Ila Das leaves Carignano

What happens

Nanda Kaul invites her oldest friend Ila Das to tea. Ila arrives as ‘a little broken bit of a crazy life’ and entertains them grotesquely with genteel reminiscence, an imaginary piano and snatches of song. Behind the comedy lies ruin: a once-wealthy family wrecked by three dissolute sons, leaving Ila and her sister destitute, and a lecturing post that Nanda Kaul’s husband once created for her, only for Ila to be forced out after his death and driven into a poorly paid government welfare job. She now fights superstition, disease and child marriage on almost no money at all.

One case presses on her. Preet Singh means to marry his seven-year-old daughter to an old widower ‘because he owns a quarter of an acre of land and two goats’, and Ila has confronted him over it. As the visit ends, Nanda Kaul comes close to offering her friend a home, gripping the arm of her chair in the effort to say ‘Come and stay with me, Ila’, then gripping it tighter to stop herself, and shaking her head. Unseen in the kitchen, Raka steals the box of matches.

Ila Das leaves at dusk. Waving off the grainseller’s warning with the words ‘I am always alone. I am never afraid’, she takes the lonely path home, where Preet Singh attacks her, strangles her with her own scarf and rapes her. The final chapter cuts back to Carignano, where the telephone rings and a police officer asks Nanda Kaul to come and identify the body. As the news breaks, her whole self-image collapses: the stories she told Raka were lies, her father never went to Tibet, her husband never loved her but kept a lifelong affair, and she lived alone not by choice but because that was what she was reduced to. At that moment Raka scratches at the window: ‘Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire.’

A closer look

The ironic architecture of the ending

Desai detonates the novel through cross-cutting. The tea party’s frail comedy, Ila Das singing at her imaginary piano, is intercut with the walk home that will end in her murder, so that the reader holds warmth and dread in the same hand. The telephone, an intrusion Nanda Kaul dreaded from the opening pages, now brings the worst intrusion of all, and the window that once framed her safe distance from the world becomes the frame for Raka’s announcement of fire. By making these devices, phone and window, turn against the woman who used them to keep life out, Desai gives the ending the snap of a trap closing.

Violence against women, plainly named

The novel’s three trapped women converge here: Nanda Kaul, decorative and unloved in her marriage; the seven-year-old daughter, sold for land and livestock; and Ila Das, educated, dignified and penniless, killed for trying to protect a child. Desai reports the rape and murder with a restraint that refuses any sensational detail, ‘she lay raped, broken, still and finished’, and then delivers it a second time in the flat officialese of the police call. The plainness is the point: Ila dies for daring to interfere with a man’s power over a girl, and Desai frames her death as an indictment of the violence a welfare state cannot reach.

Two revelations, one blow

The final chapter lands its truths almost simultaneously. Nanda Kaul’s confession strips the myth she built across the whole book, naming her stories as fabrications, her contentment as a mask, her solitude as something forced rather than chosen. Before the reader can absorb it, Raka’s whisper at the window turns the recurring fire imagery into literal arson. Desai withholds any comfort of sequence or explanation; the confession and the fire simply arrive together, and the last image of black smoke over the mountain leaves the ravaged landscape and the ravaged self burning as one.

Key quotations

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

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘She held the arm of her chair very tightly in an effort to speak, to say “Come and stay with me, Ila,”’	Physical gesture, thwarted speech	The unspoken invitation is the hinge of the tragedy; withheld care sends Ila to her death.
‘I am always alone. I am never afraid.’	Dramatic irony, bravado	Ila’s brave refusal of fear is spoken moments before the attack that kills her.
‘she lay raped, broken, still and finished. Now it was dark.’	Restrained syntax, pathetic fallacy	Desai names the violence without sensation; the falling dark closes over a life ended for defending a child.
‘She did not live here alone by choice - she lived here alone because that was what she was forced to do, reduced to doing.’	Antithesis, confession	The self-image of the whole novel collapses: solitude was imposed, never elected.
‘they were tranquillizers, pills’	Metaphor	Her invented stories are exposed as sedatives against a truth she could not face.
‘Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire.’	Direct speech, climax	The fire motif becomes literal act; the child completes what the imagery has threatened throughout.