Alone in a room at a table

Anita Desai

Anita Desai recently became the third Indian writer in English to be honoured as a Sahitya Akademi lifetime fellow, but chooses to stay away from "literary partying".

Long before the publication of Midnight's Children brought alive new possibilities for Indian writers wanting to express themselves in English, decades before Arundhati Roy's Booker win, the advent of the big publishing houses, hefty advances, the elevation of the fashionable young writer to pop-celebrity status, and the occurrence, once highly improbable, of the words "author" and "glamorous" in the same sentence, there was Anita Desai: contributing short stories to a literary magazine while still in college in the 1950s; writing diligently at her desk for a few hours each day; sending her manuscripts to England because Indian publishers at the time weren't interested in contemporary fiction; juggling the unsocial writer's life with some very social demands, such as those of raising four children.

"Things were so different back then," she says. "One felt entirely on one's own. There was no literary community "" we were all so separated by different languages and lives that it was a rare occasion when one might brush against another writer. It was a very solitary occupation, unlike today."

Despite Desai's reputation for being reclusive, I'm unprepared for how soft-spoken she is "" and a little concerned that my tape recorder won't pick everything up. We're sitting in the garden of a cosy little hotel in one of Delhi's quieter colonies, Sunder Nagar.

Desai, who turned 70 earlier this year and has lived mainly in the US for the past two decades, is in town because the Sahitya Akademi has made her one of its lifetime fellows "" and because Random House India has marked the occasion by reissuing three of her finest novels (Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay) in elegant, minimalist new designs, perfectly suited to the work of someone who continues to live by the discipline of the writing process itself rather than the stardust that sometimes sticks to the high-profile writer.

Desai is only the third Indian writer in English to be honoured thus by the Sahitya Akademi "" Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan were the others "" and yet surely the very phrase "Indian writer in English", with its hint of rigid author-classifying (and the baggage that the acronym IWE often carries), sits uneasily on a lady who once said that her novels "aren't intended as a reflection of Indian society, politics or character "" they are private attempts to seize on the raw material of life".

Is she still resistant to the defining of writers primarily in terms of their background? "I think every writer dislikes being labelled," she says, "because once you've been put in a category you might even start to believe that that's where you belong, which can restrict your movements. It's nice to know that you're free to think and write as you wish. Whether you live here or abroad is of no consequence really "" what is important is what you make of your experiences, what you present to the reader."

Besides, she doesn't want to become a spokesman for a particular group. "My writing just isn't polemical in that sense, it's an absolutely personal response to life." Her work bears this out: though her concerns include the suppression and marginalisation of women, her approach is not a stridently feminist one; if anything, it's too underplayed for the tastes of some readers.

A motif of Desai's fiction that can be found in the three reissued books is the circumscribed life: people unable, or unwilling, to escape what many of us would think of as a trapped existence, and who yet manage to find a measure of dignity even within those constraints.

Clear Light of Day, which she has called the most autobiographical of her works, sets the lonely childhoods of two sisters, Bimla (Bim) and Tara, against their lives as adults: Tara marries a diplomat and moves to the US, thus escaping the house where she had felt stifled, while Bim stays behind, a caretaker for old memories.

In Custody has small-town lecturer Deven resigned to a mundane existence until he gets the opportunity to interview one of his idols, a once-great Urdu poet now leading a shabby, parasitic life in an old Delhi house. And Baumgartner's Bombay is about a perpetual outsider, a German Jew who escapes the Holocaust as a child and lives an unobtrusive life in India for decades.

Desai's attention to detail, the carefulness of her descriptions and the fact that her fiction often deals with static lives means that her books themselves have sometimes been accused of being static by readers who are interested mostly in the forward movement of a narrative.

But this would be to overlook the mastery with which she draws us into an interior world, showing us the many layers that can exist beneath a life that might not, on the surface, appear to be very significant.

In her hands, characters like Bim, Deven and Baumgartner come to stand for a small, modest form of heroism that doesn't get the press it deserves. "Bim was based on women I knew in India, who had made something of their lives against all odds," she says. "Being an individual despite all the pressure "" to bear, to suffer, and yet remain yourself: I wanted to celebrate that sort of life, which is heroic in my mind."

In a perceptive introduction to the new edition of Baumgartner's Bombay, Suketu Mehta calls it "a tribute to the also-rans of history". I tell Desai that the book is a personal favourite and that I loved the final chapter, after Baumgartner's death, which shows us his squalid little room as seen through other people's eyes.

To them, he was a useless old man whose life and death had no relevance to anyone, but to the reader "" who has been closely involved with him through the book "" he is a very important literary character. We've been privy to his back-story, his crushed dreams, his quiet acceptance; we know about the cruel whimsicalities of history but for which he might have led a very different life.

