Rosarita by Anita Desai audiobook review – a moving tale of memory and identity

The Guardian

18-04-2025

In this novella from the three times Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai, a young Indian woman named Bonita is accosted by a chatty stranger who says she recognises her as the daughter of Rosarita, a dear friend she knew years ago at art school in Mexico. Bonita, a language student in San Miguel de Allende, is irritated by the woman and tells her she must be mistaken: 'I don't paint. Nor did my mother.' But then she remembers an old painting that hung in her childhood bedroom depicting a woman seated on a park bench rendered 'in wishy-washy pastels'. In the picture there is a child playing in the sand at the woman's feet. Although they are mother and child, it's as if they have 'no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent'.
The actor Meera Simhan is Rosarita's narrator, her solemn and poignant reading drawing out the dreamlike atmosphere of Desai's writing. In this tale of memory and identity, Bonita begins to recall long periods spent at her paternal grandparents' house as a child; there she observed their disapproval at their son's marriage to a woman clearly unsuited to domesticity. Increasingly curious about her mother, whose early life was shaped by the trauma of Indian partition, Bonita agrees to go on a series of excursions with the stranger to see the places Rosarita visited decades earlier. Reality and imagination become intertwined as Bonita absorbs herself in the past and begins to see her once distant mother through new eyes.
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