Amid a cacophony of children playing, “pigeons strutting the paving stones”, old people exchanging greetings, and vendors walking by, Bonita —an Indian girl who’s in Mexico to learn Spanish—has stationed herself on a bench in a park in San Miguel with a Spanish-language newspaper in hand, signalling no desire to talk to anyone. But, as is, the atmosphere resembles that of any community park in an Indian city, and there’s always someone eager to initiate a conversation with a visibly colloquial outsider like Bonita. Dressed flamboyantly and donning festive makeup, Victoria (aka Vicky) calls out to Bonita, confirming that she has been keenly watching her.
She is sure, she tells Bonita, that she is the mirror image of her beloved friend, Rosarita. Thus begins Anita Desai’s latest novel—two decades after The Zigzag Way—Rosarita. Interestingly, the previous novel was also set in Mexico.
“It’s the closest I can get to India when I’m in America,” Desai had noted earlier. Like a primordial truth, Desai’s novels have been about the quiet, simmering feelings that often go unacknowledged. For example, though Bonita finds Vicky “too intrusive”, didn’t she want “and [was] certainly in need of—exactly such an ‘interchange’ with a ‘native speaker’ who approaches you so warmly, so effusively?” Why was Bonita bumfuzzled then? Was it the histrionics of Vicky’s mannerisms that put her off? Or was there a promise of discovery about Bonita’s mother—whose name was Sarita, not Rosarita as she informs Vicky—that she sensed and quietly indulged in an exchange despite her unwillingness? A private history, to which Vicky was privy, is hinted at in the following sentences.
One is Bonita’s afterthought on hiding from Vicky: “But hide from whom—this stranger or your mother?” Later, this: “And in truth you too feel a shadow fall at this, this loss of which you had till now been ignorant.” In this manner, Desai layers the narrative with a sense of reveal, suspicion and mystery—and all three collectively drive this novel further. As Bonita learns that her mother may have arrived in Mexico and could’ve been the artist under the tutelage of Maestro Francisco that Vicky is referring to, she also conjures up ways to disprove it; first, to herself, and then, to Vicky.
She thinks: “Wasn’t my mother too domesticated to embark on a journey to a foreign land?” But then, she’s reminded of a sketch “in its faded rose-pinks and lavenders” that had “become so familiar to [her] throughout [her] childhood [that she] had never scrutinised it and it had never occurred to [her] to ask who had made it, when or where: it was just there.” Again, classic Desai: uncovering the most seen unseen in everyday lives. With Bonita reminiscing her past, the transition from Mexico to Old Delhi occurs seamlessly.
She remembers her meticulous grandmother and a stubborn grandfather, and the gendered partition of the house. The excruciating details of the household and the day-to-day activities conducted in this patriarchal setup are overwhelming yet mesmerising. Then comes a flood of memories of her mother and father.
The get-togethers, which came as a byproduct of her father’s occupation, disclosed something about her mother. Several “incidents revealed her unsuitability as a wife. Father’s family had established order; out of what disorder had she arrived?” All this is followed by selective amnesia and a past one can never forget.
Perhaps Vicky is telling the truth. But how to confirm that? To tread along, and Bonita does the same. She’s surprised that she says yes to visiting all the places Vicky says her mother had once visited.
In the first leg of this journey, when she’s waiting for Vicky to turn up, she sees the “face that looks out from the rebozo she has wrapped about her head is lined with age and pain”. This is some other Vicky, who Bonita later names the “Trickster”. As the story progresses, it’s time for Vicky to knock on the doors of the past —almost involuntarily.
It’s a whirlpool of emotions to manage for Bonita, but the voyage towards a discovery she never imagined had already ensued. Rosarita is not a ‘return’ story; it’s a “pursuit of the recovery” of a lived past hitherto inaccessible. Here’s the revelatory dialogue between Vicky and Bonita in which the former informs that Rosarita was coaxed into joining a commune to paint “terrible pictures”: “And trains? Did they paint trains?” The narrator, however, is unsure who asks this.
In Rosarita, Desai takes the subtextual, pensive approach towards telling an alternative narrative of horrifying historical events like the Partition of India and the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. In both cases, trains played a significant role, which Desai deftly weaves into the narrative. While the dust settles even after a huge storm, scars on one’s psyche are inherited from one generation to another, informing and giving birth to subliminal stories like Rosarita.
It’s marvellous how in less than 100 pages Desai manages to offer multiple landscapes, cultures and crises. Liminal and montage-like, her prose illuminates like strokes in a masterful painter’s creation..
