A book which was on the Booker Prize shortlist but which did not win the prestigious prize tends to be forgotten unless the author is an established name. Girl in White Cotton, Avni Doshi’s first published work, simply cannot be forgotten even if you try. Such is the extraordinary impact with its elegant prose, its visceral emotions, its scathing depictions of an often poisonous mother-daughter relationship that it unsettles and challenges long after you have finished reading it. Set in Pune, it is a story of the relationship between a daughter Antara and her mother Tara who is slowly descending into dementia. What could have been a maudlin tale is, instead, one which tells of discomfort, revulsion, a peculiar celebration of horror. In one particularly awful scene, Antara’s grandmother speaks of Tara as though she were of no value at all anymore, wondering how they would prise the jewellery of her swollen hands when she dies.
The book bristles with Antara’s resentment of her mother, who chose to follow her own path over the duties of child rearing and marriage when she left the family to join an ashram, which sounds eerily similar to the Rajneesh commune in Pune. The mother is not wracked by guilt or remorse, she is determined to live life on her own terms even though the ashram itself is hardly a place to discover oneself with its ludicrous cultish norms.
When Tara begins to decline, Antara takes her in but can feel little sympathy for her mother, burdened as she is with the neglect she endured as a child. The mother sees nothing wrong in what would be perceived by society as her selfishness. And so skilled is Doshi’s writing that one can sympathise with that sentiment even though it has hurt and harmed Antara so much. While Tara’s dementia could have brought the mother and daughter closer, that never really happens. Antara cannot hold her mother to account as Tara can no longer remember the slights and insults that she inflicted on her daughter in the past. The inability to forgive, the disquieting contours of the mother-daughter relationship, the dilemma of what constitutes a fine parent or spouse are all questions raised in this brilliant debut novel. Questions for which there are no real or comforting answers. This is not a book to be missed at any cost. The Booker may have eluded Doshi this time, but it is certainly waiting for her down the line, given the electrifying quality of her writing.
