In an interview with the Guardian, novelist Anita Desai says that male characters tell more adventurous stories (via Kitabkhana):
As a young woman, Desai says she felt her own life was not big or broad enough to feed her writing. “My whole life was about family and neighbours: it was very difficult for a woman to experience anything else. I was bored, and I needed to find more range, which is why I started to write about men in books like Baumgartner’s Bombay [in which a German Jew flees the war in India] and In Custody [a college lecturer goes in search of a famous poet]. Men led lives of adventure, chance and risk. It just wasn’t possible to write that from an Indian female perspective.”
Desai, who grew up in Delhi, had a German mother and a Bengali father. Her new book, The Zigzag Way, is a tale about the Cornish miners who settled in Mexico before mysteriously fading away. Desai also wrote the novel In Custody, about a slowly degenerating Urdu poet. The book was adapted into a luscious movie, Muhafiz, starring Shabana Azmi (one of the greatest pleasures in film is watching the lovely Ms. Azmi, bedecked and bejeweled, sitar in hand, croon a ghazal full of smoke and longing). Desai’s daughter Kiran recently debuted as a novelist with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
