At 87, the Indian author has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times, and has written her first novel in a decade. She talks about leaving India to teach and write around the world – and feeling like a stranger everywhere

The day of my interview with Anita Desai, there are flash floods in greater New York and, after my train breaks down and I am stranded at the station, the 87-year-old plunges out in her car to fetch me. Desai is tiny, with a very direct gaze that makes one feel – unreasonably, perhaps – that she is often in the position of having to tolerate idiots. That the Indian novelist finds herself, at this stage of her life, living in a small town in the Hudson Valley some 90 minutes north of Manhattan strikes her as thoroughly absurd. “But then life in America always seems to me very random,” she says. There are worse starting points for a career in fiction.

The strength of Desai’s novels has always been, partly, in her ability to withhold, an instinct that has become more pronounced with age. Her latest novel, Rosarita, is the shortest yet – “I’ve come down to a novella!” she says, delighted – and tells the story of Bonita, a young Indian woman who travels to Mexico to study and stumbles upon unknown evidence that her late mother had once been there, decades before. It is about grief, and longing, and the fact that no one ever really knows about other people, even – or, perhaps, particularly – one’s own families. I found it very moving; you are never sure, in the narrative, of what is real, and what is the projection of a grieving daughter. But, says Desai, “readers are frustrated and would like more. I have had readers say, oh, but what happens in the end? I said, look –” she looks briefly indignant, “ – I’m not writing a Victorian novel starting with childhood and going on to old age and death! This is just one little section. A little piece of their lives. A fragment.”

Even Trump’s usual lies could not distract from the president’s decrepitude. But these debates don’t move the needle

Who could have foreseen that the scariest thing about the presidential debate on Thursday night wouldn’t be the lies, the bombast or the threats to democracy, but the spectacle of Trump’s slightly wolfish restraint. Heading into the encounter, Democrats felt the kind of anxiety more usually endured before watching a child perform, with that same crushing sense of raw emotions. That Trump barely mocked Biden, or went after his age or his son, seemed less rehearsed than a shrewd response to what all of us were seeing: a president so compromised that all Trump had to do was grin, lean back and let the optics work for him.

And still, despite the evidence, it feels wanton to say this. Biden, whose voice was hoarse from a cold, rushed his delivery, fought to find words and stumbled in a style not entirely new to him. The difference on Thursday night was one of degree. “Oh my God” was the general consensus, texted around the country, when the debate opened in Atlanta. While Trump’s remarks were predictably ludicrous, full of lies and inflated claims, nothing he said could distract from the image of Biden saying sensible things in a manner so crepuscular that the entire event jumped from politics to tragedy. It made me think of a line from Rilke: “It had almost hurt to see.”