‘Rosarita’ by Anita Desai      (2025) – 94 pages

Have you ever wondered what your parents did, how they behaved or not, and what type of persons they were when they were young adults?

In ‘Rosarita’, a young woman Bonita from India travels to Mexico to learn Spanish. As she is sitting on a bench in the hot sun in San Miguel, an old woman approaches her and claims she knew Bonita’s mother Rosarita. This does not seem possible to Bonita because as far as she knew, her mother never traveled to Mexico. Besides this old woman who approached her seems rather crazy and won’t leave her alone.

But the old woman does know certain details about Bonita’s mother that cause Bonita to wonder if she is possibly telling the truth. The old woman takes Bonita to a place where Rosarita had lived for a time in an art commune. It turns out that her mother had been an artist before she married a strictly conventional Indian businessman back in India.

I started reading the fiction of Anita Desai back in the 1980s with her novel ‘Clear Light of Day’. She was one of the few writers from India I had read at that time. She became one of my “go-to” writers. I have always enjoyed her work. Desai’s works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Her daughter Kiran Desai is also a novelist, and Kiran’s novel ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ won the Booker Prize in 2006. Anita Desai is now 87 years old.

In an interview in the Guardian Anita Desai speaks of her attachment to Mexico. India and Mexico are in the same position geographically, close to the Equator with a warm tropical climate. They also both were colonized but later achieved independence.

“But the invitation is to a lecture organized by the cultural wing of the embassy, regarding a connection between the artists of the Mexican revolution and Indian artists of the freedom movement and Partition.”

I was expecting more of a resolution in the end of ‘Rosarita’ than there was. But maybe that is the way it usually is. We never do find out the full truth about our parents’ young lives, only a shadow of the truth.

Grade:   B