"He's affected by political upheavals," Desai points out, "and the book reflects my view of politics as this huge juggernaut that rides over ordinary citizens "" either you're crushed by it or somehow you survive it. Baumgartner manages to survive like some little matchstick bobbing along on a vast ocean" "" a note of tenderness enters her voice as she says this "" "and finally, he drowns."

Which book is closest to her own heart? "That's a very difficult question. One finishes every book with the feeling that you haven't done what you set out to do; that along the way it took an unintended turn. But when I wrote Fire on the Mountain (1977), I felt I had achieved a style that was largely my own."

Later, with In Custody, where the two central characters are men, she felt she had broken out of the domestic circle, "which I had been treading over and over again till I myself felt suffocated. I felt at last that I was writing about the world that exists outside. These were moments of breakthrough".

Desai's rigorous writing style and reputation for being very much the type of writer Orhan Pamuk described in his Nobel acceptance speech "" alone in a room at a table "" seem at odds with the details of her life: being a woman in a conservative society, married at 21, bringing up four children (the youngest of whom, Kiran, won the Man Booker Prize last year for The Inheritance of Loss). How did she manage any privacy at all, let alone find time to write her brand of intensely detailed literary fiction?

Her answer makes the writing process sound beguilingly simple and runs against the image of the dedicated author as a temperamental beast, incapable of being restricted to specific working hours.

"I maintained a strict discipline," she says, "knowing that I must write daily and must keep my writing in mind constantly. When the children went to school I would immediately settle down at my desk; when it was time for them to come home, I would put everything away, but keep it in mind so that I could pick up where I'd left off."

Also, her personal reaction to the partly domestic, partly social life an Indian woman must lead "" never feeling quite at ease with that sort of life ""helped her as a writer. "I would go out and meet people, of course, but there was a part of my mind which I kept separate all the time. Because as a writer, you have to have a private life "" that's where writing comes from."

What was the Indian literary scene like in the late 1950s and 1960s, when she started out? "There was no publishing outlet," she says, "Indian publishers would mostly do textbooks or reprints "" they never looked around or paid much attention to local writers. I was lucky to find Peter Owen, a small company in England with an interest in foreign voices."

Naturally, unlike young writers today, who have a galaxy of big-name authors to look up to, there were hardly any Indian writers Desai could seek inspiration from.

"I mainly read English classics: the Bronte sisters, Virginia Woolf, E M Forster. We didn't really study Indian writers "" even Tagore wasn't studied in textbooks ""and we had to discover them on our own later in life. As for contemporaries, I had this strange sense that I had no contemporaries!" Except for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who was a tremendous influence on her.

"She was a neighbour in old Delhi, living a life very similar to my own. Married, with three daughters "" in fact, I first saw her when she was wheeling a pram up and down the road! I would go to her house, we discussed books and that was the closest I came to a literary life. It was encouraging to know that here was someone else doing the same thing; that it was possible to be a writer!"

When she was younger, Desai says she enjoyed the power of language a lot more "" her descriptions were fuller and richer. Even a quick glance through Clear Light of Day will show how a number of carefully chosen adjectives and adverbs can accumulate to make a picture more concentrated, more vivid. Her best work serves as a good counterpoint to the views expressed in George Orwell's celebrated Rules for Writing; they show that good writing doesn't necessarily have to be simple.

"But in my later books," she says, "I've probably been more spare and sinewy "" I've been trying to select with the greatest possible care. It may have something to do with the fact that I now read a great deal of poetry."

Desai now lives in a house on the outskirts of New York: "It's a small village, very secluded. Whenever Kiran needs to really work, she comes out there."

In an interview with Business Standard last year, Kiran said that, like her mother, she wasn't particularly interested in the literary party scene. The elder Desai admits to discomfort with how writing is now often perceived as a ladder to social success.

"This is an enormous change," she says, "The glamour, the talk of big advances, which seems completely antithetical to the literary life. Of course, I don't want to dismiss it altogether, because for the first time now Indian writers are able to live on their writing. It wasn't possible earlier "" royalties were absurdly low. But what's unfortunate is when writers win respect by suddenly having money and access to a better life, rather than through their writing."

Apart from her novels about "little heroes" and their solitary lives, Desai has written children's books, a movie screenplay (for Ismail Merchant's film of In Custody), and numerous works of criticism. Is there any area of writing she regrets not having tried her hand at? She smiles. "One does what one can with one's life. I've tried to make the fullest use of what I had, and I hope I've succeeded to an extent."

Though she hasn't settled on another book since her last, The Zigzag Way, in 2004, she does a fair number of critical pieces, reviews for the New York Review of Books and has been working on Introductions for books on the Italian authors Carlo Levi and Primo Levi. And the old routine hasn't varied much over the decades. "Even today, a day when I don't write for a few hours each morning at my desk "" that's a disturbed day, not quite a normal day for me."