Reading Anita Desai's Rosarita in your late 20s

What do you think you’ll find if you were to go to all the places your mother went? Would it be lovers, her favourite dress, trodden roads of the place she came from or just her, without a definite address?

Desai’s latest novel, Rosarita, bit by bit takes you back in time to reveal life that influenced the present without existing in the present. The protagonist, a young writer takes upon herself a journey through Southern America to find material for her writing, instead she finds how she was written by history and familial ties.

As she travels, she slowly realises that it’s not just a vestige of her mother that she finds but a deep connection with her mother's past life, a life she has not known from a time she did not exist, through exploration of everything that her mother has been put through and her mother put her through in her life.

She chanced upon a version of her mother without seeking it out, a version that remained unexplicable to her till now; a version that only played out in images with no context at all. But here I was, about 28 years old and engaged to get married soon, seeking every chance to know who my mother was.

This happened almost two years before Rosarita even came out (not that I picked up Rosarita thinking I would find similar threads of a journey I took with my mother) , I took her out a day, with a camera in my hand to photograph her as she walked down the narrow lanes of Mehrauli.

“Maybe I will stand in front of him and he will think I am you,” I laughed as I said this to her.” We went to Shamshi Talab first, the place where parades in ancient time floated through with dancers.

Then we made our way to the inner market, through uneven streets and roadside shops. She made it a point to ask people to help her daughter know the history of the place. So she also took me to her friend's shop, the one I joked about feigning in front of as if I was her from the past.

And as I stood there talking to him in his large, busy kitchenware shop, he blushed still when I told him what I had thought of doing. Without even waiting for a breath, he replied: “But no one could compare to your mother’s beauty back then.”

All of a sudden, I looked at her. And indeed, it seemed as if she was the most beautiful woman.

Bonita, Desai’s protagonist, questions the absurdity of her mother being in a small Mexican town of San Miguel. To her, it’s unthinkable that her mother might have even been out here, miles away from India, painting in the compound of a Jardin in a group of artists. But I couldn’t question the absurdity of knowing her for the first time. All I could question was, why not before—the knowledge that Bonita painfully carries with her; of knowing her mother a little too late.

Recently, she showed me a photo where she is about 19, wearing the iconic yellow suit that she always talked about with a voice note (she is a keen sender of voice notes) as to why she sent me that photo:

"Do you remember a certain someone said soemthing about how beautiful I was? All this time, I thought I had forgotten all about me. But it seems I did not"