Book review: Rosarita by Anita Desai

A journey within, a journey without

The story opens on a cracker of a note. Our protagonist, Bonita, is sitting on a park bench in San Miguel, Mexico, absorbed in her own thoughts. She is approached by Victoria, a dramatically dressed Mexican woman of a certain age, who insists she must be the artist Rosarita`s daughter. But Bonita`s mother Sarita has never travelled to Mexico and much less did she dabble in art.

Thus does a bewildered but suspicious Bonita fall into a rabbit hole far away from India, accompanied by the Stranger/Pursuer/ Trickster friend of Rosarita. This is typical Anita Desai territory, and we watch as the young woman,  in Mexico in a  pure act of serendipity, gets unwittingly drawn into retracing her mythical  mother Rosarita`s steps, and a cat and mouse game of sorts starts up. Again, typical of Desai`s heroines, Bonita too has much to come to terms with, so this becomes an internal as well as external journey for her.

Rosarita is Desai`s new work after seven years and carries all the familiar touchstones: repressed women lurking on the borderlines of oppression and lovelessness, autocratic men who in auto-mode run over the dreams and aspirations of their women, the choice these women face to make domestic duties acts of drudgery or act of pride…and women who brood, ponder, ruminate endlessly.

The narrative is in second person and a trifle unsettling, at times almost challenging. The writing is familiar to fans of the author, the spare, cut to the bone sentences which nevertheless hold rich seams of meaning in them, the partial pulling aside of curtains to give readers a partial glimpse of what lies beyond, leaving them to fill in the gaps themselves, long stretches where nothing much happens.  The story unpeels itself like an onion but those conversant with the writer`s works will know better than to expect pat endings.

Shifting scenes

There are sentences that turn so fluidly,  like: the afternoon unfolding like a scroll, its beginning and its end both invisible. The expression on her face …of disappointment, distress, the look of failure…that allowed Father to assume his look of success …the only success of the house.  Her relief so keen she almost moans aloud as at a thrust at her ribs of revelation.

As the daughter unboxes her memories, some of them decidedly unusual –there`s was something churlish about her (mother), wasn`t there, she muses — there hangs an air of melancholia above her, above the mysterious Victoria who drops out of the story rather suddenly, above the places and the people in this narrative.

The  scenes shift but the emotions remain the same. All the characters are fleeing something which portends disaster for them. There is a lack of description to both Sarita/Rosarita and Bonita, in sharp contrast to the beautifully described rooms of an ancestral house, of arboreal spaces, of the goings-on in a plaza, and the reader soon finds themselves doing pointillist work and filling in the details. We realise Bonita is a good-looking woman only at the end of this slim volume when someone says artists would happily line up to paint her. Sadly, though, this reviewer did not really feel for either the Mother or the Daughter.

So, did Sarita/Rosarita lead a double life? And did she throw up one life for the other? Did Bonita find herself? It`s clarity the young woman clearly  seeks and at the end of the story, she does get some sort of clarity, focussing mainly on the fact that one can run but one can`t really escape the past.

Gorgeous writing as always, interesting plot, but it all peters out into nothingness. There is more kept from the reader than revealed. However, Rosarita is a must-read for those who like Anita Desai`s rich yet  restrained prose.

 Rosarita By Anita Desai. Picador India. Rs 499. 94 pages.

https://www.deccanherald.com/features/books/running-to-stay-in-the-same-place-3093836

This ran in the Sunday Herald of 7 July 2024.