Writer and the city.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Gulmohar Park was until recently known to have the bungalow of film star Amitabh Bachchan. Years earlier, the same south Delhi neighbourhood was home to another illustrious figure. Author Anita Desai lived in a bungalow just across the road from Gulmohar Park Club.

In fact, Anita Desai wrote the novel Clear Light of Day in Gulmohar Park—this being artist Vinita Chawla’s recollection. She says Anita Desai was her parents’ tenant. The white-haired Vinita conjectures that her parents must have rented out their Gulmohar Park bungalow to Anita Desai’s husband, Ashvin, a business executive. The couple lived there perhaps during the mid-1970s, Vinita says, as she tries to remember those long-ago days this afternoon at her red brick bungalow in Gurugram’s Sushant Lok. Back then, Vinita lived with her parents in another part of the city.

While Anita Desai changed continents over the years, Delhi commands a significant spot in her biography. She spent her formative years in our city, graduating from Delhi University’s Miranda House College. Delhi is also omnipresent in her oeuvre. The historic Purani Dilli lurks like a shabby aged character in her novel In Custody (later adapted into a film starring Shashi Kapoor). Now in her late 80s, Anita Desai lives far away in New York; her most recent book Rosarita has been recommended by former US president Barack Obama in his 2025 summer reading list.

Of course, at the time of her Gulmohar Park days, Anita Desai was in the early stages of her life as a published writer. The novel that, per Vinita, the author wrote in Gulmohar Park would be the first of her three books to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Whatever, a writer tends to be an enigma to their loyal readers. How is their home like? The gracious Vinita gives a sense of the Gulmohar Park house to help us imagine Anita Desai’s daily world. It was a red brick bungalow. A mulberry tree stood outside the gate. The front garden was small, but the back lawn was large, with a mango tree. The upper-floor balcony had a bowery of pink bougainvilleas—maybe there Anita Desai wrote the novel that Vinita believes was (possibly) finished in Gulmohur Park. She shows her paperback copy of Clear Light of Day. The title page has a handwritten inscription referring to the house; it was named Sneh Sadan, after Vinita’s mother.

At some point, Anita Desai moved out of Delhi, eventually settling in the US. Vinita’s parents have also passed. The Gulmohur Park property was sold a decade ago. The new owners demolished the old house.

Wait, dear reader, our story hasn’t yet ended.

Close to Gulmohar Park lies Panchsheel Park. The name of this neighbourhood appears in a new novel—The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It is by Anita Desai’s daughter, the Booker Prize winner writer Kiran Desai.

Literature and a home

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