"I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges"
About this Quote
Anita Desai suggests that narrative is not a scaffolding erected in advance but a pattern discovered in the space between people. Follow the thread between two lives, and it begins to tighten, twist, and tug until shape appears. Relationships carry history, desire, resentment, and longing; once those forces are traced, cause and effect feel inevitable. Plot is not a machine of incidents but an anatomy of attachments. By attending to how characters glance away, keep secrets, misremember, or reach for each other, Desai finds the quiet pressures that move a story forward.
Her fiction offers vivid demonstrations. In Clear Light of Day, the orbit of siblings Bim, Tara, and Raja, with their divergent memories of childhood and the shadow of Partition, generates a drama whose climaxes are interior and yet searing. Fire on the Mountain grows from the brittle link between Nanda Kaul and the child Raka; silence, withdrawal, and a guarded tenderness become the engines of fate. Fasting, Feasting sets Uma and Arun on parallel tracks across India and the United States, revealing how family expectations and cultural dissonance script their choices. In Custody hinges on Deven’s uneasy devotion to the fading Urdu poet Nur, and the plot unfolds through dependency, disillusionment, and the ethics of admiration. The events seem simple; the human ties are not.
Such an approach resists schematic plotting and trusts empathy and observation. It also reflects a social world where family and community weave tight nets, making every decision relational. By letting the story emerge from connections, Desai preserves moral and psychological complexity; characters are not puppets to a prewritten arc but agents entangled in histories. The method mirrors lived experience: we understand our own lives not by chapters but by the bonds that bind, fray, and sometimes mend, and it is there that narrative finds its profoundest pulse.
Her fiction offers vivid demonstrations. In Clear Light of Day, the orbit of siblings Bim, Tara, and Raja, with their divergent memories of childhood and the shadow of Partition, generates a drama whose climaxes are interior and yet searing. Fire on the Mountain grows from the brittle link between Nanda Kaul and the child Raka; silence, withdrawal, and a guarded tenderness become the engines of fate. Fasting, Feasting sets Uma and Arun on parallel tracks across India and the United States, revealing how family expectations and cultural dissonance script their choices. In Custody hinges on Deven’s uneasy devotion to the fading Urdu poet Nur, and the plot unfolds through dependency, disillusionment, and the ethics of admiration. The events seem simple; the human ties are not.
Such an approach resists schematic plotting and trusts empathy and observation. It also reflects a social world where family and community weave tight nets, making every decision relational. By letting the story emerge from connections, Desai preserves moral and psychological complexity; characters are not puppets to a prewritten arc but agents entangled in histories. The method mirrors lived experience: we understand our own lives not by chapters but by the bonds that bind, fray, and sometimes mend, and it is there that narrative finds its profoundest pulse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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