Rosarita by Anita Desai – a luminous search for a mother

Over a literary career spanning six decades, Anita Desai , now 87, has returned repeatedly to themes of family bonds and the place of women within them: that perennial conflict between duty and desire, expectations and independence, that plays out in different but familiar forms through each generation. In Clear Light of Day , the first of her three novels to be shortlisted for the Booker prize and the book she called “the most autobiographical”, this examination of family politics takes place against the backdrop of partition, a theme she revisits in Rosarita , her first new novel in more than a decade; a spare and haunting story of little more than 90 pages that nevertheless touches on complex ideas of memory, identity and the response of art to violence.

Bonita, a young Indian woman studying languages in Mexico, is accosted one day in the public gardens by a flamboyant old woman who claims to recognise her. The woman declares that she knew Bonita’s late mother – “my adored Rosarita” – years ago when Rosarita visited San Miguel to study art. Bonita is caught off-guard; as far as she knows, her mother – whose name was Sarita – neither travelled nor painted. Her instinctive response is to reach for her dark glasses, “so as to screen yourself from her and hide. But hide from whom – this stranger or your mother?”

Despite herself, she begins to admit the possibility that The Stranger could be offering her the missing piece of a puzzle

The Stranger, as the narrative initially styles her, is persuasive enough that Bonita agrees to follow her on a pilgrimage around locations that her mother supposedly visited, while The Stranger’s stories reawaken questions that have always surrounded her mother’s history. Insisting that Sarita was not an artist, Bonita nevertheless recalls an incongruous “sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels” that hung above her childhood bed: “it had never occurred to you to ask who had made it”. She also unearths the memory of an extended stay in the patriarchal household of her paternal grandparents during her mother’s unexplained absence, and a sense of disapproval hovering over her parents’ marriage, her mother’s “unsuitability as a wife”. Despite herself, she begins to admit the possibility that The Stranger could be offering her the missing piece of this puzzle.

“You had resisted her fantastical tale but now find you would like to believe it. Could she, like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?”

Desai writes with a poetic touch, her imagery both luminous and precise, especially when it comes to rendering landscape. But at the heart of the book is a shocking moment in which Bonita imagines the catalyst for her mother’s flight to Mexico – an art exhibition at the embassy in Delhi that drew parallels between the violence of the Mexican revolution and partition. “[W]hat emerges is the artists’ engagement with their history, in scene after scene of carnage.” The graphic descriptions of brutality against women and children in both conflicts are as distressingly familiar as current newsreels: “this is Man, intrinsically, this is his history: look!”

Desai has described Rosarita as “a fragment”, and the book has that elusive, unresolved quality of a passing glimpse into its characters’ lives. The second-person present tense creates a distancing effect, but at the same time, inevitably, gives the impression of the author addressing an iteration of herself. The narrative resists easy explanations or conclusions, but its images and questions long outlive the brevity of the story. It’s an exquisite miniature; confirmation that, while some octogenarians’ powers may be fading, Desai’s remain gloriously undimmed.

• Rosarita by Anita Desai is published by Picador (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply