Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi – On Fractional View of Self and Reality : Palash Mahmud

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi – On Fractional View of Self and Reality 

 In this literary essay, Palash Mahmud writes about Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar and sheds a light on her verisimility of her life with the story’s root and very reasonably his personal experience and memoir of a grandmother who had been suffering from Alzheimer for over twenty-five years.

It was the night before- a pattern of time dilation that makes different realities, so do our memories- the announcement of the long list of the 2020 Booker Prize, I was returning home from work; I was also thinking about Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eyes (1970) and its 50th anniversary this year and how can I commemorate her phenomenal literary premier in this tumultuous pandemic age? A notification from Granta had popped up on Facebook alluring me to read an excerpt of Burnt Sugar, an exciting debut by Avni Doshi, an Indian-American writer based in Dubai. As soon as I had tapped the thumb of my right hand, the first line I read is: ‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.’ Later when I started reading the novel and ended at where Antara, the main protagonist, reflects:

If a falsehood is enacted enough does it begin to sound factual? Is a pathway created for lies to be true in the brain? Does the illogical eventually get integrated with the rational?

I realized it was not only a close-reading of an expedition of the reconciliation of the imagination and lived realities encountered by Avni Doshi but also a meditation and a substantial acknowledgment of the irrationality of our physical repudiation and the veracity of our mental manacle, it denotes the superficiality of our understanding we are hauling about ourselves and the world at large. 

Antara was actually lying that her mother’s rational downfall and reformative reality were outsourcing her ‘a kind of redemption’ or a counterbalance of pleasure- if it was true- she would not start to draw ‘fluffy clouds’ and to do archival and medical research on our ‘synaptic function’ and ‘limbic system’; she would not start crossing reversely through her mother’s self-destructiveness’ to reconstruct her cognitive vessel as per our social acceptance; she would not make the compromise of rearranging and adjusting her relationship with her husband, father, grandmother, friend, and in-laws; of shifting her artistic career to a caregiver firmly proclaiming ‘you’re with me now. I’ll look after you.’ and last but not least, of embracing pregnancy and motherhood which challenges our understanding of –are our conditions bound us to make the decisions to live with the consequences? Or can our desires and decisions alter the probable conditions and halts and/or creates possible consequences. 

Antara’s allegories rotate our worldviews asymptomatically for rethinking about the conditions we are living in and show- we are not only living in the presence and truths but also into the whirl of absence and lies- and a live life itself is a work of art. 

The novel is a perfect metonymy of the decadence of memory, fractured relationship as well as of the refreshment of things past and lost and of the healings of emotions, feelings, and spirits between a mother (Tara) and a daughter (Antara) justly. On one side the mother is losing her past because of piling up amyloid plaque between the ridges of her nerve cells scientifically and ascending to a new present, on the other side, the daughter is sliding down from her present and walking the reverse way to their buried past.

Though the novel cannot be fallen into the category of autofiction, a narrative form lies between the finger space of memoir and mimesis- as it resonates Aristotelian idea of nature which is also applicable in art is an imitation of the external world as much as the imagination of human’s inter-space. The story starts with the first person confession of the protagonist, an art historian and curator like the author herself, about her hedonistic impressions on her mother, a woman prone to dementia with a mirror image of the author’s grandmother, and she supplies rational explications and a causal hypothesis for her mother’s retribution and articulates vehemently: 

I often wished she had never been born, knowing this would wipe me out as well- I understood how deeply connected we were, and how her destruction would irrevocably lead to my own.

Later she starts to dig her past up to make ‘occasional rehearsal’; her encounters with the travelers and foreign followers in front of the ashram; her marriage with a man possessed by her mother and obsessed in mathematics, a man she could not love ever, being pregnant without her voluntary decision, wearing white cotton saris and taking the ashram as a permanent residence, renouncing her marriage and motherhood. As Antara exquisitely makes a query on human connection and detachment asking over her parent’s divorce- ‘when a husband and wife are not wife and husband anymore,’ similarly, ‘does that mean that a father is no longer a father?’As Rachel Cusk in her memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012) clarifies, ‘… separation is the demand for space, the expression of the self’s need to regain its integrity.’  

