It started with a photograph: two white-haired women wearing white, both turned away from the camera as they stare out of the window at the falling snow.

It was one photograph out of the dozens that covered the refrigerator of a friend whom Anita Desai was visiting in Toronto, but the image stuck in the mind of the three-time Man Booker Prize-nominated author.

It was the seed which eventually inspired Winterscape, a short story about two elderly Indian sisters who make the long trip to Canada to visit the boy they raised together, now a man with a family of his own.

Part of her short story collection Diamond Dust And Other Stories (2000), it was chosen as a featured short story for this year's Read! Singapore literacy campaign.

To be sure, it is not unusual for a writer to spin a story from a single image or detail. However, this ability to create something out of so little seems especially representative of the author, who was in town recently to give some talks as part of the campaign.

After all, the 71-year-old was an Indian writing about India in English, long before Indian writing in English (or IWE, as it is snappily known in publishing circles) became a marketable genre, thanks largely to the success of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981.

As the stay-at-home wife of an Indian businessman in the 1960s, she would steal moments between her familial duties to work, writing intensely in longhand and quickly putting her work away at the sound of footsteps.

'It wasn't a valid profession at that time. People thought it was a nice hobby - it kept you quiet. So that made me a bit defensive, I think,' says the petite divorcee in a voice so gentle, it is almost drowned out by the clicks of the camera as the photographer gets in some candid shots during the interview.

Although there were a few other Indian writers such as R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand at the time, they were from an older generation, and thus Desai often felt that she was on her own when it came to writing.

'I must say that a lot of the time, it seemed like a very lonely effort to be by yourself, writing, without knowing if there were any readers for your writing, without any sense of anyone being interested,' says the author, who grew up in an upper middle-class family with an Indian father and German mother, and who studied English literature at the University of New Delhi.

But looking back, she says that she would not exchange her solitary experience for the current onslaught of writing workshops, readings and competitions available to young writers.

'Now that it is all so changed, I really look back and think how lucky I was to have all that time in which I could just follow my own drum. I didn't have to follow any trend, there wasn't anybody looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing,' she says.

She published her first novel, Cry, The Peacock, in 1963, and has since written 10 more novels and two short story collections. She has even passed on her gift for writing - the youngest of her four children, Kiran, 37, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance Of Loss.

It is tempting to call her a pioneer of Indian literature in English, but that is a label she firmly rejects. 'I don't think I really am a pioneer. There were a few writers before me, and now the number of writers has grown and grown and grown,' she says simply.

In fact, the US-based author, who has lived outside of India since 1986, admits that she feels a little uncomfortable writing about India now. 'I have been living abroad for so long. I go back to India on visits but find it changed and rather bewildering. I am conscious that the subject now belongs to a younger generation of writers.'

Tellingly, her latest novel, The Zigzag Way (2004), does not even have any Indian characters in it. About a white American's search for his roots in Mexico, the novel was inspired by her first trip to that country, which she now enjoys visiting annually.

'To plant an Indian in that situation and that place would have been a little bit too bizarre,' she says with a laugh.

Her life as a member of the Indian diaspora began when she was invited to take a fellowship at Cambridge University in 1986. She then went to the United States in 1987, where she taught at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The American green card-holder retired from MIT in 2004 and now lives in Cold Springs, a village in upstate New York. She says she decided to remain in the US as three of her children live there, including Kiran in nearby New York City. She visits India, where her fourth child lives, about twice a year.

But she is far from putting down roots in the New World. 'If my children weren't there, then I wouldn't think of it as home. I would certainly leave,' she says.

How does this sense of rootlessness affect her writing? 'It is a strange thing because, earlier, my books were very much rooted in place. I couldn't see the story separately from the place, it belonged so firmly there,' says the author, who is currently toying with two or three ideas for a novella or novel.

'But now that I have become so rootless and move around from country to country and continent to continent, I find that place is not so important anymore.'

She smiles as the photographer comes closer for a different angle, the clicking of the camera filling the silence.

'It is the observation which remains important. Whether in India, Mexico or elsewhere, always, I think, a writer simply has to have acute observation of details,' she says softly.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Aug 31, 2008.