‘Rosarita’: Anita Desai’s new novel shows she is still at the top of her game

A new Anita Desai book is always a reason for celebration, especially, if it is her first book in a decade.

Her first book, Cry, the Peacock, was published in 1963 and since then she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times (1980, 1984, and 1999) and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire in the Mountain.

In the sixty years since her debut, in her books, Desai has taken us to Ithaca, the towns in the Himalayas, Delhi, Bombay and now, San Miguel in Mexico. In her new novella Rosarita, a young Indian woman called Bonita is caught unawares when an eccentrically dressed woman claims to recognise her. Apparently, she looks exactly like her mother when she was her age. That’s impossible, thinks Bonita. Her mother – a demure housewife who barely travelled in her own country – could simply not have made this journey to Mexico. That too all those years ago. That too for something as frivolous as to paint.

Nights and days in Mexico

The presence of Rosarita (Sarita in India), an “Oriental” bird, in this small Mexican city, is as outlandish to Bonita as thinking of her mother as anything, well, besides a mother. The stranger claims her mother even had talents. Where did Sarita find the courage to wash up on these foreign shores? And more importantly, when?

The Stranger’s confidence in her memories forces Bonita to return to her own childhood. The house where no chalk or paintbrush could be seen had a sketch on the wall behind the bed. Who made it? The question never occurred to the daughter – like the windows, doors, the painting, just like her mother, was a permanent fixture in the house. Indispensable but overlooked.

Bonita thinks some more about her mother. Which inevitably makes her think about her father – a stern man who detested the inferior company at home. She remembers the silences and pretences. The deeper she delves into her past, the more she’s convinced the Stranger is actually a Trickster. Perhaps this is a game that has long ceased to be funny or simply a case of mistaken identities. “Mother dance the tango on a lamplit Mexican night, a man’s leg thrust between hers – she asks you to believe that?”, she thinks to herself. This is simply not the mother she knew.

The tales grow taller and Bonita is no longer able to sieve the perceptions from the truth. She allows herself to be led by the Trickster and in doing so opens herself to the possibility that she did not truly know her mother. What feels like impossible “parallel lives with no apparent connection” turns out to be nothing more than a failure of imagination on the daughter’s part.

We often make the mistake of assuming that we know everything about our mothers. Fathers do not invite such scrutiny – they are understood to be unyielding of secrets and a double life is often expected. Desai takes her heroine – absent in the first person! – all the way to Mexico to assert her existence. The mother “sheds” the daughter to become a self while the daughter probes her propensity to “want” without knowing what or why.

Desai’s mother, a German, made her way to Delhi from pre-war Berlin with her Bengali husband. Her daughter, Kiran, also a novelist, won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. Desai seems to have carried both Rosarita and Bonita all her life – a mother who made a journey to the unknown and a daughter built in the image of her mother. The similar-sounding names make (trick?) the reader into making these autobiographical connections.

In 94 pages, Desai creates beautiful pen portraits of three women – the Trickster included – and their half-known selves. The use of a second-person narrative voice, I believe, is a refusal to commit to certainties. The elegant, free-flowing prose emerges as a stunning juxtaposition against the confusion and memories that assail the daughter with tremendous intensity. Rosarita is an alluring, humane story from a writer who has been at the top of her game her entire career.

Rosarita, Anita Desai, Picador India.