Just how well do you or did you know your mother? Anita Desai explores the mother-child relationship in her new novella, Rosarita. We meet Bonita, a young Indian woman, who is studying at a language school in San Miguel, Mexico.
While at a park, Bonita is accosted by a stranger — a colourful older woman who exclaims that she’s the spitting image of her mother, Rosarita. Taken aback, Bonita says her mother’s name was Sarita, but the stranger who introduces herself as Victoria, insists “I have been watching you, my darling. I wanted to be very, very sure I was right, and now I am… you have her looks, her manner — what to say, her comportment. The mouth, the eyes. You cannot not be my dearest amiga’s daughter.”
Bonita is even more startled when Victoria tells her that she knew her mother when she was a talented art student in Mexico. Why, Bonita had never seen any signs of art materials at her childhood home, not even a sketchbook. After frantically searching her mind, she recalls a pastel sketch in her bedroom of a woman on a park bench, that could very well be the same park she frequents in San Miguel.
The bizarre conversation with Victoria takes Bonita back to her childhood, where she rummages through memories to reconcile this Rosarita woman with her mother Sarita. We see Sarita as a typical Brown Sahib’s wife who efficiently runs her household during the day, and organises or accompanies her husband to corporate parties at night. But sometimes she comes across as a terribly unhappy person, a square peg in a round hole. There’s the incident of Bonita’s father frowning with disapproval when her mother asks the cook for the local vegetable he’s made for himself instead of standard meat and potato Brown Sahib meals. Bonita often saw her mother shrink into herself — that’s clearly not an indication of a free spirited artist!
Yet, Bonita seeks Victoria out again and again, still trying to find signs of her supposedly artistic mother, even though she now thinks of Victoria as a trickster: “You had resisted her fantastical tale but now find that you would like to believe it. Could she, like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?”
When Victoria invites her to her family home in Colima and from there to La Manzanilla — places her mother had visited — Bonita accepts, determined to find out if there’s a germ of truth in her story.
You will enjoy travelling across Mexico with Bonita in this beautiful and elegantly written little book, and discovering whether Sarita really is Rosarita — or not.
Rosarita
By Anita Desai
Picador India
pp. 112; Rs 499
