She looks through the mail lying on a tray by the front door. Sparse, quotidian. But one envelope stands out by its size, its clean crispness, an expensive elegance, addressed formally to both Mr and Mrs, so she has licence to indulge her curiosity and open it. The card it contains is gold-lined, handsome, and invites both to an event to be held at the Mexican embassy. How had it come to them? Perhaps Father had some commercial dealings – the world of trade a cat’s cradle of improbable connections – and they would be of no interest to her. But the invitation is to a lecture organized by the cultural wing of the embassy, regarding a connection between the artists of the Mexican revolution and Indian artists of the freedom movement and Partition. One visiting Mexican art critic and one Indian art historian of repute are to address the subject.
She notes the day and time. Father pays it no attention. Besides, he will be out of town for a conference. She summons the driver and has him drive her up the calm, tree-lined avenues that run through the enclave of embassies and diplomats’ residences designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for what became the city of New Delhi. It is not a neighbourhood she often has cause to visit. Somehow she dares to proceed with the unusual venture and, having come so far, must now step out at the gate and let herself in by showing the invitation to a grave young man who waves her into a gathering of tastefully dressed and coiffed guests and hosts, the subdued murmur of civilized talk and laughter, trays passed around with iced drinks and little pieces of exquisite and unidentifiable food.
Knowing no one, she quickly takes a seat in the rows set up before a stage on the lawn, and is glad when the programme begins. There are the predictably pompous speeches made by career diplomats, a little guitar music and then the two critics come out to introduce the work of the artists – Mexican muralists who were inspired by and painted during the Revolution, and the Indian equivalent albeit of a later period – and then the flat, empty screen behind them that she had not earlier noticed comes silently, ominously to life.
The decorous tableau before it vanishes into a pit and what emerges is the artists’ engagement with their history, in scene after scene of carnage: a knife-thrust here, a skull smashed open there, guts ripped from living bodies, drawing blood and more blood. Women’s bodies are pierced and eviscerated, infants torn out of their wombs and arms, flung into flames, bones twisted and charred into ashes. Homes are levelled, wells destroyed, cattle left dead in ravaged fields. Out of these barbaric landscapes trains arriving, marvels of steel and technology, all smoke and fiery iron, some carrying troops and their arms, others packed with passengers slaughtered along the way, blood oozing out of carriages when they are opened, then more blood and still more. Victors climbing atop body-mountains, raising tattered flags, the flags that are required by nationhood. Mouths opening to roar: Azadi! Libertad! At their feet corpses left for vultures to gorge on. Wounds, mutilations thrust in the faces of those who survive to declare: this is Man, intrinsically, this is his history: look!
These slides leap, erupt into the polite scene, the discreetly lit dark. But it is not their incongruity that provides the shock for her. On the contrary, it is the confrontation with what she has always known and lived with. It is profoundly familiar, with masks and façades ripped away.
In the appalled silence that follows, before anyone can begin to move and speak, she has leapt to her feet and run, her hand crushed against her mouth to stop her from screaming. Out in the driveway, she stumbles, searching for her car and driver to take her away.
Anyone trying to explain might suggest that some wound that had been stitched up had split open then. Had the family witnessed that, it might have wondered if it had been accompanied by an admission of her own history, that suppressed one so carefully guarded. Why had it never been permitted to mention her family, its history? Perhaps she had, obliquely, timidly, and we, either innocently or maliciously, made up one of an endless train journey, with never a stop and no place of arrival.
Were those trains she saw on the screen with their unspeakable cargoes, the ones that could have carried the Muslims of India to Pakistan and the Hindus of Pakistan to India, also the ones that carried her family across some savage new border from which few arrived alive?
If so, she had refused to talk of it to anyone, ever. Not of a family, a home or a location. Had it been a desert, a mountain, an island? A mansion, a tenement? If there had been documents or photographs might they have been in those dusty, shabby cartons in the boxroom no one had thought of entering except her? Till Cook had emptied them and sold them to the kabariwallah for four rupees a kilo?
What had confronted her that night in the serene and stately garden was not the unknown and unimaginable but on the contrary what she had always known and always denied even to herself, but here saw fearlessly portrayed.
Fearlessness. That was what she now has to learn.
So she returns, again and again. Either because she cannot stay away or because her presence, her persistent interest has been noticed and invitations continue to arrive, circulars in the mail that she quickly intercepts and keeps to herself. She visits the library, withdraws books on art. It is noted by those who run the cultural division. Except for one, they are very young and charming and also enthusiastic. As part of their diplomatic agenda, they suggest she visit Mexico, so she may ‘make a study of Mexican art, casí no?’. The invitation is casual, routine to them – scholarships are available – but to her it is a dare, a challenge. Having gone so far, she must go further. She accepts.
The challenge this creates to the home, the family – so solid, so unshakeable – is not one that is acknowledged or discussed. In another household it would have been, but this is one from which drama and melodrama have been banned, prohibited. An even grimmer, deeper silence descends, holds everyone in its grip as if by refusing to acknowledge what is happening. But as a volcano is subterranean till it is not, cracks appear. Rumours travel and come to the highest authority of all: Grandfather himself, seated at his massive desk, behind a barricade of files.
He is waiting with the fingertips of his two hands touching each other to form a turret. He does not look across at her, making clear her appearance is a distraction from what is important. But he has been briefed, he does not question. After a long silence encroached on only by the overhead fan’s blades slowly ticking as regularly as a metronome, he parts his dry lips to speak. ‘If that is your plan, then you must follow it,’ he says in the voice of one who has always done exactly that.
Then, with an irritated movement, he drops his hands onto his files and opens the topmost one: there are many more he needs to go through. His secretary hurries to his side to take care of the one that is flung at him.
She is dismissed. Having received this wholly unexpected permission from the ultimate authority, she can do nothing other than to pursue what he had termed her ‘plan’, even if she was barely aware of having made one.
Having received permission from one who could not be denied, she soon finds herself clutching her passport, her visa, her ticket, a bag, her fear and her nerve, doing what till the very last she had not believed she could do, stepping into the sinister metal capsule that stands waiting on the tarmac to swallow her, finds her seat, straps herself into it – the motherly flight attendant helping one so obviously a novice – and finds it lifting off terra firma into the dust-shrouded Delhi night and sets off to explore the vast invisible vacuum.
What follows seems to take place in one long confusing blur leading to her arrival in the night at a door set in a high stone wall where a watchman is waiting to light her way in, past a harshly lit room with an unoccupied reception desk, down a dimly lit veranda encroached on by invading plants as in a jungle, to a room where she falls onto a narrow bed to be engulfed at last by exhaustion, sleep and sorrow as if into her natural element, certain she would never wake from it.
Then woken, after all, by daylight, the murmur of a dove in the tangle of foliage at the window, the sound of water falling somewhere and a broom brushing on tiles.
She can recognize nothing – this narrow wooden bed spread with thick white cotton sheets on which she has slept, and now woken, alone.
Her relief so keen she almost moans aloud as at a thrust at her ribs of revelation. Every moment of her life so far has been removed, wiped out, allowing this moment. The rest of her life will be a pursuit of the recovery of it.
But now you are allowing your own experience of that journey to substitute hers. You have not yet recovered her experience of it.
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From Rosarita by Anita Desai. Used with permission of the publisher, Scribner. Copyright © 2025 by Anita Desai.
