SOURCE: THE HINDU

Anita Desai has often experimented with language, theme and form in novels like Clear Light of Day, Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay and The Artist of Disappearance. In her latest, Rosarita (Picador), a dream-like novella, Desai gives the narrator a second-person voice. When a stranger plants an idea into young student Bonita’s mind, that her mother’s name was Rosarita and that she had studied art in Mexico, it sends her off to imaginatively fill the absences left by her mother. In a phone conversation, the soft-spoken and thrice-Booker-shortlisted Desai, now 87, talks about her Mexico connection, how she has used techniques of poetry in her prose and why India has become remote to her.