SOURCE: "Being and Becoming in Anita Desai's Where Shall We Go This Summer?," in Subjects Worthy Fame: Essays on Commonwealth Literature: In Honour of H. H. Anniah Gowda, Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1989, pp. 10-16.

In the following essay, Chellappan examines existential themes of "being and becoming" in Where Shall We Go This Summer?, contrasting the work to The Ramayana and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Meena Belliappa's claim that the novels of Anita Desai clearly indicate the "new direction that Indian fiction is taking in the hands of the third generation of urban centres … a deliberate growing away from a debased tradition, of fiction as romance, to a more meaningful wrestle with reality" is only partially true: they are certainly not romances; their very form turns romance inside out, as most of the novels only question the romantic view of life; but they are not based entirely on...