A fable about loss and disappearing mothers
Anita Desai’s powerful new novella on identity and migration is narrated with a dream-like vividness and slippery experimental prose
Anita Desai’s 18th book, Rosarita, distils many of the thematic concerns—identity, gender, migration—of her long and august career. Told mostly in the second person, in hundred spare pages and over five chapters, the novella is a quietly powerful collage by the three-time Booker-nominated novelist. The book begins on a park bench in San Miguel, Mexico, and weaves back to New Delhi before moving to the seaside, reading at times almost like a fable. It is the tale of Bonita, a young Indian student who arrives in Mexico, ostensibly to learn Spanish, and is haunted by the parallel journeys of her mother—who, she discovers, might have made a similar trip, decades earlier.
“It is as you want: lamplit, the Parroquia before you an imperturbable silhouette against the evanescent stars, the trees still, silent,” the narrator says. “Stay still, you tell yourself. Wait, here, now, she will appear and you will see her as she had never shown herself and you had never seen.” Of course, it is Bonita herself who we come to truly see, as the story moves forward. The reader gets only flashes of Sarita, Bonita’s mysterious, absent mother, who is woven through the book and given to us in flashbacks. These depict, often, an unhappy marriage as well as sketches from her alleged life as an artist, as imagined in Mexico. Was she really there or is this the alternate life Bonita conjures up, we wonder.
For, young Sarita’s life is given to us in the third person, and it has a slippery, dream-like quality. Reality is often most elusive, we are reminded; we so rarely know who our parents were before us— especially our mothers—even after knowing them our whole lives. And, sometimes, strangers offer more tangible truths.
What we get, instead of Bonita’s mother, is the very physical presence of the “Trickster”, an overpoweringly colourful and flamboyant stranger who insists that “Rosarita” has been here and focuses her “ferocious attention” upon our heroine. The woman is a force of nature, loud from the outset. When we see her at her ancestral home in Colima, she is “blown along on a cloud of heavy, heady perfume, draped once again in her familiar swirl of pink and green and violet skirts, now topped by a velvet huipil lavishly embroidered”. She convinces Bonita to accompany her to what turns out, surprisingly, to be a stately old home, after a disappointing visit to what was supposedly an art school her mother had visited.
Their immediate exchange is a nice play on the attention Indians often receive when in countries like Mexico, where we are proximate in terms of our outward appearances, the ways in which we deal with family and how we occupy public space—but, ultimately, culturally disparate. The Indian reader can only chuckle when the Trickster insists that Sarita is “Rosarita” and the Mexican connection is alive, and Bonita explains, in response, that “Sunita, Vanita, Ronita” and the like are common names in India. The similarities keep coming to the forefront, however; the garden in Bonita’s guesthouse immediately recalls her grandfather’s garden in Delhi, as do the rich street scenes in San Miguel. As a result, Bonita’s solitude is both amplified and quelled in the face of these echoes; in the way that we find comfort in the familiar when in a strange land, and yet, are reminded that we are out of place there.
In an interesting inversion, however, it is the native woman who finds herself out of place in the grand old house that Bonita soon discovers is the source of some conflict in the woman’s family. For, her nephew disputes her claim on the house, and she herself is haunted by its past, as is witnessed in a tumultuous night in the room her ancestors once slept in. Bonita finally moves into the room, still wondering how much of what she is hearing has been fabricated. Of course, aren’t we all just visitors in other people’s histories, trying to make sense of our own stories from what we glean of more firmly established ones?
Desai, now living in upstate New York, has often remarked upon the pull of Mexico, which she began to visit from the US East Coast a few decades ago. Her novel The Zigzag Way (2004) is set in Sierra Madre, and brings together miners, academics and fishermen in an ambitious and adventurous exploration of this terrain. She calls upon the emotional power of Mexico in that novel, in how the past “was alive here—crepuscular and underground, but also palpable.”
There is a similar energy at play in Rosarita. From the “snow-clad cone of the Volcan de Fuego that now floats in the air” to the “flat grey-green Pacific coastline, so close to the ocean you think the plane might run into it for a spectacular
finale,” this country is the perfect backdrop to the narrator’s emotional journey. It gives free reign to ghosts of all kinds.
It is only natural, then, that a parallel Desai calls up is the one between historical conflict in Mexico and the carnage of Partition; underlined in both the text and an author’s note which connects 1947 in India to the historical role of trains in the Mexican revolution of the 1910s. Young Sarita is struck by the footage of this violence when she gatecrashes an embassy party in Delhi. “Were those trains she saw on the screen with their unspeakable cargoes, the ones that could have carried the Muslims of India to Pakistan and the Hindus of Pakistan to India, also the ones that carried her family across some savage new border from which few arrived alive?”
Desai notes the influence of the echoes of this violence in Satish Gujral’s work in her note, which draws a connection with the murals of the Mexican artists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Her last book consisted of three stories which converge in The Artist of Disappearance (2011), speaking to the necessary purity of the artistic impulse in changing times. In this book, the mystery, at its core, is of how Bonita did not know of her mother’s other life; did not guess that she was an artist; could only guess which of the few paintings at their home in India might be her mother’s. This book, like Artist, is a tribute to “the secret part of all human beings that can create no matter how wretched our circumstances,” as the critic Maggie Gee wrote in The Guardian about Artist in 2011.
Importantly, Rosarita successfully transcends the borders of time, place and form in a way that few of Desai’s earlier works manage. The author spoke recently of the book as an experiment of sorts, and indeed it has more in common with the novels of Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante than the traditional novels which Desai’s most influential works—In Custody standing tall, among them—sit beside, those interior worlds of English women novelists like Margaret Drabble and Anita Brookner. Perhaps, most movingly, Rosarita echoes Ferrante’s Troubling Love, with its disappearing mother and sense of loss.
Does it end too briefly, even for a novella? Perhaps. The last chapter is sheer poetry, its long passages an operatic sequence of images—the reader wants to linger, to explore more of Mexico. But that would have been a different kind of book, of course.
Rajni George is a writer and editor based in south India.