Anita Desai has often experimented with language, theme and form in novels like Clear Light of Day, Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay and The Artist of Disappearance. In her latest, Rosarita (Picador), a dream-like novella, Desai gives the narrator a second-person voice. When a stranger plants an idea into young student Bonita’s mind, that her mother’s name was Rosarita and that she had studied art in Mexico, it sends her off to imaginatively fill the absences left by her mother. In a phone conversation, the soft-spoken and thrice-Booker-shortlisted Desai, now 87, talks about her Mexico connection, how she has used techniques of poetry in her prose and why India has become remote to her. Edited excerpts:
What took you to Mexico to write ‘Rosarita’?
Well, I first went to Mexico to escape from a very bitter North American winter. But the minute I stepped off the plane in a strange country, I felt entirely at home. I thought I had returned to India; the resemblance between the two countries struck me immediately, and I kept returning to Mexico. Rosarita became a kind of a patchwork, a collage of my impressions of the India that I had left and the Mexico that was new to me, and trying to find how they fit together. My instinct told me that they did fit together, yet I couldn’t find the facts, the necessary ground work on which to base them, till I discovered that I could put my bewilderment into my narrator’s voice. She was the one who created this imaginary portrait of the mother who was no longer alive.
Why did you want to tell this dream-like story in a second-person voice?
For long I have wanted to experiment with using the second person because it seems to me such an immediate way to reach the reader. The dream-like quality, as you call it, is created by bringing in the trickster who is a magician figure. She plants this seed of an idea in the narrator’s mind that there was such a character, Rosarita, who studied art in Mexico, and although the narrator never heard such a story from her mother and disbelieves it, she can’t help imagining that it might be true and what would her mother’s experiences have been had it been true. So, she creates an imaginary mother.
Is the novella a favoured form now? How has poetry shaped your work?
I have been trying to model my prose upon the techniques of poetry for quite a long time, to as far back as a small book I wrote, Fire on the Mountain (1977). I have tried to reduce my work to a set of images and to use suggestion rather than any prosaic facts. I always quote some lines from an Emily Dickinson poem to describe my work: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant/ Success in circuit lies’.
As for the novella form, I have also come to it through a long circuitous route. In earlier years, I used to write novels which were fully thought out and plotted but I found myself happier with the novella form when I wrote my last book, The Artist of Disappearance, which is a collection of three novellas. I was comfortable with this form; I could put everything I meant to in a very short space, selected and chosen carefully.
What was it like to write before Salman Rushdie and post ‘Midnight’s Children’?
I will use my own experience as a model to answer your question. English for me was a literary language. It wasn’t the first language I spoke, but it was the first language I learnt to read and write. So it always belonged to books; the books and literature I read were my model, and that made my language a more literary form of prose on paper. Although there had been predecessors to Rushdie’s work, like Raja Rao who experimented with bringing in Indian intonations, as did Mulk Raj Anand and G.V. Desani, Rushdie brought it into the present times. He seemed to use English that was all around in India, on the streets, in the shops, in the cinema. He wrote on very serious subjects in this language, which encouraged a whole new generation to write about their views of India, their experience, using a foreign language but in a way that Indians used it.
Has the India you knew changed?
Unlike my parents who never went back to their homelands [Germany/ East Bengal] because they had mostly been destroyed or had vanished, I could constantly return to India. But now I realise that India has changed in the years that I have been absent and I have changed in the years that I have been away from India, and so it has become more and more remote to me. Now when I go back to India, I keep searching for the India I had known as a child and as a young woman and I have to recognise the fact that that doesn’t exist any more.
Do you read contemporary Indian novels?
A lot of interesting things are being done in regional languages; translations have improved greatly and the books are much more accessible. I think mostly of the books by Perumal Murugan; he writes about small communities in Tamil Nadu. The language is so marvellous and they are so well-translated that it helps you to enter his world you have never visited.
The cover of ‘Rosarita’ is so powerful, a self-portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil.
It’s a wonderful discovery made by my Indian publisher, Teesta Guha Sarkar. She was looking into Amrita Sher-Gil’s work with an idea of finding something suitable for the cover and she came across this early self-portrait, which Amrita had painted when she was an art student in Paris in the 1930s. It was a very bold choice to make because I myself had not imagined or described the character of the mother or the narrator or the stranger, in fact, and Teesta’s discovery seems so exactly right. I’d never seen this portrait before, though I was familiar with Sher-Gil’s work ever since I was a young girl. I think it’s such a dramatic one for a young woman to have painted, the gaze is so determined and direct, and so thoughtful. It gave me a tremendous thrill to find myself on the same cover as Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting.
Your first few novels revolve around domestic circles and interiority. Was ‘In Custody’ a response to that?
I had written so many books about the world of Indian women which was largely a domestic world. But there was a time I felt that I had to step out of that domestic ground if I wanted to write about a wider experience, not necessarily of the whole world, but the Indian world. I thought that it would not be realistic to give an Indian woman an active public life. There have been women in the past who have led extraordinary lives, but it’s not realistic to say that that would have been available to all Indian women. It had to be a male character who experienced the outer world — once I did that, I found that the male experience of the world would largely be one surrounded by other men. In Custody was also a kind of experiment.
That brings us to one of your remarkable characters, Hugo Baumgartner, who lives with the fact that he is not “acceptable” in his native land nor in his land of exile. How did ‘Baumgartner’s Bombay’ come about?
Although I was writing in English and experimenting with how to adapt it to the Indian experience, there were other languages that I wasn’t able to bring in and I found that frustrating. For instance, I had grown up with German because my mother was German. It must have been the very first language that I heard or spoke. It was a baby language, the language of nursery rhymes but I had silenced it completely because how could I plant it into an Indian world? Then this name came to me — Baumgartner — which immediately marked the Germanness of this man and also his Jewishness, and having got that name, I then had to invent a life for him.
Who are some of the writers you are reading and loving, of late?
Jenny Erpenbeck’s work really interests me. She explores something new in each book she writes. The first book I had read of hers was Go, Went, Gone (2015), which was about African refugees trying to settle in Berlin. I am also very sad to hear about the sudden, unexpected passing away of Ismail Kadare. I have just read his novel, Twilight of the Eastern Gods (2014). He draws the story from his time as a young writer at Moscow’s Gorky Institute; writers from all over the erstwhile U.S.S.R. collected there, and it’s about the year that Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize which created such turmoil in the Russian literary world. The book presents this world to us, and it was just so marvellous, I am determined to go out and search for more of his work.
What does your writing day look like?
I have always kept the mornings free for writing, and even if I am not working at a novel, I do some kind of writing, letters or a diary, notes for a book I am thinking about — spending time with pen and paper, and leaving the reading to later times of the day.
What would you like to tell young writers? How do they address issues of the day, with the world taking such a turn? Is it easier to be outspoken today?
It must be a marvellous time for Indian writers; so many things have come to the forefront, things that may have been taken for granted, maybe thought over but not argued or spoken about. Now they have come to the forefront, and are absolutely unavoidable, and it is such a time for young Indian writers to confront those issues. We simply took it for granted, that this was the way the world was. No one takes it for granted any more, I think all young writers are aware that things can change. I know it’s difficult to get these things into print, but I think if we manage to assert freedom of speech, then it can be done, and that is why we have all got to speak out for freedom, in our writing, in our speech.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
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