Two alone, two together

Anita Desai and Kiran Desai on how their writing lives intersect, and how each nourishes the other’s work

i llustration: r. rajesh

After a life in writing, Anita Desai wants her style to be pared down to the minimum so that the “silences are just as effective as the noise”. Daughter Kiran Desai doesn’t want the anger she feels about U.S. President Donald Trump and his world to disrupt her writing any more. “I have been thrown off the normal course and I want to get back to my book,” she says, a book “about power… about a young Indian woman out in India and the world” that she has been writing for a decade and which is slated to be out next year.

Unique inheritance

As mother and daughter share the stage at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, we get a rare glimpse into the process of writing of two writers who happen to be in the same family. For Kiran Desai, her earliest memory of the ‘inheritance’ of a life in literature was that her mother had a “quietness from being a writer” who vanished every morning with extraordinary discipline to write. “Her writing life was part of our existence.” That work ethic and her imagination led to Anita Desai writing many novels that include celebrated ones like

Clear Light of Day ;

In Custody ;

Fasting, Feasting; Baumgartner’s Bombay; The Village by the Sea , and her latest, the three-novellas-in-one,

The Artist of Disappearance .

Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss , says her mother is her first reader who makes a few notes, which lead to “enormous changes”. She remembers her mother, on the other hand, writing “very clean” manuscripts; “I wrote many drafts,” Anita Desai intervenes, gently.

In her introduction to Anita Desai’s Booker-nominated

Clear Light of Day , Kamila Shamsie wrote that “those who talk of Anita Desai’s surfaces of calm, or deceptive stillness, miss entirely her ability to make her readers feel uneasy from the start…”

When Anita Desai began writing, in the 1950s, there were few writers writing in English and she used the home and family as themes before moving away deliberately to

In Custody to write about a world where women hardly figured. “My own experience was limited, I wanted to step out into a world not of my own experience. It was becoming tedious to constantly write about the domestic situation” she says. When she reached

Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), the story of a wandering German Jew in exile in Mumbai, she “had gained a little confidence just escaping from my own early concerns.”

How a book begins

Anita Desai speaks softly and her observations on life and writing are unsentimental, which is perhaps why she admires Rabindranath Tagore and Virginia Woolf — “there is Woolf in the background, she remains the standard setter for me”. She has been spending a great deal of time in Mexico — “there’s so much past in a present-day setting” — and is “wondering” about her next book. “I am trying to avoid nostalgia in future writing,” she says, as “nostalgia is a great enemy of art”. Her steps to write a novel? “I always start with a place, then characters appear on the scene and then they talk to each other.”

Kiran Desai starts the book-writing journey by gathering “sentences, thoughts, landscapes and scenes… I keep a diary and collect things there.” Both live in New York, and sometimes write together, daughter upstairs, mother downstairs, and talk about where they are in their books before sharing a drink at the end of the day.

Anita Desai remembers her daughter writing marvellous letters home and recalls wishing she would try her hand at writing even as she was pursuing studies as an environmental scientist. “Luckily, her professors in college noticed the same things that I had noticed.” So, can writing be taught? Kiran Desai feels that “strange corners get worn down if you are writing for group approval, which you do when you are part of a writers’ workshop.” Her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , was born in such a workshop, and she feels it’s a “self-conscious book”. She took a decade to write her second book, but that “enhanced her writing”. As for Anita Desai, who has taught creative writing, she doesn’t think she would have the courage to attend a writers’ workshop: “I learnt my craft by going into myself and reading, carefully reading what would be good for my work.”

Favourite works

Ask Kiran Desai what are her favourite Anita Desai books, and she gushes, “There are a few, In Custody, Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner’s Bombay — these books and the landscape are deeply familiar to me.” Most of all, she feels close to Baumgartner “because he is a character of unending exile”.

Anita Desai never draws attention to herself, walking in quietly for her daughter’s session with Paul Beatty, last year’s Booker winner, and heading towards the back, wanting to sit away from the harsh light, as her daughter’s words about her ring in our ears: “There is no narcissism about her, no loud showing off. I have always felt encouraged by her, critics have looked harder.”

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in