Hey everyone! Hope you all are great in health. I am here with review of a book : “Girl in white cotton”.
It wouldn't suffice to say that Antara & her mother Tara have a strained relationship. Not when the very opening line of the book, as Antara narrates it, tells you that she'd be lying if she said that her mother's misery has never given her pleasure. She is an artist from Pune, still trying to come to terms with her troubled past, muchly reasoned to her mother's lifetime of ill treatment towards her, and a shared mutual sense of resentment that only grows as they both age. Tara is amnesiac and has been forgetting things, except for humiliating her daughter with disdain continuously, like a daily chore she seems to have retained complete grasp on. The book takes us through Antara's rough childhood days when her mother had walked out of her loveless marriage to go live in an ashram, abandoning her daughter to starve and decay in her Baba's spiritual premises. At some points the book turns wickedly terrifying, like that one scene where The Terror stabs the back of her palm with a pencil in boarding school. Or when she considers throwing her own infant Anikka out of the window. The themes Avni so bravely explores are dark to say the least, making it an uncomfortable read, but her writing is so fluidly crisp and evocative, that every word she's written feels very purposeful, always backed by irreplaceable reason. The other characters are arced with great detail too, like Dilip, Antara's Indian - American husband, her friend Purvi, her unlikable mother - in - law, and her Nani, possibly the only woman in her family she can seek positive redemption from. Antara asks serious questions throughout the story, and through her so does Avni, delving into the notion of memory & what it means to lose it, and the thin line between one's distrust & disgust for their own children or parents.
But who else do we turn into as we grow old, if not into our parents, wonders Antara , as she realizes that she could be slowly becoming like her mother. Not just in the way she can't help despising her own baby, but also because of their gruesome fate that gave them both the same lover. Girl In White Cotton is shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020.
// PLEASE pick it up. I sincerely insist. You will love it, I can guarantee this.
