Anita Desai's 'Rosarita' review: Concise, evocative story of a daughter retracing her mother's journey

'Rosarita' is Anita Desai's first novel in over 10 years. Published by Picador India, the book released on July 7, 2024. (Image courtesy Pan Macmillan India)

If you've ever wondered what your parents or grandparents were like as young people, Anita Desai's latest book 'Rosarita' might strike a chord.

'Rosarita' tells the story of a young language student Bonita who travels to San Miguel in Mexico for an education. A run-in with a stranger leads to a surprise discovery: Bonita's mother Sarita/Rosarita may have made a similar journey from India to Mexico, to train as an artist.

The protagonist Bonita's almost-reluctant desire to find out more about her mother takes her, and the stranger, across Mexico—to a remote village and then Colima, La Tenacatita Bay and La Manzanilla. Throughout the novella, Bonita—and therefore the reader—is never entirely sure if this story about her mother coming to Mexico is true. Bonita's only clues come from the "Stranger" whom she meets in the Jardin (public park) near her school.

Just as Bonita begins to find resonances for the stranger's story in fragments of her own memories—a painting at her home that she'd never quite examined closely, invitations her mother got to attend lectures on art at the Mexican embassy, her mother's "box" storeroom with things and papers and signs of a life that no one had bothered to investigate—Bonita rechristens the old woman "Trickster" from the earlier "Stranger".

As can be expected from one of the doyens of late 20th century Indian English writing, Desai's writing is evocative. She builds up Bonita's sense of uncertainty to the extent where we as readers aren't always sure what to believe either.

For a brief moment, it feels like even the "Stranger" might be a figment of Bonita's imagination - some part of her brain trying to make sense of the memories she has of her mother, or as Desai writes in a different context in 'Rosarita', "a charmed moment embroidered by recollection". Sample this passage where Bonita has been waiting for several days, to run into the old woman again after that first strange encounter: "There you sink down on a bench, so deep in thoughts that come from a great distance away that you only gradually become aware of someone beside you, as if your thoughts had conjured her into being, half obscured as she is by a vast straw hat and voluminous skirts of lace and cotton and tulle, umber, cinnamon, saffron and indigo. Slowly a face turns to you with a great beam of yellowing teeth."

Another distinctive feature of the writing is that descriptions of landscapes often echo the characters' state of mind in 'Rosarita'. In that sense, Desai seems just as interested in the internal journeys Bonita and Sarita, before her, make as the actual sojourns through Mexico. Sample this passage: "An egret takes off from a still, reflective pool, trailing its legs like afterthoughts, and you feel it lift you with it into the hazy light."

As with many of Anita Desai's previous works, nothing much happens in 'Rosarita'. 'Rosarita' is also not the first novella to use an external journey as a way to explore interiority and unpack complex relationships. It is also not the first to examine the relationship between mother and daughter. What it is, however, is that rare piece of writing that is lovely in the first read and lovelier still the second time around.

There's just one curious detail that is difficult to square off here: the cover depicts a 1931 self-portrait by the famous Indian artist Amrita Shergil who died young under strange circumstances. It's unclear if the cover is in any way a clue or a note on how to read this book. Or a design decision that's strangely divorced from the contents of the story.