London, Sep. 03, 2004
IANS
Writer Anita Desai says "modern-day India is slipping away from
me", and has set her new novel, "The Zigzag Way", in
Mexico.
Desai released the book at the Edinburgh book festival last week. She
currently shuttles between Boston, Mexico, Cambridge and Delhi, but
says her visits to India have become less frequent.
"To my friends and family in India, I am becoming a ghost,"
she told The Guardian.
In a lengthy feature on Desai, the newspaper remarked that "at
an age when most writers are descending deeper into their own fictional
worlds, into meditations on age, identity and the bankruptcy of the
modern world, Desai is exploring lives increasingly remote from her
own".
During her annual visits to India, to see her husband and eldest son,
Desai says she feels more and more a stranger.
"One likes to imagine that things have stood still, but so much
happens. I have become an observer, and not a participant. And so much
has happened to me that to them, my friends and family in India, I am
becoming a ghost."
"The Zigzag Way" is set in Mexico and Cornwall, and is narrated
by a young American writer, a man who travels without really knowing
why.
Desai said this was more and more her own experience.
"There are two ways of travelling: there is the stumbling, directionless
kind, and there is the more efficient sort, where you know exactly where
you are going and how long it will take. But I think most things in
my life have come about through chance, through serendipity," she
told the newspaper.
Desai is said to have developed a passion for Mexico. She first went
there six years ago, and immediately felt its affinity with India.
"It's such an ancient country, you feel every stone has a history
to tell. Mexico and India share a history of colonialism - 300 years
of Spanish and British rule - along with this much, much longer past
that goes back into myth.
"Physically, we're alike, too: I am constantly taken for a Mexican,"
she said.
Speaking about her initial years in India - she left India at 45 -
Desai said: "My whole life was about family and neighbours: it
was very difficult for a woman to experience anything else.
"I was bored, and I needed to find more range, which is why I
started to write about men in books like 'Baumgartner's Bombay' (in
which a German Jew flees the war in India) and 'In Custody' (in which
a college lecturer goes in search of a famous poet).
"Men led lives of adventure, chance and risk. It just wasn't possible
to write that from an Indian female perspective."
Desai has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize.
According to her, Congress president Sonia Gandhi was right not to have
taken over as the prime minister.
"It was a role she inherited and not one she chose. She would have
been used as a tool by the party. The Gandhi-Nehru dynasty could have
gone on and on forever, but I think she was very wise to break it.
"And it's really magnificent news that a government I so much disapproved
of has been voted out," she told The Guardian.
Biography
Anita Desai was born in 1935 in Delhi to a German mother and a Bengali
father. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi
and English at school and in the city streets. She has said that she
grew up surrounded by Western literature and music, not realizing until
she was older that this was an anomaly in her world where she also learned
the Eastern culture and customs. She married a businessman at twenty-one
and raised several children before becoming known for her writing. Her
first book, Cry,the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her
better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay
(1988). She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes,
as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone
born here" (Griffiths).
She never considered trying to first publish in India because there
was no publisher in India who would be interested in fiction by an Indian
writer (Jussawalla) and it was first in England that her work became
noticed. U.S. readers were slower to discover her, due, she believes
to England's natural interest in India and the U.S.'s lack of comprehension
regarding the foreignness of her subject.
But Desai only writes in English. This, she has repeatedly said,was
a natural and unconscious choice for her: "I can state definitely
that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and
I'd say perhaps it was the language that chose me and I started writing
stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty
years now without stopping to think why "(Desai).
She is considered the writer who introduced the psychological novel
in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India. Included in this, is her
pioneer status of writing of feminist issues. While many people today
would not classify her work as feminist, she believes this is due to
changing times: "The feminist movement in India is very new and
a younger generation of readers in India tends to be rather impatient
of my books and to think of them as books about completely helpless
women, hopeless women. They find it somewhat unreal that the women don't
fight back, but they don't seem to realize how very new this movement
is" (Jussawalla).
Also, she says, her writing is realistic: "Women think I am doing
a disservice to the feminist movement by writing about women who have
no control over their lives. But I was trying, as every writer tries
to do, even in fiction, to get at the truth, write the truth. It would
have been really fanciful if I had made [for example, in Clear Light
of Day] Bim and Tara modern-day feminists "(in Griffiths).
Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most autobiographical book,
because she was writing about her neighborhood in Delhi, although the
characters are not based on her brothers and sisters. What she was exploring
in this novel, she has said, was the importance of childhood and memories
as the source of a life. She had wanted to start the book at the end
and move backwards, into the characters' childhood and further, into
the childhood of their parents etc., but in the end: "When I had
gone as far back as their infancy the book just ground to a halt; it
lost its momentum. It told me that this was done, that I couldn't carry
it further. But I still have a sense of disappointment about that book,
because the intention had been different" (Jussawalla). The character
of Raja is identified with her in the sense that he is so immersed in
all different types of literature and culture, and is so concerned with
protecting the multicultural heritage of India. His worries about the
Muslim neighbor family is not just about them particularly, but rather
worry about the loss of all that the Muslim culture and literature contributes
to India.
While Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT, and spends
most of the year outside of India, she does not consider herself part
of the Indian Diaspora. Although she does not fit in the Indian box
anymore (Griffiths) as she said, she considers herself lucky for having
not left India until late in her life, because she feels that she has
been drifting away from it ever since: "I can't really write of
it with the same intensity and familiarity that I once had." Yet
she cannot feel at home in any other place or society