BOOKS Of Mothers and Melancholia

With her novel on the Booker Prize longlist, Avni Doshi is finding the wider readership she deserves

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

GIRL IN WHITE COTTON

By Avni Doshi

FOURTH ESTATE INDIA

Released in the West as Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi’s Girl in White Cotton disrupts and delights in equal measure. Sometimes dark, forever unsettling, the novel unquestionably deserves its place on the Booker longlist. Doshi, for her part, feels “tremendous gratitude” to have been included. “There really is no guarantee that a book will get noticed, especially a debut novel. I feel lucky that my book is reaching readers, I think that is the reception all writers want,” she says over email from Dubai. The Booker shortlist will be announced on September 15, but Doshi insists she isn’t anxious. “I save [my anxiety] for when I sit down to write. I have a newborn and a toddler, I don’t have time to be anxious,” she says.

Motherhood matters to Doshi. Her Girl in White Cotton tells the story of how mothers bruise their daughters, of how daughters sometimes hate their mothers. Antara’s mother, Tara, walks out on her marriage, taking her infant daughter to an ashram in Puna that seems to borrow its atmosphere from Osho’s. With Antara in tow, she later takes to begging. Even when present, she is, at times, far away. Her dementia only makes her more absent. Antara has reason to both miss and loathes her mother. “And even now, when I am without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness—that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft white cotton that has frayed at the edge,” she says.