GRAND PRIX FOR DESAI
Author honoured by Blue Met
The long journey of Anita Desai has taken her full circle, from the hilltop aerie in India’s Himalayan foothills where she was born to another one in the Hudson Valley, where she now lives. Before travelling to Montreal this week to be feted as the recipient of Blue Metropolis’s Literary Grand Prix, one of India’s greatest modern writers found herself waxing nostalgic.
“It’s in the hills and in the woods,” Desai said of the house where she lives alone 80 kilometres north of New York City. “When I look out of the window, I pretend it’s Mussoorie I see.”
Mussoorie is a hill station near the source of the Ganges. Built by the British during the Raj as a kind of racier alternative to the summer capital of Simla, it became a place where middle-class families like Desai’s went to escape the summer heat. But it was in the family’s main home in Old Delhi that young Anita first got an inkling of her lifetime vocation, thanks to a serendipitous meeting.
“I was in my first year at college, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala lived in the same neighbourhood,” recalled Desai. “Both of us had German mothers who would meet over coffee in the German way, and so Ruth and I got to know each other, too. I think it was that very year that her first book was published. I remember holding it, looking at it, and for the first time having the thought that perhaps it’s possible to be a published writer, that one can write about this dusty little corner of our world and there may even be readers for it.”
Initial progress, at least in the author’s perfectionist self-assessment, was slow. “I wish I had waited longer to write them,” Desai said with audible rue of early novels Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Voices in the City (1965). “I think of them as books I don’t really want reprinted or reread. They were put together out of the reading I had done rather than out of my own life and my own thinking, and as a result they weren’t good.”
Desai’s opinion of her nascent work is by no means universally shared — this reviewer will always defend Voices, a fascinating peek into Calcutta bohemia — and packs a rich irony when you think of her daughter Kiran Desai, whose fully deserved 2006 Man Booker Prize win for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss was seen by some of us as partial compensation for her mother never having won despite being shortlisted three times.
“Oh, Kiran started writing at exactly the right age,” Desai said, her unmistakable maternal pride showing through. “She hadn’t meant to be a writer, but when she was an undergraduate her professors saw that this was where her talent lay, and they encouraged and pushed her. From her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, she had already found a voice and style that were completely her own. That was quite extraordinary.”
Once Desai hit her true stride, she had an unbroken creative streak with few equals in the last 50 years of world literature. While the standard never dips, some hand-picked highlights would be 1977’s Fire on the Mountain, set in an unnamed Mussoorie (“The first book I wrote that I acknowledge as my own voice, my own way of writing”); 1988’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, marking the first time Desai incorporated her German heritage into her fiction (“I had wanted to do that for the longest time, but couldn’t find a way until I thought of this man Baumgartner”); 1980’s Clear Light of Day, a lightly autobiographical novel of India’s partition all the more powerful for having the worst events take place offstage; and 1984’s In Custody, a meditation on language featuring a dying Urdu poet, and the subject of a fine 1993 Merchant Ivory film adaptation co-written by Desai and starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri.
Many have expressed surprise that Desai has never tried her hand at the Indian diaspora immigration novel, a popular subgenre epitomized by such writers as Samuel Selvon, Jhumpa Lahiri and the late one-time Montrealer Bharati Mukherjee.
“That has never been my subject,” she said. “For some reason, I have never been able to write about the immigrant experience in America. The country is still a foreign scene to me, and I don’t find it recognizable in the way I do Mexico. I’ve resisted thinking of myself as an immigrant; I just don’t fit into that group. Plus, there are so many Indian writers writing about that. I don’t need to add my voice to it.”
The setting of one of Desai’s best late-period novels, 2004’s The Zigzag Way, is a tipoff to one of her life’s passions. One year while living in Boston and teaching at MIT, in an impulsive attempt to escape a brutal New England winter, she booked a flight to Oaxaca and ended up forming a deep bond with Mexico and its people; she still spends part of each year there whenever possible.
“The minute I touched down, I felt so at home,” she recalled. “I was dazzled by this place I knew little about, yet I also found it oddly familiar. There are such affinities between India and Mexico. Both are ancient civilizations — you feel that every stone you turn over uncovers a history that goes so far back. The religiosity is also similar, and the love of family and festivals and food. All were very recognizable to me. I hope to write about it more.”
As for her decades-long base, she said, “I’ve never stopped feeling an outsider in the United States. But I suppose one gets used to that. India is so unrecognizable to me now that I feel an outsider there as well.”
Living and writing in the current American political climate brings its own set of challenges, presumably?
“Yes, although that would be more true if I had been writing about America all along, and I have not. I don’t think it can be ignored, but at the same time, one has to say one sees these nationalist, populist urges springing up all over the world, and that includes India. One has to choose one’s battles. What (Trump) has said about Mexico does come very close to me, and I have considered moving across the border to live there rather than here. But that’s a difficult choice at my age.” (Desai turns 80 on June 24.)
For all her stature as a trailblazer, her place in the modern Indian scheme of things is something Desai says she doesn’t think about a lot.
“My experience with Indian readers and with younger Indian writers is invariably that they read a book of mine when they were at school, (the 1982 YA novel) The Village by the Sea, or more accurately it was read to them. The rest of the books, they don’t know.
“It’s funny: there was a time when people said to me, ‘Now that India has become independent, you don’t have to write in English anymore,’ and I had to explain to them that I couldn’t write in any other language. I assumed then that mine would be the last generation to do it, but it has proved to be a living tradition, not a dying or a dead one, especially since Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children and really opened the floodgates. I am happy to have been part of that tradition.”
In her life or her work, does she have a sense of a grand arc, of having worked toward a single goal and perhaps even reached it?
“No, I don’t at all. My life and my experience have been broken up
into so many different, completely disparate segments: the very solitary life of a writer in India, a very different life in the West connecting with writers and with universities and students here, and always the family life, which has also been split between India and the West. It’s all so much in bits and pieces that it’s all I can do to hold it together somehow.”
Desai is writing an introduction to a collection of Prawer Jhabvala’s early short stories, and working on new fiction in the concentrated novella form that has been her preferred medium since her last book, 2011’s omnibus The Artist of Disappearance. And befitting someone of her stature, she now finds herself fielding honours like Blue Met’s. Some senior writers have been known to bristle at such lifetime-achievement laurels, feeling perhaps that they’re implicitly being ushered offstage. No such qualms for Desai.
“It came as a complete surprise. I thought at my age I wasn’t going to have surprises anymore, so that made it all the more extraordinary.”