Burnt Sugar
Also known as Girl in White Cotton. I wanted to like this novel. And it is fairly well written, at least in most parts, and at least more so than Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Burning’.
Like in that novel, my main issue here is that it peddles in cliches aimed at writing an ‘Indian’ novel for a ‘western’ audience. It’s clearly not a bad effort, but this isn’t any Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar.
It also tries way too hard to have pithy proclamations which fall flat. For example:
Ma doesn’t know. I never told her that for a portion of my childhood I was always hungry and have been searching for some fullness ever since.
And so much of the dialogue is so contrived. For example:
Nani places her hand on her cheek. ‘She’s become so fat, your mother. Her knuckles are swollen to double what they were. How will wwe pry the jewellery off her hands when she dies?’
Or
‘Do you want children?’ I repeat.
…
‘I think I do. Don’t you?’ he says. It is eactly the same answer he gave me before. He is the same man. He has not changed.
…
‘Why?’
‘Why, what?’
‘Why do you want children?’
He shrugs. ‘So we can be like everybody else.’
…
Isn’t conformity something I have always craved?
The weird attempts at infusing the story with ‘scientific’ analogies falls very short, especially since most of the descriptions are flat out incorrect. For example:
I say that these things are not always conscious, that sometimes the way we act is determined by equations we fall into over and over again. However simple the problem, and however clean the solution, there is always a remainder, a fraction of something said and misconstrued.
I wonder at the terror physicists must have felt when the laws of Newton failed under a microscope. They poked a little too far.
That said, some parts of it do make for interesting reading. A couple of excerpts to give you a sense of style:
There are repercussoins for living the life she’s chosen. I wonder if the loss is worth it, and if she believes it’s worth it. I wonder what she feels after I leave to go back to Dilip and she looks around her house. Maybe this isn’t her choice at all, but another path she has mapped over and over, one she cannot unlearn. I want to ask her if, in all the years she has run away, any part of her screams come after me? Does she want to be caught, brought back and convinced that she is important, that she is necessary?
I had been taught for most of my life that the moment for living was yet to come, that the phase I was living in, a perpetual state of childhood, was a time for waiting. And so I waited, impatiently, resentfully, longing for this period of incapacitation to pass. And in that interim, I listened less than I should have, and felt no need to engage.
I believed that this want to be older meant that age would answer all my questions, that my desires would be fulfilled at a later date, but as the years pass and I wish for youth once more, the habit of waiting has already been instilled. It’s deeply ingrained, something I can’t see to unlearn. I wonder if, when I’m old and frail and can see the shape of my end in front of me, I will still be waiting for the future to roll in.
There is never enough time for sleep. I wish I had rested all the years of my life. I wish I had done so many things. Instead, I did all the things I am doing now. Sitting in the house. Staring at the walls.
All book cover images are from Goodreads unless specified otherwise.