Avni Doshi’s first novel, Burnt Sugar, has a memorable opening: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”. And its narrator, Antara, may be justified in this attitude, given that her mother later says to her, “I always knew that having you would ruin my life”. The novel has drawn praise – and gained a Booker Prize shortlisting – for its somewhat taboo exploration of being mothered and mothering. Antara is an artist in Pune; Tara is the mother, and she is losing her memory. Her daughter resents this because it means there is “no way to baste her in guilt” over the past. There is plenty Antara thinks her mother should feel guilty about: the period, for example, that they spent during her childhood living in an ashram and begging on the streets, before Antara was sent to a boarding school run by draconian nuns who made her hold her soiled bedsheets over her head in the gymnasium for everyone to see. Antara reflects, “the only reality that remains from that time are feelings and ideas, and whether I authored them or they were placed within me is impossible to know”.
