“Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak, whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by storms at its summit.” The problem here may be that three of the four clauses “was a far peak”, “whittled out of ice”, and “gathering the last of the light” are descriptions of the mountain but the last is an event accompanying its seeing: “a plume of snow blown high by storms at its summit.” This is how we can expect readers to interpret it: “Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak, whittled out of ice and gathering the last of the light. A plume of snow was being blown high by storms about its summit.”

“The boys carried out the survey of the house with some interest. The atmosphere, they noted, was of intense solitude.” Perhaps this is what Desai means and the way the generously reader will interpret her: “The boys carried out the survey of the house with some interest. The intense solitude of its atmosphere did not fail to impress them.”

“Biju felt he was entering a warm, amniotic bath.” I interpret this as: “Biju felt he was entering a warm bath.” The ‘amniotic’ is perhaps a token of the reassurance Biju felt – as interpreted by someone familiar with psychoanalysis. Biju, being a cook, is unlikely to have notions of amniotic baths.

“In fact, so beloved were some of these servants that they were actually begged not to work; their employers pleaded with them to eat cream and ghee, to look after their chilblains and to sun themselves like monitor lizards on winter afternoons.” Here again, there are two different modes of address combined (awkwardly) into one: the employers addressing their servants and the narrator describing it to us. It is not intended to mean that the employers invoked monitor lizards to their employees.