Burnt Sugar’s Bitter Alchemy
In the midst of memory and the butchery of betrayal, Avni Doshi’s debut unveils a mother’s disquiet and a daughter’s fractured inheritance
In the lilac haze of a Pune morning, Antara stands before a canvas that refuses her brush strokes. She breathes in the oppressive quiet and wonders whether the echoes of her mother’s laughter or her mother’s cruelty, have settled into the very grain of the wood. She watches a single mote of dust swirl in a shaft of light and feels, with unnerving clarity, that memory itself is the greatest artist and the most merciless critic.
Antara tells us, from the first page, that a daughter’s delight in a mother’s anguish is neither beautiful nor forgivable. It is, she admits, a secret feast, a morsel of communion with pain. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” she confesses. That moment stings with the honesty of a wound left untreated. Yet within its jagged edges lies the raw power of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, a novel that refuses the comfortable illusions of familial love and forces us to taste the acrid truth beneath sweetness.
There is a grammar to cruelty, a syntax of abandonment that Antara decodes through the slow unravelling of her mother’s mind. Tara was once a firebrand. She left home to join an ashram. She became a devotee of a guru who claimed enlightenment but practiced possession. She offered her body and her soul in service to a man who beckoned with promises of transcendence. The white cotton robes of innocence turned stained with the dust of pilgrimage and the blood of betrayal. And among those robes, a child cried.
In flashbacks that shimmer with the unreliability of recollection, we witness young Antara’s bewilderment at her mother’s choices. When Tara adopts the life of a beggar, Antara learns to navigate the world by the rhythm of her mother’s whims. One day she is kissed in public as the guru’s concubine. The next she sits alone under a neem tree, clutching a bowl that empties by the hour. A woman who had once been a daughter herself, daughter to affluent parents who mourned and raged at her rebellion, becomes a ghost mother. She drifts through village lanes and upscale hotels with equal detachment. The passport photos of her life lie scattered like ash.
Memory, as Doshi shows, is a cunning witch. It reshapes the past the way a sculptor coaxes beauty from marble. Yet nothing in Antara’s childhood marble emerges pure. Instead, the chisel reveals the pockmarks of neglect and the fissures of resentment. Antara’s recollections are tinted by the shadows of her mother’s disapproval. Each flash of tenderness is dimmed by the glare of abandonment. The questions crowd her mind. Did Tara ever love her? Was she ever enough? And if love was there, why did it never feel like a harbour?
When Tara’s mind begins its twilight descent into early onset dementia, Antara finds herself cast in the role of caretaker. The daughter who once longed to escape the ashram becomes her mother’s keeper. She washes Tara’s hair in a basin of lukewarm water. She holds her hand in a hospital waiting room. She swabs her mouth and listens to her breath catch against the brittle walls of her chest. The power dynamic reverses, but the ache remains the same. In those moments, Antara glimpses the fragile humanity of Tara’s decline. Yet she cannot forget the fierce rigour of her mother’s neglect. She cannot forgive the woman whose love was so thin it barely coated her skin.
There is an unsettling symmetry to watching someone you despise become helpless. In the ashram, Tara wielded freedom like a sword and flayed her daughter’s innocence. Now memory abandons her mother as unceremoniously as Tara once abandoned Antara. The daughter learns what it means to witness decay from the inside. And she asks herself whether this is mercy or justice.
The structure of the novel, its delicate oscillation between then and now, mirrors the push and pull of Antara’s own heart. We thread through her life in fragments. A brushstroke here. A discarded photograph there. A memory half-glimpsed behind the veil of sleep. Avni’s prose is elegant in its restraint. It does not rush. It rests on the sensation of skin against sheets, on the weight of silence in a house filled with unspoken grievances. Every sentence carries the pressure of unshed tears. Every paragraph pulse with the latent electricity of unmet yearning.
Yet if Burnt Sugar is an ode to bitterness, it is also a testament to the complexity of maternal love. The novel denies us the solace of simple villainy. Tara is no gothic witch. She is, at her core, a woman who sought herself and lost her footing. Antara is no angel of vengeance. She is a daughter who inherited her mother’s capacity for self-destruction. Both lives collide in a prismatic light. Each shard reflects some fragment of the other. Their fates are sealed by blood and memory.
Critics have praised Doshi’s unflinching gaze. They have lauded the novel’s exploration of memory as both weapon and balm. They have recognized in its pages the universality of a wound that cuts between in-laws and lovers, between parents and children, across the borders of caste, creed, and geography. Yet no amount of praise can fully capture the disquiet that Burnt Sugar stirs in the heart. It is a novel that insists we sit with discomfort. It asks us to taste the burnt sugar on our tongues and wonder whether sweetness can survive the sour of heat.
For some readers, Antara’s candour may read as cruelty. She watches a photograph of childhood, her mother’s face alight with joy and feels only contempt. She draws lines around her own childhood emotions, labelling them like specimens in a jar. Yet within that clinical precision lies compassion. Antara’s ruthlessness toward Tara is rooted in a fierce cruelty of love. It is a longing for something that was never given. It is a hunger for absolution in a garden that bore only weeds.
In the twilight of Tara’s illness, Antara confronts the possibility that the patterns of neglect will repeat. Holding her own infant daughter against the lullaby of a failing heart monitor, she wonders whether the scars of her past will mark a new generation. She traces the map of her mother’s mistakes on her own flesh. She lays her tiny daughter against her shoulder and feels the warmth of fresh beginnings. She prays that love, unlike memory, can break the cycle.
Avni Doshi does not grant us a tidy resolution. She leaves us at the threshold of ambiguity. In the final pages, Antara stands before her canvas once more. This time her brush moves. A shape appears. It trembles with both hope and fear. She paints her mother and her daughter in the same frame. She knows the portrait will be flawed. She knows the lines will blur. But she paints anyway. Because in the act of creation, she finds a flicker of redemption.
Burnt Sugar lingers long after the last page falls silent. It haunts in the pattern of a dream. It haunts in the sudden flare of memory when we smell jaggery at a wedding feast. It haunts in the unspoken conversation between a mother’s frail hand and a daughter’s steady gaze. In this debut, Doshi offers not just a story, but an unvarnished mirror. When we peer into it, we see ourselves—our own betrayals, our own longings, our own burnt edges.
And maybe, just maybe, we learn that the alchemy of forgiveness begins in the crucible of truth.