When Anita Desai, the grande dame of Indian English literature, publishes a new book, it is an event to be celebrated. For a generation that has grown up reading Desai (her Sahitya Akademi Award–winning 1977 novel, Fire on the Mountain, was included in university syllabi), another novel from her is like a much-awaited letter from a beloved friend that you read and reread with joy, savouring each inflection of the familiar voice. Rosarita, published 13 years after Desai’s last collection of novellas, The Artist of Disappearance, is a reassuring piece of work, telling us that the 87-year-old author has lost nothing of the understated brilliance that sets her apart. Using the imagery of travel that runs through her works, one can say that coming to Rosarita is like returning to a favourite old place by the sea and registering with a pleasant shock that the quality of light there is as searing as you remember it from the last time.
Desai is much concerned with questions of travel, like the American poet Elizabeth Bishop before her. Is travelling, leaving one place for another, worth all the hassle? After all, the sunset we watch from our home window is the same as the one in an exotic landscape. Or, is it? Journeys change us as we experience peoples and cultures very different from our own. The self watching the sunset from the window of her home and its later edition looking at the sunset from the hotel window in a foreign land might well be two separate people.
Rosarita
Picador India
Pages: 112
Price: Rs.499
Given that we change along with places, is it ever possible to return to the same location? In other words, can one ever find a fixed, steady place called home? One of the epigraphs to Rosarita is from Daniel Kehleman’s astounding 2005 novel, Measuring the World. It goes: “He too wanted to go on a voyage, said Humboldt. Foster nodded. Quite a few had that wish. And everyone regretted it later. Why? Because one could never come back.”
The protagonist, Bonita, is a young Indian woman studying Spanish at a residency in Mexico. She is a woman on the run, trying to escape her home, her country, her past, her unprocessed griefs. She chose the study of language so that it “would wrench you out, lead you as far away as you could get—French that took you to Pondicherry, Portuguese that took you to Goa, and the Portuguese led you to Spanish and Spanish had brought you here—here and now. Aqui y ahora.”
Cover of Rosarita | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
The emphasis on “here and now” tells us that the sojourn in Mexico is just a stop in Bonita’s endeavour to break free. Having experienced the discreet charm of home, she has chosen to be an eternal outsider. In this she is like her creator, Anita, who left India in her 40s for England and now lives in the US.
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In separate interviews after the release of Rosarita, Desai has said that America feels as alien to her as present-day India. This dissociation helps her write: “Always being apart. Perhaps that is being a writer. One is always an observer rather than a participant” (interview in The Guardian, June 29, 2024). No matter how close Anita must be to Bonita, she distances her too, addressing her as “you”, keeping her at arm’s length.
The Trickster’s story
Bonita, when we meet her first on a park bench, is taking in the sights and sounds of San Miguel de Allende, that glorious city of the arts celebrated for its baroque Spanish architecture. She seems quite content until she is approached by a flamboyantly dressed elderly Mexican woman with kohl-rimmed eyes. This woman, the antithesis of quiet Bonita in her muchness, remains a mystery throughout. Later called the “Trickster”, she holds Bonita spellbound with her story about Bonita’s mother, Sarita, who in this dame’s version becomes Rosarita, a gifted artist who had come to Mexico to paint.
For Bonita, her mother had been that uncomplaining wife who had accepted her place in the shadows of the household. She had been a part of what Bonita had left behind. And then the Trickster presents a version of her mother who might be more like Bonita: a rebel, a wanderer, an artist dislocated by terrible sorrows, killings, violence. Can that be true? Did her mother have a double life? Bonita is suspicious of the Trickster’s narrative but is also captivated by the story, like the wedding guest from Coleridge’s poem who is eager to escape the clutches of the batty old mariner but cannot do so until he has listened to the intriguing, disturbing tale in full.
However, the Trickster’s story does not take up the entire novella. She is left behind as Bonita continues her journey onward in Mexico. Yet the Trickster’s chronicle (which might be a figment of her imagination) shifts something in Bonita, showing her the possibility of exchanging her old demons of grief, resentment, exhaustion with a daimon—her mother, but a mother who is nothing like the one she knew, a restless wraith who can guide her in the rest of her travels.
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The novella too opens up as Bonita hits the seas from the inlands, and there is an onrush of light. Here is her first encounter with the Pacific Ocean at La Manzanilla: “You want to throw out your arms, run like a bird across the sand, cry out with relief, the relief that feels like joy. You have arrived, and in one instant you have recovered what you thought was lost: clarity, clarity, the promise of clarity.” This scene, with its sudden drama, is like a crest of revelation on which you are magically suspended for a moment until the novella settles down to its unhurried pace again.
Speaking in images
There are smaller moments of luminosity before and after—the pigeons that “murmur and coo in an expression of mounting ecstasy”, the egret that takes off, “trailing its legs like afterthoughts”, the flocks of sandpipers that race “ahead of you in search, always in search”—as Bonita journeys on. What changes in the days following the encounter with the Trickster is that the progression of moments seems less unyielding than before. Bonita notices the sun disappear into the Pacific Ocean, the vines with mauve flowers “that will be dead by night”, a cemetery with lovingly tended graves that will one day be swallowed by the sea, and the relentless change speaks not so much of loss as of freedom gifted by loss. She returns to the memory of her mother’s death, at which she was not present, and is reminded of the cold letter her sister had sent her afterwards, scrupulously dividing their mother’s assets. If the bits and bobs of the past had burdened her once, now they seem to say in chorus: “Go free”.
Rosarita ends as suddenly as it starts, leaving you hankering for more. One can even gripe that, speaking in images, it promises more than it delivers. There are fleeting references to Partition, to the Mexican Revolution (1910-17), and a telling portrait of a traditional Indian home where “If there was a god, it could only be The Husband”. But Desai is evidently reluctant to spell it all out. Leaving the reader with just a snapshot is also the classic Anita Desai touch. As she said in The Guardian interview: “I’m not writing a Victorian novel starting with childhood and going on to old age and death! This is just one little section. A little piece of their lives. A fragment.”
If you are still dissatisfied, you can gaze in silence at the stunning cover featuring an early self-portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil that adds to Desai’s story while telling its own.
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