Avni Doshi's debut novel shortlisted for Booker

Rashi Mathur

The human brain is fragile and coping with the fear of disappearance from somebody’s memory can be daunting. Indian-origin author Avni Doshi’s debut novel, ‘Girl in White Cotton’ (‘Burnt Sugar’ in the UK), which has been shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2020, draws us to this thought time and again through a roller-coaster emotional ride into a daughter’s mind.

Since she first submitted a manuscript to a literary agent in 2012, it took Doshi seven years and eight drafts to bring it to its final shape. The novel was released in India in 2019 and made its UK debut this year, immediately getting longlisted for The Booker Prize along with the likes of Hilary Mantel, a two-time Booker winner. The Booker committee called the novel, set in modern-day India, “sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit”. “This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers — between mother and daughter.”

The notion of turning into a ‘caregiver’ to her mother, the woman responsible for snapping her idyllic childhood, pushes Antara back and forth into an unending maze of episodes from the past. She feels her mother’s agony is ‘redemption’ of the ‘humiliation’ she subjected her daughter to. She is forgetting the date, the year, enquiring about her dead friends.

For Tara, the mother, marriage was like a ‘sanctioned kidnapping’. A year later, Antara was born. When Tara’s alienation from her own family grew, she started attending a guru’s satsang, donned in white cotton, ‘dripping with milk’ without feeding her — the light cotton becoming ‘a path to freedom for the mother’, but for Antara, a ‘separation from family’.

As her mother loses her memory, Antara finds it unfair that her mother ‘can put away the past while I’m brimming with all the time’. She sits in the present, but her senses drift into a different space, her own grab over reality constantly loosening. Every time Antara contemplates, the author achieves her purpose of emphasising upon the fallibility of memory. Tara’s physical degradation is ‘repulsive’ to Antara, who feels that human mind degenerates, ‘halts, sputters, but can’t be reversed’. She lives under a constant threat that ‘for a moment’ her mother doesn’t know who ‘I am, and for that moment I am no one’.

Supported by the images of a ‘loud’ and ‘pungent’ Pune, Antara’s artwork of ‘looking at where pattern ceases to exist’ and the ashram scene with Kali Mata, the author gives this mind trajectory an organic unity.

Interview

From being longlisted for the Booker, you are now on the Shortlist. It’s not just recognition, it has entered the portals of achievement. Have you felt the need to process it?

I’m not sure how to process something like this. There isn’t a manual for it. Digesting something so big probably takes time, and I’m not focusing on it, particularly because not much has changed in terms of my day-to-day life.

It took you seven years to write the book. Does this prolonged indulgence fortify the author in varied ways, as much as it does her or his characters?

I don’t think of it as an indulgence as much as what was necessary for me to write the book. I had to evolve and change as a person to be able to write this novel. After every draft was completed, I went back and realised I wasn’t happy, that I hadn’t been able to tell the story I had wanted to. If I could have written the book in a year, I would have. But my abilities didn’t allow for that.

You are a trained art historian. How does it play out in the shape and size of imagery — of your characters, their characteristics, your version of them, their version of themselves?

It’s hard to unpick exactly how my background in the art world has influenced the way I write and what I write about. Of course, at a very obvious level, the artistic practices of the characters and descriptions of the art world feature prominently in the book. Perhaps there is a certain aesthetic in my writing, in the way the sentences sound and look? I try not to analyse this too closely.

You were born in the US, live in Dubai. Does physical distance alter the macro and micro component of the world you write about?

I think distance from the place I was writing about was useful in that I had to rely on memory, particularly in the form of sensory experiences. The book is quite sparse in terms of descriptions overall, I only wanted to include settings and spaces that would be evocative in terms of what was actually happening in the story and for the characters. Because I was far from Pune, I gave myself the permission to invent where I felt it necessary.

The first question that pops up in a reader’s mind is: who is this ‘girl in white cotton’? For the mother, cotton is ‘her truth’, while for Antara, it binds her in ‘prison’. Her daughter Anikka is referred to as a ‘bundle of white cotton’. Any particular reason for choosing this word and attaching multiple connotations to it?

White cotton as an image operates in the novel through its various registers of meaning. It is resonant for all of its connotations, the light and the dark, and its associations with renunciation, purity, motherhood, memory and grief. I didn’t set out with an expectation to unpack this image, but it began to appear again and again, and then I tried to excavate its possibilities in the narrative.

A mother-daughter relationship is about unconditional love, but it’s not devoid of discord. Can we say the same holds true for Tara and Antara, but their neuroses alienate them from each other, and that’s what the novel tries to achieve — fear and withering of mind associated with dementia?

What if we could accept that a mother-daughter relationship, with its originary mythologies, can contain contradictory emotions? Like love and hate, or creation and destruction. What if a mother-daughter relationship isn’t about unconditional love, but about deep ambivalence? Can we tolerate that? I think opening up the kind of questions we ask about motherhood gives us the opportunity to understand it as lived experience, rather than an idealisation.

The pandemic’s been an altering event. What has changed, what hasn’t?

My daily life isn’t very varied. I mostly stay at home, with my children, and read and write in the moments that allow for some quiet and solitude. The pandemic has made that time less possible — we are always together.

I think, overall, I have a sense of how little we need to survive after the last few months. There were certain luxuries and freedoms that I thought were necessary to my happiness, but it turns out that I was quite a contented prisoner. — TNS

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