Outsider, that’s me: Anita Desai on belonging, identity, writing every day

New Delhi: Still a foreigner in her adopted home in the US and finding herself alienated from the rapidly changing India of today, veteran author Anita Desai says she has accepted the “outsider” tag and that’s what a writer should be anyway. The 87-year-old, one of India’s best known writers in English and a pioneer in the genre, has always been intrigued by the question of identity. Born to a German immigrant mother and an Indian father, it is a theme she has explored in depth in her many books and in her personal life as well. “I am still a foreigner here, I am still an outsider here, and I have accepted it. Well, that’s what a writer’s life is: to be the outsider. India has changed so much. I don’t understand those changes. There are many occasions where I feel I don’t belong in India,” Desai told PTI in a Zoom interview from her home in Cold Spring, New York. “...I don’t feel like going back to India, to the old Delhi that I grew up in. Because the place doesn’t exist anymore. It has been torn down, rebuilt or just vanished.”

Desai, who started writing at the age of seven and has just released her latest work, a novella called “Rosarita”, a haunting tale of identity, memory, grief and generational trauma, still puts pen to paper every single day. “I spend some time writing every day. Not always for a novel... It could be a bunch of letters, reviews or notes for a diary. If I don’t write, not put pen to paper, for me it is sort of a lost day. There is a gap in it, I need to fill it, which keeps me writing. Also, one has to keep practising. Like the way you do in music and art,” said the author who celebrated her 87th birthday last month.

The grande dame of Indian literature has moved to slim novellas but her appetite for the written work is as strong as that of the Miranda House college student in her 20s – when she wrote her first novel “Cry the Peacock”. Since that first work in 1963, the Mussoorie-born Desai, who moved to England in the 1980s and eventually settled in the US, has written nearly 20 novels, novellas and children’s books. Her last book, “The Artist of Disappearance”, released in 2011, was a collection of three novellas. She’s been shortlisted three times for the much coveted Booker Prize -- for “Clear Light of Day” (1980), “In Custody” (1984) and “Fasting, Feasting” (1999).

Desai has received numerous awards and honours, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel “Fire on the Mountain”, Padma Bhushan in 2014 and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for short novel “Village by the Sea” in 1982. Her latest book tells the story of Bonita, a young Indian student who goes to Mexico to study but finds herself digging her late mother’s past after an elderly stranger tells her that Rosarita -- the name given by the mysterious stranger to the mythical mother -- stayed in the same country, decades before, as an art student. “I never knew the countries my parents came from. You grasp essentials and you use your imaginations to build up their past... And that’s what Bonita finds herself doing. She has left India, her family, wanting to become an adult and live a different life. “And fortunately meets the trickster who won’t let her, who takes her back to the past, says ‘No, that is where you came from’. So, that was the fascination of the story,” said Desai on the book, which has a rare self-portrait by eminent Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil as its jacket.

Set in past-day India and present-day Mexico, readers will also see flashes of the usual Desai trappings – post colonial Indian family life, including the deeply ingrained patriarchy in Indian households -- in the story. “If there was a god, it could only be The Husband,” reads the book, as Bonita recalls life in her grandparents’ house. The novella at the end leaves the reader with more questions than answers, always wondering what is real and what is mere figment of imagination of the grieving daughter. And that, according to Desai, was the plan. “I have left it very minimal, left it all to ambiguity and suggestions. I have not written a full length novel. Also, I haven’t written a section on the Partition in India, revolution in Mexico. Just suggested these things, the way most of us only get to know, very little,” she added.

She got married to the late Ashvin Desai, an Indian businessman, in 1958. The couple has four children. Anita Desai left India at the age of 45 to teach, first at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and later for a long teaching career in the US. She is a retired professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Discussing the plot details of her daughter-centric novella, the conversation segues into Desai’s writer daughter Kiran Desai and her remarkable 2006 Booker prize win for “The Inheritance of Loss”. The doting mother recalled how she was too afraid even to watch the award ceremony on TV. She actually went to a Tibetan village without television on D-Day. “I didn’t really believe that I would win it, so I didn’t feel the loss of it. But I was so afraid on behalf of my daughter, I couldn’t bear to watch it. I hid in a small Tibetan village my brother was living in then. There was no television there. I was in such a bad state till the next morning when I started getting phone calls to tell me that she (Kiran) had won,” she said. “Rosarita”, published by PanMacmillan India and priced at Rs 499, is currently available for purchase across online and offline stores.