The day of my interview with Anita Desai, there are flash floods in greater New York and, after my train breaks down and I am stranded at the station, the 87-year-old plunges out in her car to fetch me. Desai is tiny, with a very direct gaze that makes one feel – unreasonably, perhaps – that she is often in the position of having to tolerate idiots. That the Indian novelist finds herself, at this stage of her life, living in a small town in the Hudson Valley some 90 minutes north of Manhattan strikes her as thoroughly absurd. “But then life in America always seems to me very random,” she says. There are worse starting points for a career in fiction.
The strength of Desai’s novels has always been, partly, in her ability to withhold, an instinct that has become more pronounced with age. Her latest novel, Rosarita, is the shortest yet – “I’ve come down to a novella!” she says, delighted – and tells the story of Bonita, a young Indian woman who travels to Mexico to study and stumbles upon unknown evidence that her late mother had once been there, decades before. It is about grief, and longing, and the fact that no one ever really knows about other people, even – or, perhaps, particularly – one’s own families. I found it very moving; you are never sure, in the narrative, of what is real, and what is the projection of a grieving daughter. But, says Desai, “readers are frustrated and would like more. I have had readers say, oh, but what happens in the end? I said, look –” she looks briefly indignant, “ – I’m not writing a Victorian novel starting with childhood and going on to old age and death! This is just one little section. A little piece of their lives. A fragment.”
