This profound and riddling novel follows a young Indian woman’s quest through Mexico to find out more about her mother
Anita Desai’s riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. “The Stranger” – elderly, overfriendly and peculiarly dressed “in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions” – claims to know Bonita’s dead mother, whom she calls “Rosarita”. She says they met and became friends when the latter came to pursue art under the tutelage of Mexican maestros. Bonita has no recollections of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico. She remembers, however, “a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at home, of a woman seated on a park bench – and yes, it could have been one here in San Miguel – with a child playing in the sand at her feet”. The woman “is not looking at the child and the child is not looking at her, as if they had no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent”.
Written in the second person, the novel interrogates the gulf that can exist between a parent and her child, and the sketch – forgotten and recalled – is a sly mise en abyme that also speaks to the fickleness of memory, and the ever-porous boundaries between the past and the present. Bonita has no information about who made it, when or where. Next, she is looking back on the “years no one mentioned again once they were over, the time when Mother was absent and you were taken to live in your grandparents’ house in Old Delhi”. Bonita’s memories congeal around the figure of her paternal grandmother, a woman who took great delight in running her home but quietly suffered her domineering and authoritarian husband. Time spent in her company proves eye-opening; when her mother finally reappears, the child considers her “unsuitability as a wife”. She observes how she surrenders to the demands of domesticity, and honours the lifestyle of her husband, an uppity executive, “although she showed no sign of Grandmother’s pride in such an achievement, only of an unwilling martyrdom”. Bonita will later opt to study languages – first French, then Portuguese and Spanish – fuelled by her determination to travel and escape a similar fate.
