Mother of mysteries: Rosarita, by Anita Desai, reviewed

There are other reasons beyond shortage of time (the acclaimed Indian novelist Anita Desai has just turned 87) to write a novella; the genre is as attractive and prestigious as it is fashionable. The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and limitations for its effects. Rosarita does both.

A young woman, Bonita, addressed as ‘you’ throughout, is taking time out from her Spanish-language studies and relaxing on a park bench in the historic centre of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Education has been her means of escape from the domineering family structure back in India that crushed her mother. Sarita apparently never had the opportunities given to her daughter; but the quiet of the jardín is broken by the arrival of Vicky, as chatty and colourful as a parrot, who claims to recognise the daughter of her dear artist friend, called not Sarita here, but Rosarita.

The bewildered student can only protest: her housebound mother never left India and certainly harboured no artistic inclinations. But thinking back, she realises there are awkward lacunae in her mother’s story. During a mysterious absence, the child was sent to live with grandparents. Glimpses of depression might be explained by a talent that was squashed and defeated by societal expectation. Sarita was a grudging housewife and inattentive mother. That child, now a woman herself, feels more curiosity and empathy than resentment.