Reading the opening of Rosarita kindled a memory within me. A stranger once turned to me in the street and said, ‘I knew your mother when she lived here. She was beautiful.’ I could almost sense my young, long-buried mother coming up the hill behind me.

Irrelevant to the story? Perhaps, but something similar may happen to you. Anita Desai involves the reader in Rosarita, a novella in five parts, by narrating it in the second person, a device that establishes a kind of intimacy between narrator and reader. Rosarita opens in the jardín of San Miguel in Mexico. ‘You’ are Bonita, an Indian student visiting Mexico to study Spanish. ‘You’ are basking on a bench in the sunlit garden, reading Spanish-language newspapers, when ‘you’ become aware of a woman on another bench ‘staring at you fixedly’. The stranger, flamboyantly dressed in Mexican festive costume, rushes at ‘you’ in an ecstasy of recognition: ‘Of course you are, you must be, my adored Rosarita’s little girl. You are the image of her when she first came to us … You cannot not be my dearest amiga’s daughter!’

What’s going on? A case of mistaken identity, surely? Bonita’s mother was Sarita, not Rosarita; she has neither visited Mexico nor been an artist, as this woman claims. Ridiculous. Embarrassing. She must be deluded or mad. The narrative assigns her two sobriquets, ‘the Stranger’ and ‘the Trickster’. We are in