Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi
Antara has never comprehended her mother Tara’s actions, including leaving her marriage to follow a guru, living as a beggar on the streets, shacking up with an obscure artist, and defying social norms. However, as Tara begins to lose her memory, Antara looks for a method to reconcile with their shared past—a past that both of them are plagued by. Antara encounters her own anxieties and neuroses as she relived her youth in Pune in the 1980s, her years at a Catholic boarding school in the Maharashtra hills, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, discovering she might not be so dissimilar from Tara after all. It is a journey into changing identities, memories, and the arbitrary nature of truth.
Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi
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The narrative of Girl in White Cotton centres on a woman who must deal with the mental deterioration of her abusive mother. The narrator of the novel is followed through a number of contacts with her numerous family members and friends, many of whom appear to be trying to mislead her, as well as through a number of flashbacks regarding her miserable upbringing.
Antara, the protagonist, is a likeable girl who wrestles with how she sees herself and her mother, their shared past, and her role in the world. She and her mother have a turbulent history that continues into the present, which makes caring for her in her declining mental health challenging. None of the other people in her life, including her mother, make things simple for her. Everyone kind of acts like she’s the one with problems and treats her like trash. Even after learning a bit about the mother’s past, I still had trouble comprehending her intentions. Even with some of the information you discover, it’s still hard for me to comprehend how she could treat her small daughter so horribly as an adult. I’m trying to be as vague as possible here. In the end, I didn’t feel like I understood the mother very well, but maybe this was my fault as a reader.
If you like literary fiction, beautiful prose, and getting inside a character’s head, the book is generally well-written. Some excellent insights into the mind, memory, relationships and family are provided. The tale itself is where it falls a little short in my opinion. It’s a never-ending stream of gloom, and there’s no real escape, so the tone can get a little repetitive.
