“Booker Prize 2020: 6 Books shortlisted for this prize.
“Burnt Sugar”: In order of reading book number 4.
In order to follow this event, I am writing articles on all six of the short listed books and will propose my winner before the official announcement.
Visit the official site for more details: Booker Prize 2020
I wonder how I will love Ma when she is at the end. How will I be able to look after her when the woman I know as my mother is no longer residing in her body? 
When she no longer has a complete consciousness of who she is and who I am, will it be possible for me to care for her the way I do now, or will I be negligent, the way we are with children who are not our own, or voiceless animals, or the mute, blind and deaf, believing we will get away with it, because decency is something we enact in public, with someone to witness and rate our actions, and if there is no fear of blame, what would the point of it be?
This book told by Antara is the conflictual story of her and her mother Tara in India, beginning in 1981 for Tara’s arranged marriage which Antara likens to a sactioned kidnapping. Each chapter represents a moment in their lives, told in two parts, the first part purtains to the moment in time chosen for the chapter, 1981 then 1986 and other dates, the second part of the chapter tells us of Antara and her husband Dilip and Antara’s relationship with her mother in the present day, advancing in the light of the newly revealed past.
As we learn later on in the book even her very name, given to free her has another effect:
My mother has a beautiful name. Tara. It means star, another name for the goddess Durga. Like Kali Mata. She named me Antara, intimacy, not because she loved the name but because she hated herself. She wanted her child’s life to be as different from hers as it could be. Antara was really Un-Tara – Antara would be unlike her mother. But in the process of separating us, we were pitted against each other.
We learn early in the book tha Tara has Altzeimer’s and begins to lose her mind in her early fifties as illustrated in the opening quote, leaving Antara to worry about and look after both her mother and her grandmother. And this for a mother who ran away from her husband and his family to join a sect whilst Antara was still a young child, in the sect her mother became the latest lover and plaything of the Guru, leaving Antara to be looked after and brought up by Kali Mata, a previous favourite of the same Guru and seemingly not caring about her. then we move forward to learn something of her views on mother daughter relationships:
She continues talking about how difficult things were. These tales have been passed down from mothers to daughters since women had mouths and stories could be told. They contain some moral message, some rites of passage. But they also transfer that feeling all mothers know before their time is done. Guilt.
In this excellent emotionaly complex book there are of course hidden secrets and guilt as well as an ambiguous ending which is in tune with the story. And as for the title, well if you have a mother who due to illness has no restraint or notion of embarassment, well there’s an interesting secret, but of course it comes with a feeling of guilt.
This may be my favourite, the coming posts may confirm this. Buy it!
First Published in English as “Girl in White Cotton” by Fourth Estate in 2019
South of Paris books 
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