[5] Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight.
She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N.
The following year she married Ashvin Desai, later the director of a computer software company and author of the book Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos.
She considers Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.
Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011.
It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and starred Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.