‘Rosarita’ by Anita Desai is a tale of two women, bonded by blood, free spirit

Seated on a park bench in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende, Bonita, a young language student from India, savours the scene: children playing around the bandstand, a wandering balloon seller, and the pigeons strutting and bowing to each other, “muttering greetings like old gentlemen on their morning constitutionals”. Reading the opening passage of Anita Desai’s new novella, ‘Rosarita’, one is bound to agree with poet Keki N Daruwalla’s observation that Desai is as much a poet as a novelist.

The calm of the opening scene is brazenly interrupted when a flamboyant elderly woman accosts Bonita, claims she is the spitting image of an old friend and conclusively decides that Bonita is indeed the daughter of that friend, “the Oriental bird” Rosarita, who had decades ago journeyed to the very same city to study art. This revelation both unsettles and intrigues Bonita for she had never known her deceased mother Sarita to paint or ever set foot on foreign soil. She is at first almost dismissive of this claim by the woman, Vicky, who will thereafter be referred to as Stranger and then Trickster. But strangely, Bonita finds herself compelled to give “credence to a past that had never been mentioned or guessed at” and wonders whether the Stranger could, “like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?”

The second-person narrative pulls the reader deeper into the vortex within Bonita’s mind as she tries to piece together the life and journey, real or imagined, of Sarita/Rosarita. Bonita stitches together a what-might-have-been story of Mother’s flight to Mexico, aided by some hazy recollections, some highly imaginative but probable situations and some knotty questions she alone must try to answer. What was the trigger for Mother’s quite unexpected journey? Was it a lecture she attended on the connection found in the art during India’s Partition and the Mexican revolution? Did the unspeakable horrors of the two tragic chapters in history documented at the event open up “some wound that had been stitched up” or a suppressed but carefully guarded family history? “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?”

The novel then is also about memories, of the ones that haunt and stay, of the ones that are shuttered but will eventually break free too. Bonita recalls her own rather subdued childhood at the sprawling bungalow of her grandparents, where the presiding deity was Grandfather. Grandmother was the woman who “set her household on wheels” with well-trained servants and zero domestic crisis. Bonita also recalls Mother slipping into the same obligatory duty of “a company wife”, though she showed no sign of pride in such a role, only an “unwilling martyrdom” to Father’s daily unbreakable executive routine. When Father returned to his “well-ordered home, he expected to be met by a wife prepared for the evening and the obligatory party (without which they would have been deemed social failures)”.

In his reflective piece for Indian Literature, after Desai was conferred the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2007, Daruwalla wrote that she brilliantly excavated the griefs of Indian women and brought them to light, “neither too gently nor with a scalpel”. The lyrical quality, rich imagery and flawless eye for detail that inform much of Desai’s novels can be seen in ‘Rosarita’ too — essentially a tale of two women, bonded by blood, fierce determination and a free spirit.

In Bonita’s quest to see her mother in a way she had never seen, she is, as she acknowledges, allowing her own experience of the journey to substitute her mother’s. One that may eventually set her free.