Like blood, bile is also thicker than water

AVNI Doshi’s debut novel has cut a slow but inexorable path around the world, dazzling readers in country after country. Girl in White Cotton was first published in 2019 in India, the birthplace of Doshi’s parents. Last year, the novel – retitled Burnt Sugar – was published in the UK, where it was named a finalist for the Booker Prize. And now, trailing clouds of international praise, it has finally arrived in the US.

Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication. It is also the world’s worst Mother’s Day present.

“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” the narrator begins. “The sympathy she elicits in others gives rise to something acrid in me.” This is a family tragedy laced with equal parts wit and strychnine.

It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely – and so baldly.

The narrator is an Indian artist named Antara, whose mother is presenting symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The doctors offer only a dose of vague hope; there is no concrete diagnosis and certainly no cure. Hovering in the dusk of competency, Antara’s mother still manages to live alone, but increasingly she wanders, forgets where she is and what she’s doing. As her only child, Antara embraces the responsibility of caring for her with a determination threaded with resentment and even bouts of suspicion.

“It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done,” Antara tells us. “It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time. I fill papers, drawers, entire rooms with records, notes, thoughts, while she grows foggier with each passing day.”

This situation, difficult under the best circumstances, is rendered excruciating by the tense nature of Antara’s relationship with her parents. In the narrative that unfolds through gentle shifts between present to past, we learn of the early collapse of their respectable family.

“Ma always ran from anything that felt like oppression,” Antara says. “Marriage, diets, medical diagnoses.” Antara was born in an ashram, where her mother served, for a time,