"Fire on the Mountain" is a slight tale very much in the style of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala…. Set in Kasauli, a Himalyan resort of some former grandeur and much present squalor, it gives a bleak but convincing picture of modern India; the dust and blazing sun, the pseudo-English declining gentry, the sullen and starving poor….

[The] aged Nanda Kaul seeks a haven from her troubled land and from her troublesome family, but her privacy is shattered by the arrival of her granddaughter, Raka. Raka is a strange, half-mad child, as aloof as Nanda, and Nanda finds herself trying to draw the girl toward her with fantasies of a glamorous past. Raka, however, prefers to spend her days roaming the hillsides and setting fires. As the contest of wills intensifies, Nanda enlists the aid of her friend Ila Das, a fierce old woman….

Anita Desai's ability to evoke Nanda's isolation, Ila's pathos, the sights and sounds and smells of Kasauli, makes one overlook awkward prose…. It also makes one wish she had let herself be beguiled from her original outline. The decaying resort and the two disappointed, game old ladies have a real story in them; but not this one, with its pyromania and brutality. Even in masterly hands this plot could produce only the easy thrill of a startling climax; in Anita Desai's talented but less expert hands, it is anything but startling. So the reader has the sense of looking helplessly on as characters of Jane Austen possibilities are marched along to the garish drum of Edgar Allan Poe. If only Anita Desai had been less intent on surprising us with a spurious melodrama, and had given her imagination a chance to surprise herself.