s craving for ‘nothing’ a philosophy she has chosen, or a symptom of something she will not name?
Towards the exam
Write one analytical paragraph: How does Desai use narrative method in Part I to shape our impression of Nanda Kaul? Embed one short quotation, name the method at work, and end by connecting your point to a larger concern of the novel, such as solitude or the refusal of care.