Rosarita opens with Bonita, a young language student from India who arrives in Mexico to study Spanish. The novel alternates between the languid environmental bliss of Mexico and the busy domesticity of India, each city providing an invasive friction to the storyline. In Mexico, Bonita unintentionally stumbles into the fragmented past of her dead mother, Rita, whose secret life shatters Bonita’s understanding of her entire upbringing.
Taking a moment of solace in one of many jardins in Mexico, Bonita clearly expects a certain degree of solitude from her time abroad. However, this is interrupted when a stranger recognises her as her mother’s, “Rosarita’s”, daughter. Initially doubtful of the stranger and the ludicrous idea that her distant homemaker mother could have lived a vibrant lifestyle steeped in art and revolutionary thought in such a faraway city, Bonita dismisses the stranger. However, as she moves through the city, she’s haunted by fragments of her mother’s double life, confronted by the reality that dozens of strangers intimately knew the woman who seems more and more like a stranger to Bonita: ‘Mother, or Trickster? Or both?’
Anita Desai’s prose is as careful and considered as always, beautifully guiding you through the reckoning that is to come. Her deliberate choice to write in the second person feels at times like being put on trial, simultaneously accusatory and comforting in its directness as you fall into Bonita’s shoes, experiencing every doubt and revelation alongside her. Rosarita examines the gulf between identity in parent-child relationships, interrogating the ownership a child feels over the personhood of a figure who has existed before them, and separately to them, with prose that elegantly lays out the grief, conflict, and love a daughter has for her mother.
