Anita Desai: Writing and trepidation

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 10/01/2006 9:41 AM  |  Life

Trisha Sertori, Contributor, Ubud, Bali

The shadows of childhood shyness quietly dust the shoulders and flitter about the rare and gentle smile of Indian born author Anita Desai in her 64th year of living through and within the written word. Over the years that adolescent awkwardness of being, that silent background seeming has metamorphosed into a calm humility that may, at first, be mistaken for shyness.

For this widely celebrated, thrice Booker Prize short-listed author of 16 books and the screenplay adaptation of her novel In Custody, the notion of a social existence for writers is almost outside her ken. She spoke with The Jakarta Post during the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, where she was a key speaker.

""Writing was always a solitary and private experience to me. I am surprised how people, writers, have such a social life today,"" Desai says with that delicate uplifting of the corners of her mouth, her quiet smile like the whispered blooming of frangipani.

Dressed in black, handbag nestled under her arm, Desai enters a room almost as if wishing to be invisible, an impossibility for anyone who has seen images of her face, radiant with grace and warm intelligence, as if lit from within by an almost holy peacefulness with her internal world.

For this daughter of a Bengali-Indian father and a German mother who met in pre-war Berlin when her father was an engineering student, the need to write was born as soon as she could hold a pen and place letters one after each other across the page. As other children may learn to knit, one plain one pearl, Desai instead knitted tales with the brightly colored yarn of her third language, English, learned in the mission schools.

The colonial language became Desai's medium from the start, extraordinarily given that her first languages, German in the home and the local Hindi language the lingua franca of the streets, bazaars and playgrounds of her Old Delhi home.

""From when I was 6 years old I wrote of every experience, every impression around me in English. From this habit nothing was real or complete until I had written it down. English was my written language, not my family language, not the language of my childhood friendships. It was the language I used exclusively for reading and writing.

""It may have been because English gave my writing separation. I always saw the world of books as separate from the worlds of family and friends,"" said Desai who acknowledges she tended to be shy as a schoolgirl and her writing gave her solace and an outlet for her sense of difference from other students.

Desai told The Guardian's Maya Jhangiani in a 1999 interview, ""I remember being very lost at school, not being popular or successful. It was always a great struggle to belong. It was an immense relief to come home to books, to be alone, I had a great need for privacy that was unusual for a child, but not at all for a writer.""

The act of writing is, to Desai, much like pregnancy; a seed is planted, silently germinating, growing in its own warm darkness of the subconscious, daily watered with scraps of ideas, impressions, colors and sounds that organically link themselves into the DNA strands of an infant novel, whose completed life-cycle is as dependent on the reader as the writer.

""When I am creating a character, it develops in fragments, not fully formed and whole until after it is written and then it is the reader who first meets the fully formed character. It is only then that analysis of the character can occur,"" said Desai.

Her characters can take a lifetime to germinate, she adds. Laid down in her subconscious, perhaps decades before bursting into life across the pages of her works such as the central character in her novel Clear Light of Day, Bim, an unusually independent woman in mid-20th century India, who Desai says in The Guardian, may be an amalgam of her two sisters.

""My characters start with just a seed that lives in my mind for a long time and piece by piece develops until it arrives at some kind of wholeness. Those seeds lie (in my mind) a long time -- you can call them seeds or ideas -- for the book in the form of little seeds that live there, maybe from something I have seen as a child. The seeds begin to sprout over time. They have to accumulate the body of the idea for the novel to become,"" said Desai whose works are much informed by her Old Delhi childhood and the partitioning of India in 1947 when the author was 10 years old.

The shock of waking up in a broken nation, where all she had known had been swept aside, gave her a greater understanding of her parents sense of isolation and exile from their homelands -- an exile imposed by their decision to marry outside of society's mores.

""During the partition my family was relatively untouched -- our home life remained much the same -- but it gave me a finer understanding of my parents who had both given up their home lands, taking on the immigrant life of the outsider.

""I suddenly saw that life isn't so cozy and safe as I had imagined,"" Desai said, adding that India had taught her that history is not fixed but fluxes, moving in a chaos of dimensions with the present colliding with past and future.

""With partition the population changed overnight. The Muslim population we had grown up with had vanished and been replaced with a Punjabi population. History does not stand still -- it is not a tombstone but moves, rolls on without cease.""

That history was a moment by moment element of Desai's childhood and early adulthood. She says walking the streets of Old Delhi was like walking through India's past. ""All around me where the ruin of so many empires and dynasties, the old Mughal, the British Empire was there in remnants of huge stones heaped all around me. I would pass them on my way to school, as a child I would play around them -- that history, those ruins created a very deep impression of history on me.""

While most of Desai's novels and short stories have been based on the lives of women in India, some of her finest novels have been set with male protagonists, such as the Urdu poet Nur and his admirer, a professor of Hindi, Deven, in the acclaimed In Custody (1984); or Baumgartner, the retired Jewish businessman who escapes to India as a youth only to discover he has built himself a prison of cats and catastrophe, in Baumgartner's Bombay (1988); or the shy and rootless Eric in Desai's most recent work, The Zig Zag Way (2004).

For Desai, the decision to write in a male voice was both daunting and liberating.

""In my early literature I had written almost exclusively about women and women's lives. I had begun to feel stifled -- I was limiting my world and I made a very conscious decision to use male characters. They provided me with the keys to a larger world.

""My first novel using male characters was In Custody, in which women have almost no involvement at all. This gave me so much freedom -- for the first time I could draw on my imagination rather than on what I knew. Then I wrote Baumgartner, those two books gave me the courage to speak out ,"" Desai said.

In The Zig Zag Way, Desai steps out not only of the ""purdha"" of writing from a female perspective, but also sliced through her Indian roots, setting the novel in Mexico, where she frequently spends time.

Writing The Zig Zag Way demanded the discovery of a new world, a social character that was not informed by any of her earlier understandings.

""Although The Zig Zag Way is a very small book, it drew me deeply into another world. I traveled in Mexico for many years, but it was a long time before I sifted through the ideas and impressions and arrived at the book,"" said Desai, agreeing that the Cornish immigrants to Mexico, the gregarious and energetic Betty and her cautious miner husband Davey, may have some similarities to her own parents.

Despite Desai's career as a writer, spanning more than 40 years, 15 of which she taught writing at MIT, filling the post of professor of writing until her recent retirement, Desai admits that even a novelist of her stature begins every work with trepidation.

""There is always fear and a state of doubt and anxiety (when beginning to write). Will it lead anywhere is a question -- one does have few false starts,"" said Desai. ""When the narrative does begin to move of its own volition -- sometimes in directions you had not planned. That's the thing about art. You are creating something that did not exist, so there is the constant doubting and questions.""

This year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival theme, ""Place, Time, Identity"", follows closely both the Balinese Hindu central belief in this triumvirate, as do Desai's works. There is always an essence of the roots of the place, its time and juxtaposition of that time as a moment to moment transition outside of the linear and the identity that is essentially marked and formed by those roots and time.

As Desai tells us in The Zig Zag Way, the Huichol Indians leave the roots of the peyote plant to guide them home, picking only the succulent tips of this dream-weaving drug, and ""the ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends but a ladder descending into the past"".

""Growing up I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I doubted its possibility.

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