Mother, and a maze of memories

Girl in White Cotton (Burnt Sugar)

by Avni Doshi.

HarperCollins.

Pages 288.

Rs 599

Rashi Mathur

The human brain is fragile and coping with the fear of disappearance from somebody’s memory can be daunting. The book draws us to this thought time and again through a roller-coaster emotional ride into Antara’s mind.

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 and figments of a bleak future. 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, 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. She would disappear into the ashram every day, donned in white cotton, ‘dripping with milk’ without feeding her. Here, we learn the heavy meaning of light cotton — ‘a path to freedom for the mother’, but for Antara, a ‘separation from family’.

Now, when Tara is showing signs of ‘amyloid plaque’, 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 is constantly loosening. She feels eluded by ‘peace of mind’. She becomes a mother thinking that a ‘baby will tie her irrevocably to Dilip’, who, on the other hand, is ‘disciplined and linear’, and she reckons his belief that ‘it must be tiring to be me’. Her life is totally different from her mother’s — she had an amicable husband, Anikka to bestow her motherly affection upon, grandmother, friends. Yet, her mother’s illness seems ‘contagious’.

Eventually, we learn that 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’. Gradually, she does make herself invisible, unseen by all 11 people in the room, a mere reflection projected by the mirror. And the thoughts manifest.

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