IT WAS just before 5am when Anita Desai was shaken awake by her sister-in-law in the sleepy north Indian town of Dehradun.

“You’d better see this,” was all the 69-year-old writer remembers hearing as she was led to the television set flickering in the corner of the room.

Only then, peering at the screen, did she realise that her daughter, Kiran, had become the youngest woman to win the Man Booker Prize.

“It was the most wonderful moment of my life to see my daughter walking up there to receive the prize after eight long, hard and lonely years of work,” Mrs Desai told The Times from Dehradun.

The moment was all the more emotional because Mrs Desai herself was shortlisted for the Booker three times, in 1980, 1984 and 1990, but never won it. She had been so afraid that the same would happen to her daughter that she decided not to attend the award ceremony in London and to stay with her brother in Dehradun instead.

“I was afraid others might not see the beauty in her work,” said the author of In Custody and Clear Light of Day, who was born in India but now lives in the United States.

After accepting the award Kiran Desai described her mother as almost a co-author of her book, The Inheritance of Loss, about the trials of life in post-colonial India and as an illegal immigrant.

She owed her mother “a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine”, she said. “It was written in her company and in her witness and in her kindness.” The only problem was getting in touch to thank her in person.

Kiran Desai told the media that her mother was staying in a remote Tibetan settlement with no access to a telephone. It turns out that she had access to a telephone, television and internet connection. But such was the frenzy surrounding the Man Booker winner that she was unable to speak to her mother until yesterday.

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