At last, it’s time to unpack the difficult mother

In my middle-school years, I found a book called Tamarind Mem in our school library, which I soon got quite obsessed with. The writer, Anita Rau Badami, was unfamiliar to me at the time, and so was the icy Calgary from where her protagonist Kamini remembered — misremembered, really, if we are to be accurate about the slippery slopes of memory – her growing-up years with Saroja, her “sour-tongued mother”, in railway towns across India, where her father was posted. (There might have been a sibling – but I am forgetting the details.)  Saroja had been given the name “Tamarind Mem” by a mysterious man who entered their lives in one of the railway towns, and who, Kamini later understands, had become Saroja’s lover.

This novel unleashed in me a fascination for a specific kind of mother-daughter novel, one that inverted the heretofore familiar formula of the wild/ difficult daughter locked in a complex relationship with her mother, in her attempt to live a life beyond the familiar frames of reference, the kind of daughter who exerts as much of a compelling centrifugal force in the family as in the narrative. Up until then, in the books I had read, the daughter was the doer, the mother, the witness. But Tamarind Mem, deliberately overturning this, was fresh, different, almost scary. For so long I had identified with the difficult daughter myself, transposing the contents to my own Calcutta childhood and youth, yearning constantly to break out of their mould and outgrow my own mother – and, therefore, Tamarind Mem, where it is the mother who wants to break the mould, cast a curious if baffling charm upon me.

I was reminded of all this – the genre, the obsession, the need to recast memory and even scores with our mothers – when I read Avni Doshi’s powerful novel, Girl in White Cotton, published earlier this year. (It is interesting that the inverted mother-daughter/doer-witness relationship is also explored in another book that is the toast of literary circles now, Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field.) Written in the voice of the grown-up daughter, the artist Antara, Girl in White Cotton employs spare, elegant prose to not only detail the present but also conjure up the complicated and acute terrain of the past, to contain its treacherous stories, stories that are as difficult to recollect as they are to forget.

(Except, Tara is forgetting.)
I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.
I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption – a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned.
But now, I can’t even the tally between us.
The reason is simple: my mother is forgetting, and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt. I used to bring up instances of cruelty, casually, over tea, and watch her face curve into a frown. Now, she mostly can’t recall what I’m talking about; her eyes are distant with perpetual cheer. Anyone witnessing this will touch my hand and whisper: Enough now. She doesn’t remember, poor thing.
The sympathy she elicits in others gives rise to something acrid in me.

In the past, Tara had walked out of her marriage (to an unexciting man with an overbearing mother) and joined a cult, daughter in tow. While she became the cult leader’s favourite, beginning to live with him as his partner, Antara grew up in the ashram, cared for by the eccentric ashramites, chief among them the American hippie Kali Mata, who had moved to India many years ago, in the groupthink days of free love and spirituality.

Afterwards, when a new favourite replaces her, Tara leaves the cult, and her attempt to return to her previous life, to her original family — Antara’s Nana, Nani and the estranged father – leaves a visceral impact on the child. Eventually, Tara moves out again, and mother and daughter cobble a life together, built on the agonizing highs and lows of their acute bond. Into that tinderbox arrives another man, a photographer.

Structured so deftly that the movements from the present to the past are seamless and controlled with quiet precision, Girl in the White Cotton, however, is its most sophisticated in its forays into the present – Antara’s life, with her husband and his overbearing NRI mother, her fraught relationship with Tara – who is now showing the early signs of dementia – and to her artistic life.

If you are partial to the pleasures of the literary novel, then, without a doubt, Avni Doshi’s debut, with its exquisite prose and formal brilliance – the ending was one of the finest I have encountered in a long time – is for you. It will dazzle you with its many quiet bounties, each sentence as polished as it is tight, its bleakness deeply evocative of the daily lives of artists, whether or not they have the complex maternal ties of Antara, its the exploration of the silences, the cruelties and the tendernesses that mark our most intimate relationships, sustained, and its familiar darkness, borrowed from the deepest reserves of our own truths.