hen authors break a long literary silence by releasing a new book, readers are likely to approach their work with a heady mix of expectation and apprehension. However, a celebratory spirit surrounds Booker Prize-shortlisted author Anita Desai’s return to publishing – at least among the loyal readers of her quiet, lyrical prose.

With her new novella, titled Rosarita, the 87-year-old doyenne of Indian literature in English has enriched her oeuvre, which now comprises 12 novels, six collections of stories and three children’s books.

Desai’s latest offering features a daughter’s quest to peel back the confounding layers of mystery surrounding her late mother’s past. Rosarita begins in a crowded, sun-dappled park in San Miguel, Mexico. An Indian student named Bonita is accosted by an unknown woman as she is trying to find a bench where she can sit and read her Spanish newspaper.

“[Y]ou must be… my adored Rosarita’s little girl,” the stranger tells Bonita.

Rosarita, the woman claims, was an “Oriental bird” from India who came to Mexico to paint. Bonita initially dismisses the stranger’s account as it is laden with inaccuracies: her late mother, named Sarita, had never travelled to Mexico. However, the woman’s words flow like an endless “torrent” and sow the seeds of doubt in Bonita’s mind.

Fuelled by a blend of cynicism and a curiosity about the hidden facets of her mother’s life, the Indian student allows the stranger to draw her into the hapless tale of an artistically inclined Rosarita. The disjointed narrative that emerges through Bonita’s interactions with the woman could very well be the product of the latter’s imagination.

Desai urges readers to remain wary of the stranger’s version of Rosarita’s life through a series of literary devices. The two epigraphs to the novella suggest that some truths are best left uncovered. The first – a poem by Fernando Pessoa – cautions against searching for versions of other people’s lives that may appear somewhat reductionist.

The second – a passage from Antonio Tabucchi’s It’s Getting Later All the Time – is a veiled reminder of how some crucial events in life are not visible to ordinary bystanders.

At the same time, Rosarita is largely written from a second-person perspective. Through this technique, the narrator allows readers to partake in Bonita’s journey of discovering her mother’s secret life but doesn’t open a doorway into Rosarita’s mind.

In one of the novella’s five chapters, the second-person narrator assumes the guise of an omniscient yet unreliable third-person narrative voice seeking to understand a younger Rosarita’s motivations for visiting Mexico. Be that as it may, the version of Rosarita that emerges in this section remains an extension of her daughter’s grief-addled fantasies.

Throughout the narrative, Rosarita is absent from the linear arc of the narrative, but remains a dominant presence in the memories of other characters. While this is a clever technique, readers are warned against viewing the enigmatic aura surrounding Rosarita as a promise of a spine-tingling revelation. Steered by a quiet restraint, Desai’s fiction tends to evade explosive denouements.

Through her fiction, Desai presents an exploration of characters on the brink of marginality and in danger of being excluded from mainstream discourse. The titular protagonist’s marginality shines through in her absence. Rosarita tackles public and private discord through an almost punitive silence.

She sacrifices her desire for creative self-expression to fulfill her domestic responsibilities and patriarchal expectations. Moreover, she is burdened by traumatic memories of Partition and doesn’t even gain the opportunity to share them with her loved ones, especially her children. Art becomes an antidote to Rosarita’s suffering – albeit fleetingly.

In Rosarita, Desai ventures back into the terrain of her earlier fiction insofar as it draws attention to the constraints faced by women in India’s oppressive social fabric. The 94-page novella specifically bears echoes of the author’s fourth novel, Where Shall We Go This Summer.

Published in 1975, the novel features a “heavily pregnant” Sita who escapes her domestic life and seeks refuge on an island in an effort to “not give birth.” Rosarita is far more nuanced and memorable than Sita, even though the latter figures prominently in the linear trajectory of Where Shall We Go This Summer.

Rosarita also gives Desai the opportunity to draw an intricate line of connection between her fictional works set in India and Mexico. Twenty years ago, some of Desai’s ardent fans were puzzled when she wrote The Zigzag Way, a novel set in Mexico that had no Indian characters.

The author’s deep affinity with Mexico can be gauged from her observations on how she detects an “Indian core” in the North American country. Rosarita evokes this “Indian core” by drawing parallels between Partition and the Mexican revolution of the 1910s. Trains were a pivotal motif in both historical events and Rosarita’s traumatic association with them acts as a point of confluence between two national tragedies as well as Desai’s two competing creative landscapes.

Rosarita is a poignant tale about a grief-stricken woman’s fascination with an image of her mother she will never fully comprehend.

A long-awaited literary comeback, Desai’s new work also carries subtle resonances of her earlier fictional triumphs. The opening line bears a distinctly serpentine quality – an enduring testament to her literary craftsmanship. At one stage, an office room is described as “crepuscular” (a signature Desai adjective). A rich, luminous novella, Rosarita is welcome proof that her talent hasn’t dimmed over the decades. It has, rather, gained new creative ground.

Rosarita

Author: Anita Desai

Publisher: Picador

Pages: 96

The reviewer is a freelance journalist and the author of No Funeral for Nazia