Anita Desai Has Put Down Roots, but Her Work Ranges Widely NYT | Top Stories Anderson Tepper 7 January 2025 at 03:14 Her new novella, “Rosarita,” takes place in Mexico, a country she finds so like her native India that, she says, “I feel utterly at home there.” © Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAnita Desai, the daughter of a Bengali father and German mother, has often been shadowed by a sense of foreignness and dislocation.