Anita Desai | One Doesn't Want to Lose the Beauty

Anita Desai No, so it was always a fusion of the known facts and imagination, because the known facts were so few.

KD I remember you telling me about your father as a child in Bangladesh – did you tell me or am I remembering reading Tagore? How they would leave their villages and travel down the river …

AD My father told me that, about that riverine landscape of East Bengal and how, for much of the year, the land was flooded and they would paddle back and forth in boats …

KD Even your father lived like that?

AD Yes, as a boy he did, and he told me stories that I can't even imagine. The mailman would walk through the forest, ringing a bell to frighten away the tigers, and he would shout, "In the name of Queen Victoria, make way for the mail!"

KD You must have told me this memory because I put that in The Inheritance of Loss. Reading Tagore's diaries must have seemed like reading their memories.

AD Reading Tagore, I recreated my father's world, much more than by the few stories he told me. My father was very reticent. In the 1950s, I remember him taking me to a cinema house that used to show Bengali films in the mornings. He took me to see Pather Panchali, and when we came out, into that bright orange light of Delhi, his face was bathed in tears, he couldn't speak. I realised this was the world he'd left. It was his world. Those films of Satyajit Ray made a great impression on me.

My mother talked about her childhood constantly. She could tell us every shop and house she passed on the way to school, the butcher, the baker, the tailor, obviously she went over and over it in her mind. Christmas and Easter in Berlin were more real to me than Diwali in our house.

KD Was my grandfather ever my grandmother's family's lodger? Is that how they met?

AD [Laughs] You're mixing it up with Vikram Seth's story! His uncle and aunt. My father went to Berlin to study engineering. One day he was just walking down the road and was stopped by a German who asked if he would please sit for his portrait. The artist was Georg Kolbe, a sculptor, who was very interested in Asian faces. My father sat for him and he did a bust and a torso. Kolbe knew my mother and her family, and he is the one who introduced them. In fact, he was best man at their wedding. There were pictures of the reception. The other photographs from those days were of my father with a society of Indian students when Tagore came to visit Berlin. All of the boxes and bundles of photographs were thrown away when we left Delhi.

KD We lost all our pictures, too. Remember, in Kalimpong, when the rain came through the roof … And then with each change of address.

AD Travel means you lose your pictures. A leaky roof in our house in the Himalayas, 23 changes of address in my life, and my pictures have whittled into nothing more than a handful of half-destroyed prints. A German firm had employed my father. They gave him a very grand job to set up their branch in India. They lived first on Underhill Road, then Alipur Road, both old bungalows with gardens and low walls.

KD Like the bungalow in Clear Light of Day?

AD Exactly like that.

KD Was there a Haider Ali? [Haider Ali is the glamorous figure with a library in Clear Light of Day.]

AD No, he was inspired by the Urdu poetry and literature we grew up hearing. My father did have many Muslim friends, and some, having studied abroad, had European wives. But all of this didn't last very long because a German firm in British India could not have lasted in the 1930s. And then the war was going on in Europe, so it was also a very sad time for my mother. There were hardly any survivors of that war, no one in her family. In India, many of her German friends went into an internment camp near Dehradun. Those who weren't Indian citizens, they all went into camps. My mother had become an Indian citizen so she didn't have to go.

And when Dhaka became the capital of East Pakistan, my father's ancestral home vanished too. He never went back either, so that was another lost land. Very little remained of either family – the families were scattered. As a child I must have been aware of all these vanished pasts, vanished landscapes. Not that it cast any shadow on my life, children don't take it as dark.

KD You lost your grandparents before you knew them, your parents' landscapes, your own one of Old Delhi when Partition occurred.

AD Yes, landscapes, languages. Something that survived for us was the language of Germany. My father had lived there for 10 years and spoke it fluently. Our nursery rhymes were German ones. But my father made no attempt to keep Bengali alive for us.

KD You studied it as an adult?

AD Yes, but for me there are all these lost languages. I've lost the language I used to speak as a child. My German wasn't good enough to write in, and my subject matter couldn't possibly have fitted the German language. No way to bring them together. Baumgartner's Bombay was the book in which I brought in German speakers, wrote English the way they would have spoken English, recovered some bits and scraps of German from my mother's past. That was my effort to bring it back to life.

KD Your books often refer to a mix of languages. You quote Iqbal and Byron in Clear Light of Day. In Custody is about Hindi and Urdu. You quote a lot of literature in all your novels, mingle it with every geography.

