Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, review: a feverish portrayal of corroded love

‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” is the playful, poisonous opening of Avni Doshi’s Booker-longlisted debut. Doshi, born in New Jersey to Indian parents, spent seven years working on the novel, a twisted, clever examination of a love-hate relationship.

Antara, an artist, and her mother Tara live in Pune in India. Tara is losing her memory, which distresses Antara as it means there’s “no way to baste her in guilt” about her past offences. “It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time.” The past spills into the narrative, which weaves Antara’s memories of her miserable childhood (life in a free-loving ashram, begging outside her grandparents’ club, boarding school run by sadistic nuns) with the daily struggle of watching her mother disappear before her, “a battery-operated doll whose mechanism is failing”.

Antara’s memories are seasoned with doubt, too, as Doshi dwells on the toxic axis between memories and lies. Now in her thirties, Antara works on a Chinese-whispers project of drawing a man’s portrait every day, copying it from the previous day’s sketch. The man’s changing face “celebrates human fallibility”, thinks Antara.

Spite and resentment colour things even more. After a fight with her husband, she wonders, aloud, “in the future, how we will exact our revenge and make the other repent”. In the midst of all this, Tara feels like a cipher, stuck between the mother Antara longs for and the woman she’s grown to hate. “There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness.”

There’s a lot more to praise in Burnt Sugar: a concern with corporeality and illness, smells and shrieks erupting through the feverish prose. It’s a corrosive, compulsive debut.