The days of abandonment in the ashram dejected Antara’s memories full of longing, loneliness, suffering, humiliation, and all the lies of adult lives, conversely, the eternal companion and friendship with Kali Mata. Leaving the ashram with great betrayal and disappointment, they take refuge in the Pune club and beg at bare hands defaming their family pride and dignity and finally rescued by her husband and rehabilitated at her father’s house. Antara’s second displacement in the catholic boarding school in the hills of Maharashtra where she was accused of defacing reality through her artistic fascinations and experiments. The most romantic and exciting part of the narrative appears when Tara and Antara start to live together with Reza Pine, a Muslim photojournalist who appeared in the scene of a communal riot in 1993 in Bombay and disappeared to the debris of the twin towers’ demolition in 200, with whom Tara felt the essence of love, adultery, and infidelity. At peak of the narrative, Tara finds out a photograph imprinted Mumbai that makes confident and clear that Antara’s art is not art itself is an exposure of triangular love and lust story as Antara enclosed, ‘… a man whom I loved even though he’d once loved my mother’. She struggles to hold up the equilibrium between her husband’s fluid reality and her mother’s new reality. As in Still Alice (2007, 2014), a film adaptation of the debut novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, the daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) asks about the initial challenging experiences of dying memory and struggling cognition, the mother, Alice (Julianne Moore) heart-wrenchingly verbalizes: 

 I have always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me, and I can’t reach and I don’t know who I am? 

She abandons her artistic establishment, embraces pregnancy and motherhood and endures all the lives she has never lived, and starts to doubt surrealistically the nature of the reality we are naturally habituated to conceive and the different shades of identities that distort the essence of self like Jessie Greengrass’ anonymous woman’s adrift in the woods of indecision to be pregnant again in “Sight” (2018). Ms. Cusk reflects a solid verisimilitude on motherhood and identity:

The long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth,… to act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character,… it demands a complete surrender of identity. 

The narratives originated from India are as diverse and visceral as its languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, and histories and most notably its every possible human condition and consequence are as large as its landscapes. Ms. Doshi has poetically injected the souls of classical Indian philosophy, conspicuously, Jainism’s idea of multi-sided reality (anekantavada) as well human identity and Buddhism’s attitude of sublimity in human nature through the character depiction in the narrative. Both traditions and teachings of Philo-theology are more or less complementary to each other; both strive to find the true nature of reality and the ways of mindfulness for all living beings, in short, to establish homeostasis between our exterior and interior reality.  In Jainism (700 BCE), as like in Buddhism (500 BCE), the reality is a transient ides and very fragile like our breathing that we cannot count in a second that we call as present and real-time is so temporal, as Heraclitus (475 BCE), Greek philosopher, after so many years of Jain and Buddha preached in the east, reintroduced in the west. We can repeat our past which is an accumulation of our present is stored in our hippocampus through memories are very reasons for our sufferings and grieves because our world views are partial and we are living with innumerable ignorance and lies about our essence and existence. As Tara said, ‘the world exists only as far you can see.’ This kind of subjective reality echoes in Dilip voice, being known to Antara’s rendezvous and adultery in Goa with Reza who also ‘spoke in terms of fluid reality… and experience continuously altered itself as memory’ and he remains stable and open to accept the other possible realities a person can have. 

The change, motion, and transcendence are the absolute truth in nature, as Mahavira (527 BCE), the twentieth-four Jain Tirthankara, says, ‘modes are infinite’ exemplifying the parable of the blind men and the elephant, or Henri Bergson (1941), the French intuitionist and the philosopher of time and memory, proclaimed: ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.’ 

All characters both in central and around the periphery are always in motion and into a transcendental journey that creates their realities, so do their identities. Even the title of the novel has gone through a transformative experience: firstly it is titled “Girl in White Cotton” published by HarperCollins India in 2019 focusing on Tara’s rebellions, mysticism, spiritualistic determination, and her will to live the highest life wearing white cotton saris all the time even though she did not have any experience of mourning. The reader will find contradictory statements regarding white cotton through Antara’s monologues: 

Maybe Ma saw this white cotton as the means to her truth, a blank slate where she could make herself and find the path to freedom. … the white cloths were the ones that separated us from our family, our friends and everyone else, that always made my life in them a kind of prison.

Hamish Hamilton has renamed the novel “Burnt Sugar” (2020) in their U.K. edition. As the ambiguity of white cotton, Ms. Doshi also presents to us a very didactic approach with a very practical language in opposition to the Indian philosophical and spiritualistic rationale of the consequence of the desire and decision of wearing white is ‘burning sugar’ in our biochemical process which has a causal relation to the evaporation of memory as Antara says:

Life without sugar makes her sharp and erratic and in truth, unhappy- like she was when she came into my room and went through my things. … A fat-burning brain is a clean brain. … A sugar-burning one is murky.

How do we compose our memories and how do we also decompose are very crucial to understand and ‘to devour the self’ because, speculatively, without memories, we cease to exist as an individual in society and our whole communication system falls apart, therefore, we bound to form new memories as a new self but what if our memories are also in a continuous adding and subtracting without repetition and recollection, on that point, Antara reflects, ‘We actively make memories you know. And we make them together; we remake memories too, in the image of what other people remember.’