AD Yes, I always give myself away! Well, Urdu was what we heard spoken in Delhi, and it was spoken very beautifully in those days. Then there were the books we bought for ourselves. My father would read Byron and occasionally he would burst out and recite snatches of what he remembered from his schooldays, Byron, Swinburne, Browning, the same scraps over and over again. Oddly enough, he never brought Bengali music into the house, which was such a pity. But perhaps because he came from a political family – he had a soft spot for communism – he loved Russian music. I remember hearing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" played and played on our gramophone, thinking it so oppressive and dreary. Oma brought back a piano with her, had whole albums of Beethoven and Brahms, Schubert lieder and also her German library, beautifully embossed leather books in the old German script. When my father died and she left Delhi, she gave her books to the library of Delhi University, which had a German department.

KD And when my own father died a few years ago, we donated our family library to Gargi College in Delhi.

AD Now that you ask me – and others have pointed it out – why am I constantly writing about the past? Well, I probably couldn't approach the present directly, because I was carrying all of this past with me.

KD Do you think this is why you became a writer in the first place?

AD If I hadn't left India, if everything made sense and was continuous, perhaps I would not have found the necessity of putting all the bits together. I did most of my writing in India, but of course it was a changed India after Partition, the India of my childhood had gone. I began writing when I was in school, publishing while in college, writing regularly for journals in Delhi, like Thought, Writers' Workshop and Envoy, which was published in London but was about Indian affairs. I wrote book reviews, vignettes, short stories, and through the English language, somehow I was reaching out to the west already. Even as a child, at nine, I had been collecting pen friends all over.

KD I remember the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that one of them sent you and that I read too when I was a child. What did you read later? What has survived, which writers have been by your side? I remember, when I was a child, you loved Virgina Woolf.

AD She was such a huge influence on my writing, and I remember going to Atmaram's and buying the row of green Hogarth Press volumes with their yellow jackets. I used to read them over and over again. For a long time I would read a page or two before I started my morning's work because I was using her as a kind of tuning fork, I wanted to catch that exact note she would strike. Then I became quite frightened that I was trying to replicate her manner of voice, her tone, and that was holding me back from discovering my own. I stopped doing that but I still like to read poetry before starting my work. Rilke, Cavafy, Mandelstam, Brodsky …

KD Poets of exile?

AD Yes, all of them. Poets go directly to what they want to get across – they don't amble around, they cut to it with a tremendous immediacy that affects one. I don't know if could tackle the bulk of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Proust again, but I would love to see if I could repeat the same wonderful experience of reading them.

KD What was it like to read the introductions to new editions of your books that recently came out in India? [These are handsome navy and white volumes with introductions by Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta, Abraham Verghese, Rana Dasgupta, Kamila Shamsie, Daneeyal Muniuddin, MS Vasanji.]

AD I was so grateful, they were so serious. It is astonishing that now a whole generation has grown up reading Indian literature in English. Nothing was being read when I was a student. We read no Indian writers at all.

KD People always say you are a quiet writer, but I find great violence in your books, tremendous frustration, unhappiness, sometimes silenced unhappiness, but no less "loud" for that.

AD Perhaps because it was such a struggle, one seemed to be going against the grain, which was not literary. I wrote almost secretly, and so it felt subversive. I could give myself away without restraint.

KD You write so much about exiles, outsiders, travellers, translators, although I know you get terribly travel sick, in Baumgartner's Bombay, Fire on the Mountain, Journey to Ithaca, Zigzag, Fasting Feasting, Artist of Disappearance. Was it inevitable that you left first to live in the Himalayas and then that you left India? Does one live the lives one has written as much as one writes about lives one has known?

AD It was never my intention. I took one step, then another, thinking I would retrace my steps and return, but was drawn further on instead. So often one's writing is prophetic. When you write, you are in touch with another force, not the everyday force you employ, you retreat so deep into yourself, you don't suspect those feelings had been there.

KD Did you ever feel the cost of a writer's life was too high? You grew up in a house of four children, and we were four children – why do we have such a sense of isolation?

AD I wonder why that is – because we are writers? I'm sure you also feel a sense of envy when you see friends or siblings who belong so wholly to their lives in a way we don't. It is a great influence on one's thoughts to be always on the outside, not belonging. There was always a sense of loneliness because my family wasn't like others.

KD You travelled to so many countries. Did that change the form of your thinking and writing?

AD It was a frightening experience, and I think that fear is something you've often experienced. Your subject is elsewhere, and your fear is you may not be able to recover it. When we first came to America and I started teaching, I had an awful feeling that I would never write another thing. I was so far removed from India, the past, family, and what was around me was absolutely not mine, and then I wrote Fasting Feasting, going right back into the past, and the only way I can write is to keep recovering that past.

