Supriya Chaudhuri with Anita Desai (right) at the interaction. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Soft, diminutive, sort of lost in the packed split-level interactive space at Oxford Bookstore, Anita Desai seems almost reluctant to face the evening as she is ushered in. The frail yet upright 70-year-old author is to face a barrage of questions from academic Supriya Chaudhuri, along with the motley crowd of Calcutta’s literati. But as the evening wears on, Anita warms up and grows as animated as the crowd, speaking in a quiet, dignified fashion of her life and times.

Anita Desai, nee Mazumdar, was born to a Bengali businessman father and a German mother, had German as her first language though she also spoke Bengali, Urdu and Hindi, but chose to write in English. “It wasn’t yet fashionable to write in English back then. But I had Ruth Prawar Jhabavala as my neighbour. It was her quiet way of writing with veracity about the world around her that gave me a lot of courage.”

Desai was thrice nominated for Booker but never won it. Her daughter Kiran, however, won it with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. As Kiran said: “When I decided to be a writer, my mother always warned me how difficult a writer’s life was.” But Anita repudiates: “I don’t remember being all that discouraging to Kiran.” Yet as she describes her own experience of being a writer in India, she says: “It is like being deep inside a dark cave, quite alone.”

Solitude is an inherent part of Desai’s works. As Salman Rushdie had said of her, “solitude is your great subject”, and it is found in all her principal characters. “Solitude is edged around by the material world and it is a quality by which one senses the material world.” Of her own life, Desai says: “I preferred solitude, because my world was a world of books.” But that can’t be said of all writers. “Proust, for example, came from a material world. He attended dinner parties of Paris and observed and came back to his room to sift through his observations and write.”

But then Anita herself is a keen observer. When Chaudhuri said that a great part of her novels had description, which spoke of her quality of observation and record, the writer answered that that was because she grew up in the hill town of Mussourie. In her childhood, she was keenly aware of nature, earth, animals, insects. The country was teeming with flowers and insects, and even those insects were as important to her as people.

Often accused of having restricted herself to writing about urban women, Desai says: “I could only write about the world I knew, the world I grew up in, so that I could write with familiarity.” And while doing that she strove to be different. Clear Light of Day is a kind of autobiographical work, In Custody investigates the world of Urdu poetry while Baumgartner’s Bombay is a kind of docu-event, a fictional account of an event in Bombay.

Random House India is reissuing these three classics with special new designs and introductions by peer authors, Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta and Kamila Shamsie. Desai was in town last Sunday as part of the promotional tour.