Raka comes to Carignano

What happens

Raka arrives thin, shorn and insect-like, and Desai marks the meeting with an image of estrangement rather than welcome: their embrace makes ‘a sound of bones colliding’. Her name means the moon, which the narrator flags at once as ‘an utter misnomer’, for there is nothing luminous or gentle about her. She is a self-contained wild child who vanishes for hours into the harsh country around the house, the refuse-choked ravine, the charred pines, the smoking chimneys of the Pasteur Institute, Monkey Point and the deserted club.

Ram Lal befriends the girl in his practical way, warning her of jackals, snakes and mad dogs and telling her ghost stories. A great dust-storm turns the sky into ‘a splendid bonfire that burned in the heart of the yellow clouds’, and he remarks that this is how forest fires start. Nanda Kaul, who imagined herself the household’s settled recluse, finds herself unnerved by the child’s complete indifference to her, and begins to court her with elaborate tales of her own girlhood in Kashmir: an adventurous father, exotic animals, a Buddha carried from Tibet. Raka listens politely rather than curiously, and drifts away again to the country she prefers.

The Part turns on Chapter 18, when Raka is drawn to a burnt, fire-gutted English cottage on the ridge. The scene of devastation and failure inspires her; she stretches until she seems ‘alight, ablaze’, and a watching caretaker names her ‘the crazy one from Carignano’. What the child wants, Desai makes plain, is not beauty but the ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces where nothing is asked of her.

A closer look

Raka as the wild double

Desai places Raka before Nanda Kaul as a mirror, and the comparison humbles the old woman. The narrator’s distinction is exact: if Nanda Kaul is a recluse ‘out of vengeance for a long life of duty’, Raka is a recluse ‘by nature, by instinct’, ‘born to it, simply’. Where Nanda Kaul has laboured to renounce a crowded life, the child renounces nothing because she has never wanted anything, and Desai calls her the ‘finished, perfected model’ of what the old woman was only ever a ‘brave, flawed experiment’. The effect is a quiet devastation: Nanda Kaul’s prized detachment is exposed as effortful and second-rate beside the real thing.

Fire and the blighted landscape

The country Raka loves does the novel’s symbolic work. Desai’s Kasauli is not a picture-postcard hill station but a scorched, fire-prone waste of ‘pine trees with charred trunks and contorted branches’, and fire smoulders through the imagery long before any flame is lit. The dust-storm reads as a bonfire in the clouds; Ram Lal’s warning that this is how forest fires start hangs over the summer as ironic foreshadowing. By binding the child so tightly to burnt ground and to the ruined cottage, Desai makes Raka the human face of an element that promises destruction, and readies us for the arson to come.

Stories against silence

Nanda Kaul’s invented tales are the Part’s saddest gesture. Having built her pride on wanting nobody, she now needs the child’s attention badly enough to lie for it, conjuring a lush Kashmir that stands in pointed contrast to the barren ridge she actually inhabits. Raka’s polite indifference defeats every story, and Desai lets us feel the pathos of a woman performing a self she does not possess. The fabrications she spins here are the very ones Part III will strip away, so the reader watches a self-deception being assembled in real time.

Key quotations

References are by Part and chapter; editions vary, so no page numbers are given.

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘Raka - what an utter misnomer’	Irony, naming	The name means the moon; the gap between it and the shorn, staring child sets her apart from tenderness.
‘There was a sound of bones colliding.’	Auditory image	An embrace rendered as collision signals a family emptied of warmth.
‘a recluse by nature, by instinct’	Antithesis, free indirect discourse	Set against Nanda Kaul’s reclusiveness ‘out of vengeance’, it exposes the old woman’s solitude as effortful.
‘the finished, perfected model of what Nanda Kaul herself was merely a brave, flawed experiment’	Metaphor, doubling	Raka is the ideal Nanda Kaul only imitates; the child outdoes her at her own creed.
‘a splendid bonfire that burned in the heart of the yellow clouds’	Fire imagery	Fire enters the sky itself, seeding the motif that builds towards Raka’s arson.
‘The scene of devastation and failure somehow drew her, inspired her.’	Free indirect discourse	The child is pulled towards ruin, aligning her innocence with the elemental and destructive.