Rosarita by Anita Desai: A Luminous Tale of Searching for a Mother

Over a literary career spanning six decades, Anita Desai, now 87, has returned repeatedly to themes of family bonds and the place of women within them. Her work often delves into the conflicts between duty and desire, expectations and independence, shaping into familiar forms across generations. In her first novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Clear Light of Day, she tackles these themes against the backdrop of the partition of India. Now, more than a decade later, she revisits these intricate themes in Rosarita, a concise yet haunting new novel.

Rosarita, despite its brevity of just over 90 pages, touches on the intricate themes of memory, identity, and the role of art in responding to violence. The story begins with Bonita, a young Indian woman studying languages in Mexico. She is approached in a public garden by an exuberant old woman who claims to recognize her. The stranger insists she knew Bonita’s late mother, Rosarita, who had visited San Miguel years ago to study art. This catches Bonita off guard, as her mother’s name was Sarita, and to her knowledge, her mother neither traveled nor painted.

Bonita’s initial reaction is to shield herself, reaching for her dark glasses as if to hide. Despite her skepticism, she begins to entertain the idea that this stranger might hold the missing pieces to her mother’s mysterious past. The stranger persuades Bonita to accompany her on a tour of locations her mother supposedly visited, reigniting questions about her mother’s history. While Bonita remains firm that her mother was not an artist, she recalls a pastel sketch from her childhood, wondering who had created it.

The narrative delves into Bonita’s memories of an extended stay with her paternal grandparents during her mother’s unexplained absence, where she sensed disapproval hovering over her parents’ marriage. She begins to question whether this stranger might provide insight into her mother’s so-called “unsuitability as a wife.”

Desai’s writing is both poetic and vivid. She masterfully captures landscapes with luminous precision. At the heart of Rosarita is a disturbing moment where Bonita imagines the catalyst for her mother’s escape to Mexico—a violent art exhibition at the embassy in Delhi, drawing parallels between the Mexican revolution and the partition of India. The graphic depictions of violence, particularly against women and children, are unsettling and reminiscent of contemporary reports, highlighting the brutal nature of human history.

Desai describes Rosarita as “a fragment,” and indeed, the novel carries an elusive, unresolved quality, offering a fleeting glimpse into the lives of its characters. The use of second-person present tense creates a distancing yet personal narrative style, almost as if Desai is addressing a version of herself. Though the novel resists easy explanations or conclusions, its evocative imagery and thought-provoking questions linger long after the story concludes.

Rosarita stands as an exquisite miniature, showcasing that, even in her eighties, Anita Desai’s literary prowess remains gloriously undiminished.

Source: The Guardian