Abstract Anita Desai seems to have been on the quest for order and meaning in life in her Indian English fiction. She focused on feminine anguish in the complex cultural stresses and strains of Indian society. Her protagonists undergo a struggle to find their real self; because of the cramping pressures of anxieties, they seem to have lost it. They experience a discrepancy between the higher needs of the individual’s inner nature and the unchangeable cosmic conditions of existence. Those who are able to comprehend and surmount their personal problems seem to gain a healthy vision of life after some struggles. Desai remains primarily a novelist of moods, of persistent states of mind, of the psyche. Most of her novels are extended narratives of states of being which do not cohere into a plot or structure in the conventional sense, Desai sees the world in terms of experience as it emerges from the encounter of the self with the world outside. This paper attempts to show how she achieves the results she seeks to gain, in order to expose not only the extremity of the suffering endured by women, but also the deep psychological problems that beset many human beings.