With the publication of Fire on the Mountain (1977), Games at Twilight (1978), and The Village by the Sea (1982), Desai became more widely known to western readers, first in Britain and then in continental Europe and the United States, and began to confirm her reputation outside India. These three works map out the spaces of an ‘Indian’ milieu which include the rural precincts of Kamala Markandaya and the domestic interiors of Attia Hosain, and compare well with the acute observations of smalltown Indian life for which R. K. Narayan's Malgudi novels are renowned. Desai's passage from India also brings her ‘India’ to the world; alternating between urban and rural settings, the three works offer tantalizing glimpses of the rich variety of lives, locales and cultures in post-independence India, and enter into the inner sanctums of families, communities, and individual psyches.

But as much as they reveal, there is also a distinct reticence which is partly attributable to the brevity of the works themselves – Fire on the Mountain and The Village by the Sea are novellas, and Games at Twilight is a short story collection. As a formal quality, this reticence suggests Desai's careful reappraisal of her craft after the tortuous lengthiness of the earlier novels. This is particularly evident in Games at Twilight which figures as a quasi-laboratory of narrative experiments focusing on character, situation, or event, and where different points of view of narration are tried out and manipulated. The reticence also speaks to an understanding – and a respect – for the mystery of human existence and circumstance which the author explores and probes through her imagination but can never fully comprehend, represent, or narrate. It is characteristic not only of these three earlier works but also of the full-length novels that Desai was to publish later on in the 1980s, and which secured her fame. Its recurrent function is to unsettle any complacent assumption of knowledge about ‘India’ garnered from a reading and rereading of her works, and to put the reader in her place, so to speak, between familiar recognition and encounter with an impenetrable unknown. It is tempting, though not necessary, to name this reticence as ‘Indian’ for it is a quality which Desai shares with the greatest of modern short story writers like Joyce and Katharine Mansfield, and earlier, Chekhov.