Ah, well. That was roughly half a lifetime ago. Now, a decade-and-a-half later, I'm more willing to be carried along by this austere prose, this cold gaze, these aching, half-articulated longings that claw at Desai's characters from inside their hearts. It is to be short stories this time, after a series of novels, and I wonder if short stories aren't, in fact, what she does best. Diamond Dust, after the suffocating bleakness of her last novel Fasting, Feasting, is a collection of nine stories punctuated by more satisfying perfect (if fleeting) moments and more agreeable epiphanies. Desai's recurrent preoccupations are all here: the predicament of the individual wanting to escape from here to there, there to here; the troubled interior landscape; the longing to stay, the yearning to flee. For every fluttering restlessness, she counterpoints a grey rootedness; for every homelessness, a stifling nest. Home, whether it is the opulent Lutyen's Delhi of Royalty or the shabby barsati area of The Rooftop Dwellers, or even the streets outside Lodi Gardens where the dog Diamond knows to escape by instinct - this thing called home is the grand obsession of these stories. What we realise is that, ultimately, there is no place like home. It's where we are, the here and now, the day that we can seize - these days, these moments, are where we live.
Earlier Desai has used exotic peacocks and blackbirds in her titles; this time, she chooses the evocative name "Diamond" for the black dog in the title story, a tale of blind, stubborn, obsessive, and yes, doomed love. In Royalty, we meet another Sarla - not the pinched, penny-pinching housewife from In Custody, but a fading queen who has 'presided' at gatherings while her diplomat husband 'served'. If the kitchen was the real domain of the earlier Sarla, this time we meet a wilting Delhi rose from a vanishing, gracious, Oxford-returned generation of post-colonial sahibs, who finds herself at a loss when her cook deserts her. The high point of this collection, for me, is the sight of this family - Simba, the aging dog; Ravi, the devoted husband; and Sarla, who has just been elegantly let down by an old friend - climbing slowly up the hill, into the shadows.
Desai's textured brush sweeps across locations, from summer in Delhi, the escape to Shimla, the whiteness of snowbound Canada, to the edgy clarity of Mexico, to swivel back again to Delhi. Her gaze, if passionless, is unwavering and subtly ironic. Winterscape, one of the loveliest stories here, traces the bewilderment and tenderness that accompanies a meeting between women from east and west. Just as it is a child that has kept the two sisters together, it is the birth of Beth's baby that gives these women a fleeting moment of bonding. Underground is another gem about how we treat marriage, that great partnership, that celebration of togetherness, as long as one doesn't know what life would be like without it. Until suddenly it's gone, and one lives with aching memories.
Not all the stories offered moments of light. The Man Who Saw Himself Drown, where Desai returns to a fundamentally tragic vision, juxtaposing the desolation of a life lived namelessly with the seduction of death, was for me the darkest of the collection. Life is fragmented, there is no wholeness, no pure feeling, realises the man with terrifying clarity. But surely fragments, slivers of light, shards of colour - the little we have - surely this is enough to give joy, to sustain life, one wonders. Another dark tale for our times, The Artist's Life, shows us that nothing is sacred, least of all art, whose accoutrements - often more exciting than art itself - provide no protection against the ugliness of hateful gestures.
In the final story of this collection, The Rooftop Dwellers, delightful Moyna, one of my favourite characters in this book, has escaped from the home in which she was born, and seeks to make a new home for herself in Delhi.
She finds not only a rooftop house, with the sky above her, but also a family of sorts, a home, a cat. And perhaps that is what this collection of stories really looks at - the slow, loving, restless process by which we fashion a home for ourselves, wherever we are, every day.
