Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Page Count: 255
“It was a particularly hot day when my mother-in-law and Dilip came to our flat for lunch. I cursed Pune for making a bad impression. I felt responsible for everything abhorrent about it, things I hadn’t noticed before.” It is one of the many points in this book that resonated with me and the life I live. Living in Karachi, one of the biggest, most populated cities of the world, when I have someone visit on my behalf, I more or less feel like Antara, the narrator and protagonist of this rich novel.
With my guests accompanying me, I too start noticing things, unpleasant things like piles of trash, pungent stinky smells, bustling loud noises, harsh weather, and I start personifying Karachi and become ashamed of it as if it has let me down.
Doshi’s novel takes place in the city of Pune in India, where Antara lives with her mom who has just started forgetting things. This makes their already challenging mother-daughter relationship, because of their unpleasant past, even more challenging. Early on in the story, Antara also meets Dilip, her American-born future husband, in a café.
Dilip’s parents then come to India for the wedding, and Antara’s mother-in-law finds India mockingly backwards and has a satirically funny ride home from the airport to Antara’s flat. But what is actually funny is that Dilip’s mom is still Indian in her roots, and refers to a pandit to see if their marriage will be successful. The pandit foretells that if they get married Dilip would die because Antara was born on a cursed day and time, which we come to know is her false birthdate. Another point which resonated with me and the surroundings I grow up in.
Meanwhile, Doshi includes chapters that tells the intoxicating and exuberant story of Antara’s mother, through which we come to know more about the tension between her and her daughter Antara. An eccentric, different and stubborn personality, Antara’s Ma visit the local ashram from an early age and spends weeks there with ashram’s pious residents Baba and Kali Mata. Even after she gets married and gives birth to Antara, the ashram and Kali Mata remain more a home to her than her own parents.
Antara’s world, because of her mother’s choices, starts there too; and after they leave the ashram, they go through countless other unusual and mostly demeaning situations. Antara’s father leaves them and goes to America with his new wife, and Antara is left with her mom, who she both consciously hates and instinctively loves.
Antara becomes an artist and prefers only to sketch. She makes a sketch of an image of a man’s portrait, and then makes another sketch from the first sketch and so on. This becomes her years long project, and gets acclaimed locally as well. However, who is the man in the photo? And does it have anything to do with the tense relationship of the mother and daughter?
I really liked this book. Doshi’s prose brings to live her surroundings and the things that fill that surrounding. The ugly, the naughty, the obscene, she boldly includes everything that her story has to tell, and therefore succeeds in telling a story that feels true, modern, and rich. Along with a gripping, fast-paced, and vivid storytelling, Doshi’s novel has a conflicting and deeply affecting tale of a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and in that a beautifully and closely told story of Alzheimer’s disease in development.
It’s a multilayered
story and one that spreads and connects like a root, which not only makes it fascinating
but also appreciable for being something sophisticated and complex. If by any
measure crowned not great, Doshi’s ‘burnt sugar’ is, nonetheless, definitely a
really good book – and sometimes that’s all a book has to be. One of my favorite
books this year.
Ratings: 5/5 ***** December 8, 2020_