The India of Anita Desai’s dreams, and a new book, ‘Rosarita’, set in Mexico

Anita Desai's experimental novels explore language, form, and themes, with her latest novella, Rosarita, showcasing a dream-like narrative style.

Anita Desai has often experimented with language, theme and form in novels like Clear Light of Day, Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay and The Artist of Disappearance. In her latest, Rosarita (Picador), a dream-like novella, Desai gives the narrator a second-person voice. When a stranger plants an idea into young student Bonita’s mind, that her mother’s name was Rosarita and that she had studied art in Mexico, it sends her off to imaginatively fill the absences left by her mother. In a phone conversation, the soft-spoken and thrice-Booker-shortlisted Desai, now 87, talks about her Mexico connection, how she has used techniques of poetry in her prose and why India has become remote to her. Edited excerpts:

Well, I first went to Mexico to escape from a very bitter North American winter. But the minute I stepped off the plane in a strange country, I felt entirely at home. I thought I had returned to India; the resemblance between the two countries struck me immediately, and I kept returning to Mexico. Rosarita became a kind of a patchwork, a collage of my impressions of the India that I had left and the Mexico that was new to me, and trying to find how they fit together. My instinct told me that they did fit together, yet I couldn’t find the facts, the necessary ground work on which to base them, till I discovered that I could put my bewilderment into my narrator’s voice. She was the one who created this imaginary portrait of the mother who was no longer alive.

For long I have wanted to experiment with using the second person because it seems to me such an immediate way to reach the reader. The dream-like quality, as you call it, is created by bringing in the trickster who is a magician figure. She plants this seed of an idea in the narrator’s mind that there was such a character, Rosarita, who studied art in Mexico, and although the narrator never heard such a story from her mother and disbelieves it, she can’t help imagining that it might be true and what would her mother’s experiences have been had it been true. So, she creates an imaginary mother.

I have been trying to model my prose upon the techniques of poetry for quite a long time, to as far back as a small book I wrote, Fire on the Mountain (1977). I have tried to reduce my work to a set of images and to use suggestion rather than any prosaic facts. I always quote some lines from an Emily Dickinson poem to describe my work: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant/ Success in circuit lies’.

As for the novella form, I have also come to it through a long circuitous route. In earlier years, I used to write novels which were fully thought out and plotted but I found myself happier with the novella form when I wrote my last book, The Artist of Disappearance, which is a collection of three novellas. I was comfortable with this form; I could put everything I meant to in a very short space, selected and chosen carefully.

I will use my own experience as a model to answer your question. English for me was a literary language. It wasn’t the first language I spoke, but it was the first language I learnt to read and write. So it always belonged to books; the books and literature I read were my model, and that made my language a more literary form of prose on paper. Although there had been predecessors to Rushdie’s work, like Raja Rao who experimented with bringing in Indian intonations, as did Mulk Raj Anand and G.V. Desani, Rushdie brought it into the present times. He seemed to use English that was all around in India, on the streets, in the shops, in the cinema. He wrote on very serious subjects in this language, which encouraged a whole new generation to write about their views of India, their experience, using a foreign language but in a way that Indians used it.

Unlike my parents who never went back to their homelands [Germany/ East Bengal] because they had mostly been destroyed or had vanished, I could constantly return to India. But now I realise that India has changed in the years that I have been absent and I have changed in the years that I have been away from India, and so it has become more and more remote to me. Now when I go back to India, I keep searching for the India I had known as a child and as a young woman and I have to recognise the fact that that doesn’t exist any more.