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: that perennial conflict between duty and desire, expectations and independence, that plays out in different but familiar forms through each generation. In Clear Light of Day, the first of her three novels to be shortlisted for the Booker prize and the book she called “the most autobiographical”, this examination of family politics takes place against the backdrop of partition, a theme she revisits in Rosarita, her first new novel in more than a decade; a spare and haunting story of little more than 90 pages that nevertheless touches on complex ideas of memory, identity and the response of art to violence.
Bonita, a young Indian woman studying languages in Mexico, is accosted one day in the public gardens by a flamboyant old woman who claims to recognise her. The woman declares that she knew Bonita’s late mother – “my adored Rosarita” – years ago when Rosarita visited San Miguel to study art. Bonita is caught off-guard; as far as she knows, her mother – whose name was Sarita – neither travelled nor painted. Her instinctive response is to reach for her dark glasses, “so as to screen yourself from her and hide. But hide from whom – this stranger or your mother?”