But how do we lose memories or what does provide us the energy to make, lose and regain our memories when ‘a fleck is always slipping through the sieve.’  Is it the limited capacity in the hippocampus, insulin imbalance, or ‘with problems in the insanities’ but Antara’s Nani superstitiously says that ‘it’s because she isn’t married’. Women forget things when they aren’t married.’  Sam Mendes’ film adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road (1962, 2008) sheds light on the incoherence of human relationships where Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) argues with April (Kate Winslet), ‘It is the inability to relate to another human being is insanity. It is the inability to love.’ To make the portrait of dementia and nostalgia Ms. Doshi so impeccably draws a clock analogy:  

The clock on the wall of the doctor’s office demands my attention. The hour hand is one. … The most diabolic part is the second hand, which, like a witching wand, is the only part of the clock that moves not only forwards but backwards too, back and forth at erratic times.’ 

Avni Doshi shows us parallel some means and ends to recover the lost past to halt and/or cease the dying of nerve cells. As the doctor prescribes knitting is more preferable to cooking which is ‘notoriously difficult to keep straight’ that proves that memory can bypass parts of the brain to take refuge in the ridge of fabrics and in the flavor of spices as a second home. Antara and Dilip adopt writing as the techniques to remember and rehearse the lost lore to sustain the accepted reality. Avni Doshi herself is influenced by memory as a device and/or as a theme in the literary narrative by the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

Avni Doshi recounts the very prosaic and paranoid moments when her own grandmother was diagnosed with memory loss that pushed her to draw out the discomfort and depression resulting from dementia. The idea was at first a dot-like but later it turned to a curved line and ended at the full circle including motherhood, madness, sacrifice, tolerance, vitalism, and sublimity in human nature and reality with a poetic touch. 

As with Ms. Doshi’s grandmother and her character Tara, I had been going through an uncomfortable experience with my own grandmother who had been suffering from part-dementia and intentional-forgetting. In the early stages sometime around the late 1980s, it was assumed as a social stigma that she was possessed by an evil spirit, in addition, there was a story universally circulated that there was a mistake, a disruption in her midnight prayers or in her spiritual meditation in result a divine curse had been cast upon her. It had been almost fifty-seven years since she refused to leave our home in hopes that my grandmother, one day, would return to take her to Assam to show her the royal estate he had been built and ruled there. She rarely slept at night because she believed it was her highest duty to keep eyes on everything around her in the dark; there were no sunsets in the east for her. She said it is darkness where you can be alone and find yourself to tell yourself things you don’t speak about with others in the light and most speculatively, she would read everything pretentiously whatever the languages are (I had tested her many times showing her journalistic report in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese English, French, German, Hindi, Spanish and so on) – not what was written on the pages but what was in her minds in an epistolary form. I have also written my debut short story in English based on my grandmother’s mental incongruity with our known reality; she could remember her present but would fabricate her past. I have also changed the title of the story twice. First as “In search of Lost Lore” focusing on memory, perception, and remembrance and then as “A Split Life” spotting light on forgetting and lies that divide personal identity and the reality we are living with.  As with the title of the novel, there are repetitions and references of renaming the characters and places to connote their identities and representation of self as Eve changes to Kali Mata, Reza Shaik to Reza Pine, and Bombay to Mumbai.   

Lying has an inexorable commitment to shape our identity, experience, reality and to sketch out artistic dealing.  Dilip is prone to exaggerate his narration and makes fabrication of his memory to make it more appalling and acceptable whereas Antara 

In The Lying Life of Adults (2020), Elena Ferrante untangles the paradox of the ramification of lies in our life through the lens of Giovanna, a girl at the verge of adolescence, who comes to know that she is ugly resembling her aunt narrated by her erudite father without any objection her mother that compels her to know the whole truth about herself. Ferrante also elaborates that fiction is one of the primeval humanoid tools to untie the folding truth, to resolute the ‘moral problem’ and to elevate the ‘aesthetic savor’, correspondingly, when Tara sees Antara’s art exhibition- 365 faces, a diary of creating a dialogue of difference and accuses her as ‘a professional lair’ and her art is nothing but a lie and Antara counters that her art is ‘finding irregularities . . . looking at where patterns cease to exist.’  Ms. Doshi almost mirrors Ferrante’s insights on lying and parenting that broaden our predicament of personhood:

One is formed by what one’s parents say and do, and one is formed by what one’s parents are. But what happens when what they say and what they are don’t match.

Burnt Sugar is like an x-ray machine that snaps the ‘uncompromising mark’ of our mundane life that we often escape and refuse to look at the closest because of our habituation and fractional view of reality. The story is like ‘merely a snarled confusion of suffering’ and love ‘without redemption’. Avni Doshi’s unflagging enthusiasm and commitment to her bourgeon literary calling orients us to a new kind of neuronovel that unsettles our emotions simultaneously