Book: Rosarita
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Picador India
The novella ‘Rosarita’ is Anita Desai’s latest work. Anita Desai is one of the most important Indian writers in English who was born in Mussoorie, India to a German mother Toni Nime and Bengali father Dhirendra Nath Mazumdar. She spent her childhood in Delhi, India, they moved away abroad and then they moved back to India in 1920. Anita Desai grew up speaking German, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. She learned English language when she went to a missionary school. Anita Desai has a B.A in English literature from Miranda House at the University of Delhi. Anita Desai married Ashwin Desai, a business executive in 1958 and had four children. Anita Desai’s first novel was Cry, the Peacock (1963). Her other works are Voices In The City (1965), Bye-Bye Blackbird (1971), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Fire On The Mountain (1977), Clear Light Of Day (1980), The Village By The Sea (1982), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Journey To Ithaca (1995), Fasting, Feasting (1999), Diamond Dust (2000), The Zigzag Way (2004), The Artist Of Disappearance (2011) and The Complete Stories (2017).
Anita Desai was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Winifred Holtby Prize in 1978, the Sahitya Akademi of India Award in 1979 and the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Smith, Mount Holyoke and MIT. She lives currently in the United States of America.
‘Rosarita’ is a 112 paged novella, the most recent work of Anita Desai, published by Picador India, 2024. The cover art is an “untitled self-portrait” painted by Amrita Sher-Gil in 1931.
Rosarita is a fascinating story a young Indian woman called Bonita who goes to San Miguel de Allende situated in Guanajuato, Mexico to learn Spanish language and is unpredictably confronted by a strange woman who claims to know Bonita’s mother.
This claim is ridiculous to Bonita since she never even thought of her mother visiting Mexico when she was young. The strange woman’s name is Vicky and she is Mexican. She claims that Bonita is the uncanny, spitting image of her mother called ‘Rosarita’ despite of Bonita protesting meekly that her mother’s name is not Rosarita but Sunita.
However, she goes on this unexpected journey to find out more about ‘Rosarita’ whom Vicky claims to know in her youth, who was an Indian woman who had come to San Miguel to learnt the art of painting and how she sat on the same place where Vicky found Bonita, in the Jardin, where Vicky tells Bonita that is where her mother ‘Rosarita’ used to sit and paint under the guidance of one such celebrated art maestro by the name of Francisco.
Bonita is completely appalled and thrown off by all these new information about her mother ‘Rosarita’. She does not remember her mother ever mentioning a friend or someone named Vicky or Victoria, neither did she know for sure if her mother ever painted or was interested in painting. Bonita finds these absurd! However, Vicky or Victoria, the strange Mexican woman who claims to have been a friend of her mother ‘Rosarita’ who was a painter insisted that they catch up and meet her again.
Even though Bonita continues to attempt to persuade this strange woman that her she must have mistaken her for someone else, the strange woman doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, on the contrary, she is absolutely convinced that Bonita is her old friend Rosarita’s daughter and fate had been kind to her to make them meet this way. Victoria says “But, darling, I see her so clearly before me, as clearly as I see you. And you have the same way of putting your fingers to your lips when you speak, pushing your hair behind your ears, even that charming mole near your mouth. And now you have come to see where she had once been, perhaps also to paint? You are artist too?”
This encounter makes Bonita think of a painting hung above her bed in her childhood home of a painting made of “wishy-washy pale pastels”, a painting Bonita never scrutinized it and it never occurred to her that someone had made that painting. Bonita never really asked herself questions about her mother or ever wondered how she must have been when she was young, before she became a mother, before she became a wife.
The stranger’s encounter forces Bonita to dive into her past and questions her observations about her mother and father, their relationship, especially she is intrigued now about her mother and really wonders if her mother could have once this ‘Rosarita’that Victoria describes and claims to be her friend.
The novella also illustrates the parallel worlds of a Delhi family (Bonita’s childhood home) and of Victoria’s memories of old Mexico and the social circumstances that surrounded these individuals’ lives then. Anita Desai also lusciously describes the settings and backdrop of the beautiful city of San Miguel and of the beautiful Mexican colors, foods, clothes, music and its people and its history too.
Anita Desai enthralls us with her perfect descriptive writing in this novella. The connection between Mexico and India is established through the histories of these two countries and the characters in the book too and also the similarities of themes in those days chosen by Mexican and Indian painters, Indian painters who had gone through the partition. As Anita Desai has written on the author’s note on the book that in 1947 when the partition of India took place, there were millions of refugees born due to the partition and its violence and history resembled that of the “historical role played by trains in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s”.
Another true story as Desai writes on the author’s note is that of the GI Bill that was passed by the Amercian government in 1944 which made the education to universities in the Americas free who were returning as war veterans and some of them ended up going to Mexico, in San Miguel de Allende and one such Indian artist was Satish Gujral who went to study mural art via scholarship and Desai informs us that he “clearly saw the parallel between the Mexican Revolution and India’s partition” which he experienced as a refugee and that his paintings are also full of the “same violence and tragedy as the murals of his maestros, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros”.
Rosarita is a novella written masterfully with a plot that connects two beautiful and wounded countries, of their pasts, their present, their art scenes and of also an individual, Bonita’s journey to find out who her mother was or wasn’t and also the connections between India and Mexico through art and people and her own life.
The writer is currently pursuing Masters in English Language and Literature from Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru. She earlier interned at Bowel Cancer UK as a public relations assistant in London, and after receiving training as an English teacher under Via Lingua International in Istanbul
