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, most trodden roads or just her, without a definite address? Desai’s latest novel, Rosarita, takes you back in time. The protagonist travels through Southern America to write, instead she finds how she was written. It’s not just a vestige of her mother that she finds but a deep connection and exploration of everything that her mother has been put through and her mother put through in her life.
In all instances, she chanced upon this version of her mother without seeking it out. In all instances, I was seeking every chance to know who my mother was.
And so, 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 friends shop, the one I joked about.
And as I stood there talking to him in his large though busy kitchenware shop, he blushed still when I told him what I had thought of doing and added: “But no one could compare to your mother’s beauty back then.” And all of a sudden you look at her as if she is indeed 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.
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