KD You've been working on things I have been struggling with, switching between historical times, different points of view, different geographies.

AD It's like having a jigsaw puzzle and having to see how to put the pieces together. Fasting Feasting was like having two different jigsaw puzzles and trying to make one from it. I inherited a fragmented world, you had a whole one that fragmented when you were 14 and we left India for England and then the United States, and you've had to find a way to fit it together, which is what you did with Inheritance.

KD When you are creating a story, you find a form for it.

AD In Baumgartner's Bombay, everything takes place in one day. The idea I had was this would be the last day of Baumgartner's life, I knew he would die, I didn't know how, so I had to crowd it in. That was one story that did have to be neatly ended, but he could have been killed by the very poor man on the streets, or by a thief, but it seemed right and proper that he should die the way he did.

KD Do you envy Indian writers who work from a single, continuous landscape?

AD Indian writers who inherit one world – one envies it, one world, one century. Like Tagore or Narayan. Well, my early books belonged to one world. Then the world widened, became more scattered, and dispersed.

KD Do you regret this?

AD Not in the least bit. Earlier I had always been described as the one writing about women, women's lives, being criticised for this.

KD Why? There was so much else, a huge landscape even within the quiet bungalow in Clear Light of Day …

AD Well, major events were taking place off stage in my novels, not on stage, so I was always criticised for writing about a very confined and limited world. Maybe it was resentment that made me open up the world. I definitely had a feeling, writing In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay, of opening the door and stepping out into the street, walking, seeing, experiencing other places, other lives. If I'd lived my whole life in Old Delhi, I would feel so much frustration and anger that my world should be so limited by my very narrow experience. I wouldn't have wanted it otherwise. Was it wonderful? That is a different question. It was both wonderful and difficult.

KD Each landscape must have given you something different. England must have seemed like travelling to a part of the literary landscape of your childhood.

AD I never wrote an English book about an English landscape, but all that literature I had read fed into everything I wrote. Mexico was different. It was such a strange experience, so entirely new. Never having learned anything about it living in India, I set off with the intent of exploring it, and found so much deeply familiar, with close connections between the Indian and Mexican, that was also, of course, an Indian world.

KD You wrote about foreigners coming and searching for something, they didn't even know what, in India. Was there something of that in how you went to Mexico?

AD Yes, remember the library in San Miguel, how much reading I did there, how much note taking, in the same way Europeans would once come to India with a very vague idea of what they would find, using very wishy-washy terms like the wisdom of India, ancient India, then stubbing their toes on the real India. It was strange what India meant to them – it wasn't the imperial adventure after all, it was other treasure they came searching for. They didn't even know what they were searching for. In the end, it was the experience. It was difficult to find a form for the Mexican book. I didn't want to put myself in the place of a traveller, which had been done so beautifully before by others.

KD The novellas seem different to me, a different way of writing for you, fairytale-like – the hungry elephant ruining that old landowning family – reaching beyond past or present, very directly to some deeper, persistent human situation.

AD They were found stories, not stories I had to develop. With Borges, each story is complete in itself. I think a short story is often a found story, a moment, an episode. A novella is closely related to that, in that you cannot bring in a great many diversions, digressions, so they have a quality of being whole and focused, even though these ones are open-ended. The details of time and place are left deliberately vague, so not only my imagination but also the reader's imagination must be exercised to enter this place.

KD Do you find a pattern in your work when you look at it all together?

AD I'd never sat down to think about it. Perhaps that line by Emily Dickinson sums everything up: "Memory is a strange bell – jubilee and knell." I suppose that's been ringing away in my head all these years. That is why I feel so alienated from the India of today, because it has so separated itself from the India of the past.

KD With deliberate effort?

AD Tearing itself, to destroy the past, to be rid of it.

KD Doesn't that seem dangerous?

AD Dangerous, and it takes a lot of nerve, ambition. There is the fear of losing so much, of having to abandon and leave it behind. That is perhaps what you felt writing Inheritance, the fear of losing something.

KD Yes, the beauty of that landscape, what it feels like to spend a night in the kind of house that doesn't exist very much any more, the sounds, the quality of electric light when I was small.

AD That is why you bring your character back, the cook's son struggles practically on his knees to get back.

KD One doesn't want to lose the beauty …

AD You'd lose all that. There may be great things to be found, but you couldn't help looking over your shoulder at all those treasures you have lost … or maybe not even treasures, but they were once living things, they once existed, how can you let them die?

The Guardian, 11 November 2011