Shorts fired: A Wknd interview with author Anita Desai

At 88, her writing is sharper, even if the books are slimmer. Rosarita, her first in over a decade, is about a daughter who is learning about her mother’s past.

Speaking to Anita Desai on the telephone feels strangely like talking to an erudite distant aunt you’ve never met.

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The landline in her home in a small town in New York state crackles and echoes. The doorbell rings. There are so many questions one is tempted to ask, but I stick to talking about Rosarita, Desai’s latest novella, set in a vanished Delhi of the post-Independence period and in contemporary Mexico.

“Old Delhi was where we had our home. Of course, so much that was known to me in those years, the life that we led, doesn’t exist anymore. India’s a new country now. It isn’t my material any more, so I have to leave it to the younger generation,” says Desai, 88.

Why Mexico? “The first time I went there, I was escaping a very bitter winter in New England. I just caught a plane to a city I had heard of but never visited, Oaxaca. I remember getting off the plane and my first impression was, ‘Oh, I’m back in India!’ After that, I kept going back, and it always rewarded me very richly with the material that finally came to rest in this book,” she says, adding that she also kept seeing parallels in the huge upheavals faced by the two once-colonised nations.

“It seemed to me that under the surface of art, and culture and beauty, there was this thread of violence and injustice. Strangely enough, it was possible to bring in a lesser-known American thread to it — the fact that there were some American artists who did choose to go to Mexico rather than to Paris. So I was able to bring in that part of World War 2 and talk about the experience not only of those who suffered on the ground but of those who inflicted violence on them,” Desai says.

Which brings us to the artist Satish Gujral, whom Desai mentions in her author’s note as someone else who “clearly saw the parallel between the Mexican Revolution and India’s Partition, that, as a refugee, he had experienced himself”.

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I mention a long-ago meeting with Gujral, and how he spoke then of his time in Mexico training under the artist Diego Rivera. “I am thrilled to hear that you actually met him... I wish I had had that experience. I had already written the book when it occurred to me that there was one Indian artist who shared my feelings of our common histories of revolution and independence and all the violence that went with it. But this was long after Satish Gujral’s death (in 2020) and I never met him. I had very little to go on. But I was very happy that I could include him because he was an important influence at the back of my mind, in my subconscious,” she says.

While most authors dwindle as they age, many descending into a pastiche of their earlier and richer work, Desai’s writing has become sharper, more concentrated, even if the books themselves are shorter.

“In recent years, the novella is the form that I feel most comfortable with, perhaps because I haven’t got the energy and the strength to write the bigger books that I wrote when I was younger, and do the research I did into histories and the past,” she says. “It takes a lot of stamina to stay with a book like that. Now, when I find a subject that will fit into a novella, I’m happier dealing with it. My work is getting briefer and briefer.”

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Desai’s books have never been doorstoppers. In Custody, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, was 248 pages long. Her powerful Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), which traced the journey of a Jewish refugee, was about 40 pages longer. To me, the 94-page Rosarita, about the journeys both outward and inward of Sarita and her daughter Bonita, is no less impactful.

Unlike Baumgartner, the mother and daughter haven’t fled the Nazis.

They are racing, though, away from a stifling marriage in the case of the former and in search of a life of meaning for the latter. “Not In Custody or Fire on the Mountain (1977), but other books like Baumgartner’s Bombay and Journey to Ithaca (1995) have taken me on long journeys because I do think writing is a form of exploration. When one is writing a book, one is exploring not only a character but exploring their worlds, their histories, their pasts. I suppose that’s why the book also takes the form of a physical journey,” says Desai, whose narrator in Rosarita begins uncovering an unknown side to her mother during her travels.

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Desai’s own parents — the German-origin Toni Nime and the Bengali businessman DN Mazumdar — led “quite complicated lives”.

“Although they told us about some of it, I always had a feeling that there was a great deal that was left out. I think my father, in particular, was a very reserved man. We never visited East Bengal, which was his home, though he told us of some bits of his life there. He always seemed nostalgic about the green waterways of Bengal. But there was so much else that he didn’t tell us, like the fact that his family was involved in the independence movement. An uncle, his brother, even spent time in prison,” Desai says.

Nime, on the other hand, was a marvellous storyteller. “She recreated her childhood in Germany in such detail that it was like listening to fairy stories.” But even here the tales were incomplete.

Desai visited Germany in her mid-20s. “It was after World War 2 and there was very little resemblance to the stories my mother had told us, and I realised how much is kept in reserve,” she says. “Either parents do not like to speak of certain areas of their lives or they are not able to convey these to their children. I think we all choose what we tell our children.”

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Speaking of literary influences, Desai says that the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Paramo has probably influenced her writing most. The book is about a dying mother who sends her son to visit his father in his father’s village. “When he goes there, he finds there’s no one alive. It’s a village of ghosts.”

Desai has fashioned her own ghosts into believable characters, always in search of their true selves. It is why her writing continues to be powerful.

She still sets aside her mornings to write, she says, a habit she fell into when her four children (one of whom is the Booker Prize-winning Kiran Desai) were little.

“They’d go to school and that was my quiet time to myself. I knew what I wanted to do with that time. I didn’t have any other hobbies or ways of living except through my books, the ones I wrote and the ones I read,” she says. “Maybe I’d have written more in other circumstances, but on the other hand, now I think it’s all right to learn how to work within borders.”