Review: The Girl in White Cotton

It’s hard to come back to reality after finishing The Girl in White Cotton. It lingers on, absolutely not with a good aftertaste. You are shaken, unnerved, if a little frightened. This novel speaks from the author’s gut. Whether it’s a gut full of parasites, harmful bacteria or microbes, it depends on the reader’s ability to gauge the most fraught and volatile relationship between a mother and a daughter.

Avni Doshi, a Dubai-based American novelist, tackles too many issues in her debut novel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2020. The first chapter itself lays down the complexities – dementia, anger, revenge, hatred. And as you read on, promiscuity, abandonment, reprisal, bisexuality … the book occasionally also indulges in scientific exposition, the chemistry and molecularity of dementia.

It is interesting to see how Antara, the daughter and the primary caregiver, tackles her mother Tara’s dementia. The book is a first-person account by Antara, and she states quite categorically at the beginning that it gives her pleasure to remind her mother of occasions when her mother had been cruel to her, only to watch her reaction. But she is robbed of that pleasure because her mother genuinely has no memory of her cruel actions. To care for a dementia patient, one needs copious amounts of kindness, empathy, and love, but the complex relation between Antara and Tara comes in the way of such a linear, unidirectional flow of love. Antara vividly recalls how her mother walks out on her father for no reason and finds escape from the mundane in a guru’s ashram, where Antara has to live not of her own choice but because Tara has taken her with her as she leaves her husband. And then, when the guru discards Tara like his worn cotton robe, Antara and Tara are driven to beg in the streets. Till they are rescued by Antara’s father and dumped at her grand-dad’s. It’s interesting that Tara chooses to take her daughter with her when she leaves for the Ashram. A mother’s instinct working here?

The Ashramite life is seen through the perspective of little Antara, who forges a motherly relationship with another abandoned soul there, Kali Mata. She wound up in the Ashram from the US, possibly succumbing to the charms of the Guru, who has, ironically, abandoned her for Tara. Kali Mata, perhaps, finds solace in forging a relationship with Tara’s daughter, who remained in touch with her long after her Ashramite days. The book offers a glimpse of what the famous Osho ashram might have been like, since it was also on the outskirts of Pune.

From an ashram, Antara’s eventful childhood then takes her to the regimented life of a Catholic boarding school somewhere in Maharashtra, where again she encounters inexplicable physical harm. Doshi, in her novel, has gathered a number of tortured and demented psychopaths, and it is indeed a wonder that Antara becomes a responsible, sensitive, caring daughter who also embraces motherhood by the end of the novel.

As she grows up, Antara again encounters her mother’s bohemian relationship with a photographer, whom she describes as her first experience with an artist. Antara herself is an artist who studied at the JJ School of Art but didn’t graduate, did the rounds of art galleries in Bombay, drank a lot of wine and occasionally sketched. There is one description of an exhibition of her artwork in which she displays sketches of human faces copied from photographs. That photograph plays a pivotal role in the development of the mother-daughter relationship in the novel’s later stages.

The bohemian relationship between the mother, her lover and the daughter is expounded in the description of a holiday in Goa, where the three are in the buff by the sea. Or in the way Antara describes how the lover touches her mother and draws her into him. The young Antara’s gaze never leaves the two. And later, almost fait accompli, Antara and her mother’s lover become lovers in Mumbai, but Tara doesn’t get to gaze at it. In fact, she discovers much later through one of her dementia episodes that her lover and her daughter were together.

In between, we glimpse Antara’s struggle to provide care for her dementia-ridden mother. She writes down small episodes from Tara’s life and puts them in various corners of her house for her to discover and jog her memory. Descriptions of the doctor’s clinic and of how Antara analyses Tara’s hippocampus, with its buildup of amyloid, through sketches on paper are interesting and provide information on the disease for the uninitiated.

The character of Nani is lovingly sketched, with her idiosyncrasies and her unassuming practicality as she tackles a wayward daughter and tries to give her granddaughter a semblance of normalcy. Like when both Nana and Nani try to give Antara an education when they drive her to the boarding school. Till before then, Antara did not know how to write. Later, in a penultimate scene at the end of the book, Nani and Tara are together in role reversals, and Avni’s description of how Tara looks like an old mother and Nani looks younger than her daughter tugs at the heartstrings. The realities of dementia are peppered throughout this novel, which draws the reader into Antara’s present challenge even as one traverses the emotional, physical, and psychological labyrinths of her young life.

Antara eventually finds love, or does she? She finds a husband, an America-born, Pune-living corporate executive who has an ambivalent attitude towards his country of origin. Again, Antara’s mother-in-law, who lives in the US but makes extended visits to Pune, is portrayed as an atypical Indian mother-in-law. Antara’s attempts to turn her gaze away from the spectacle that is India are both comical and farcical. Like the street urchins defecating on an open road in Pune.

Throughout the novel, Pune appears in descriptions of its chaotic roads, its colonial club, marketplaces and cafes, and both posh and middle-class neighbourhoods. The city is seen through Antara’s eyes, where she was born and lived, moved most of her life, also through her US-born husband Dilip’s eyes, who has a non-committal attitude towards the Indian city and also through his mother’s eyes that seek out the ugly and the unpalatable. 

Antara’s relationship with Dilip is, at best, tepid, with Dilip playing an accommodating yet aloof role. They never have serious arguments, only mild misunderstandings that are swept under the carpet. After motherhood, Antara’s post-partum drives them apart, and they hardly communicate, but that doesn’t come between the marriage. Dilip accommodates her mother at his house despite the dementia episodes, including the burning down of Antara’s studio. 

The denouement brings together the myriad characters of the novel, including Antara’s bisexual friend, her overbearing husband, Antara’s father, stepmother, and stepbrother, her Nani, and her mother, one evening in Dilip’s mirrored living room. The occasion is the arrival of Antara’s daughter, Anikka, which means bird calls. It is like this one big reunion of disparate and extended family members who, instead of getting on each other’s cases, sing a lullaby in unison, where the four generations of Nani, Tara, Antara and Anikka meet and coalesce.

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Purchase the book here.

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