Return voyage This profound novel-a transcendent gift from the author-follows a young Indian woman's quest in Mexico to learn about her mother

Anita Desai's riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

- Yagnishsing Dawoor

A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. "The Stranger" - elderly, over-friendly and peculiarly dressed "in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions" claims to know Bonita's dead mother, whom she calls "Rosarita". She says they met and became friends when the latter came to pursue art under the tutelage of Mexican maestros. Bonita has no recollections of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico. She remembers, however, "a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at home, of a woman seated on a park bench - and yes, it could have been one here in San Miguel - with a child playing in the sand at her feet". The woman "is not looking at the child and the child is not looking at her, as if they had no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent".