Anita Desai has lived in Delhi and London and Boston, but when she settled, she chose the Hudson River Valley, in New York State. She first came 40 years ago, to visit the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and was so impressed that she later made her home here, on one of the most dramatic stretches of the river.

“I discovered what a beautiful part of America this is,” recalled Desai, 87, sitting in her house in Cold Spring, her living room awash in sunlight and her walls lined with books.

The journey to this point has been long and winding for Desai. For years, she explored a variety of literary and artistic landscapes, from remote Indian ashrams to Mexican mining towns and suburban America, expanding in the process the horizons of generations of Indian writers, both at home and abroad. And now, though she has put down roots in one place, her imagination continues to roam widely.

Her new novella, “Rosarita,” is a slim, enigmatic mystery set in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a ghostly meditation on truth and memory, violence and art. In it, a visiting Indian student stumbles upon traces of her mother’s hidden past as an artist in 1950s Mexico — or is it just a mirage, fed by the “fantasies and falsehoods” of a local stranger?

Salman Rushdie has been a deep admirer of Desai’s work since early books such as “Clear Light of Day” (1980), which he said reminded him of Jane Austen. “Both Anita and Austen present a deceptively quiet and gentle surface to the reader,” Rushdie wrote over email, “beneath which lurks a ferocious intelligence and a sharp, often cutting wit.”

“Rosarita” signals a “new departure for Anita,” he added; with its air of mystery and otherworldliness, it suggests Jorge Luis Borges more than Austen.