In Search of the Mythical Mother

Everyone who knows a woman knows a different side of her. As a daughter, a sister, a wife, a daughter-in-law or a mother, a woman wears the expectations of those around her, like an ornament. Hence, emerges a new woman, each time. This imagining and reimagining of a woman is central to Anita Desai’s latest and shortest work, Rosarita, which rightfully opens with a quote from a 1930 Fernando Pessoa poem, Songbook: “Each of us is many persons/ To me I’m who I think I am/ But others see me differently/ And are equally mistaken.”

            Bonita, a student of languages, is caught off-guard by an elder woman in Mexico. The stranger, Victoria, claims to have known her mother when she visited the city of San Miguel. At once dismissed by Bonita as a “Trickster”, Victoria’s fond remembrance of a woman she keeps calling Rosarita – “an Oriental bird!” – seems to be a misunderstanding. As far as she knows, her mother, Sarita, never visited Mexico to study art, let alone ever painted in life. “Mother, an artist? In the home you remember as without a paintbrush, a chalk or a sketchbook to be seen?” Surely, this stranger is mistaken.

            Victoria’s persistence compels Bonita to revisit the memories of her mother. In a marriage to a man who deemed the company at home as unimportant and showed as much interest in it, Sarita inherits the “duties of a ‘company wife’” as “an unwilling martyrdom to his daily routine” from her mother-in-law, but without the latter’s pride. The only trace of this artistic synergy is but a faint recollection of a pastel sketch of a woman on a park bench with

a child playing at her feet, that hung over her bed; overlooked, like the rest of the mother’s life. It is this fate subjected to her grandmother and then her mother that Bonita willfully tries to escape, only to accidentally find herself back where her mother experienced a “flowering”. “Stay, sit,” she tells herself, “Wait, here, now, she will appear and you will see her as she had never shown herself and you had never seen.”

            As Bonita travels back to the places from her mother’s past that Victoria is incessantly keen on making her visit, her feelings soon transform into a new loss “of which [she] had till now been ignorant”. Rosarita remains an alien image. The possibility of her mother dancing tango “on a lamplit Mexican night, a man’s leg thrust between hers” in free spirit and passion, seems unbearably unimaginable to her. Independence, such a strange color for a mother.

            In Rosarita, Desai – who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize not once or twice, but thrice! – writes a story that speculates much more than it reveals. One wonders how much of her own mother and motherhood Desai carries or sheds in the making of this short book, her first in over a decade. The novella, though, is much more than a personal history – of Bonita and perhaps even Desai’s.

            In under 100 pages, it captures not just a daughter’s failed quest of finding the mother who is lost forever, or the undoing of a woman’s aspirations, but it also has an undercurrent of both countries’ socio-political histories. The novella is inspired, in part, from the deeply unnerving connection between the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and the 1947 Partition of India, as Desai so mentions in her author’s note. An Indian artist who studied at San Miguel de Allende, Satish Gujral, saw this parallel as a refugee himself, and captured the violence and the tragedy of those times, in his art. In Victoria’s memoires of Rosarita, we briefly witness this traumatic past impacting the latter’s art and milieu.

            The parallels do not stop here. An untitled self-portrait of Amrita Shergill welcomes the reader on the cover of the book and for the uninitiated, like me, it fits perfectly well as an image of what Sarita, who became Rosarita when in Mexico, would have looked like. Without the weight of a family and a household on her chest, this vision of Rosarita offers a striking resemblance to Shergill at 18 in Paris in 1931, a rising artist in her own accord. It is the same year that Shergill wrote to her mother: “Everybody says that I have improved immensely; even that person whose criticism in my view is most important to me — my own self.” If only Rosarita had that kind self-endorsement and acceptance.

            Nonetheless, the personal journey is the highlight of the story. In grief, the search for the person behind one’s parent, intensifies rather than dampens. I bear witness to this fact. In Bonita’s case, however, her search leads her to a cemetery where her mother’s symbolic grave could have been, a land where Rosarita died and Sarita emerged, a part of her dying before returning to India to adapt to the quotidian minutiae of a domestic household. Even the ‘clarity’ that Bonita claims to have recovered as she faces the Pacific Ocean is lost once again, even before she leaves the shore; a failed imagination. She puts an end to her limit to go any further in her search for what is clearly a “mythical mother” as she had first described the notion.

            The book ends as abruptly as it had begun – with the question of a mother’s identity beyond motherhood as one that remains unanswered eternally. Like a brilliant idea abandoned midway. As to how much of it is intentional, only Desai knows.