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This paper studies Anita Desai's experimental sleight of hand in The Zigzag Way and explores how new ideas erupt from old yarns as the immigrant-protagonist absorbs the mysteries of an older world, enriches his territory in the New World by mining the graveyard of history, and stakes his claim by letting the New World Encounter influence, take over and transform his world. This study shall reveal how the novel's fictional space re-captures the dilemmas and the nostalgia of immigrant experiences and shows how the descent down the "ladder of time" helps the protagonists discover that everyone comes from somewhere else.
Anita Desai, an Indian diasporic author who has resided in Delhi, Massachusetts, Cambridge and Mexico, has the credit of being a three-time Booker Prize nominee. Born to a Bengali father and a German mother, Desai's bicultural upbringing in British colonial India and her maternal ties to pre-war Germany helped her "sail into wider seas and experience different worlds" (Desai, "Bicultural" 121). Following the trend set by great novelists like E.M. Forster, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, whose literary genius portrayed New Worlds that were richer, more complex and more mysterious than their native homelands, Desai has set her fourteenth novel in Mexico,1 thus following in the new trend of globalised Indian writing where writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Bharathi Mukherjee and Suniti Namjoshi pen the trials of immigrants as participants in a new modernity of "collective" and "individual" displacement. In The Zigzag Way, Desai weaves together strands of lost memories of immigrant miners from Cornwall who crossed the high seas to seek a new beginning in the gold and silver mines of Mexico. The novel's diegesis takes the reader on a discovery of many chapters of history-European, Mexican and Huichol-thus linking historical events of Mexico, Cornwall, New England and Vienna. I shall explore how the novel abounds with the hybrid mingling of Christian and Pagan rites, as in the celebration of the feast day of Día de los Muertos when the living and the dead re-unite and link togther the past and the present. The novel's hybrid fictional space is replete with efforts to unravel the past as the protagonists re-embark on a passage to New Spain, re-trace ancestry, and re-locate the lost...