Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi is at its heart about the destructive and all-encompassing enmeshment that seems to inevitably occur in mother-daughter relationships. The novel’s domestic drama features Antara, the protagonist, and her mother Tara. Antara reveals the significance of her name: “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.” (210) Indeed, their relationship is fraught with inter and intra-personal conflict. The intimacy Antara’s name prophesies ironically manifests in the ways Tara violates her daughter’s personal boundaries. The erasure it threatens spans the psychological, then the literal realm.

Tara is a negligent and incredibly selfish mother who seems entirely uninterested in motherhood. She leaves Antara to be raised by her own parents and strangers, stand-in parental figures. While Antara eventually recognises Tara’s character defects in the big picture from an adult’s perspective, she is still understandably very hurt by them. She remains unable to disentangle herself from the unhealthy enmeshment of their relationship. For much of her childhood, the duo are physically separate as Tara abandons her. Despite that, Antara takes care of Tara in the latter’s twilight years—Antara becomes her caretaker as she develops dementia. While Tara forgets even simple facts, Antara diligently maps out her mother’s illness in painstakingly scientific detail. There seems to be a clear divide: caretaker and patient; healthy and sick. Yet, beneath this veneer, the two remain deeply enmeshed and even similar. They mirror each other in their disdain for each other, their husbands, mothers-in-law and daughters. Significantly, Antara’s husband Dilip covers the walls of their marital home in mirrors, reflecting everything multiple times over. Even in the place physically symbolising Antara becoming her own, she is more reflection than substance, more Un-Tara than Antara.

When Antara is a young child, Tara takes her to an ashram and joins a cult, leaving Antara to Kali Mata’s care. Tara chooses this ‘spiritual’ lifestyle so as to subvert traditional familial values and structures. She does this to escape the belittling and stifling arranged marriage she had to previously endure. In a sense, she tries to live in a suspension of reality. This bubble, however, finally bursts— the cult leader and Tara’s lover eventually moves on to his next lover, leaving her and Antara homeless and destitute before they are saved by her parents. Her ‘escape’ therefore mirrors her captivity; in both cases, she is treated like a pet, like an inconsequential footnote in a man’s personal narrative.

Likewise, Antara’s attempt at escape from her past and her mother also fails. When Antara speaks of her mother’s diagnosis, she is ostentatiously scientific— this is in stark contrast to the mystical, dreamy language she dresses her experience at the ashram in. The different language she uses to narrate her adulthood textually sets it apart from her childhood.She is no longer a lost child and a victim of parental neglect. She is a dutiful adult daughter taking care of her sick and ageing mother. Reading Burnt Sugar, one is almost jolted out of a reverie when the plot switches form the past to the present day. As such, she seemingly distinguishes herself from who her mother was at the same age, the kind of woman she was and the lifestyle she led.

Yet, as the narrative progresses, Antara becomes increasingly like her mother beyond just the above-mentioned similarities. When she has her own child (becoming a mother herself), lucidity begins to elude her. In contrast to her previous meticulousness, she loses track of large swathes of time. The defined borders of cause and effect slowly slip away.

The novel begins with her explicit acknowledgment of Tara’s abusiveness: “I suffered at her hands as a child”. This statement is said with some distance and awareness. It is said matter-of-factly, calling out lousy mothering for what it is. She then states that “any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption… where the rational order of cause and effect aligned. But now, I can’t tally the score between us. The reason is simple. My mother is forgetting, and there is nothing I can do about it.” While the rationality here is filtered through her subjectivity, she speaks of redemption, of a clear crime and its subsequent punishment. However, towards the end of Bunt Sugar, Antara attributes a lot of her suffering to superstition, a base form of spirituality. in this way, the boundaries between her and her mother blur as they become one and the same, a figurative phenomenon that becomes frighteningly literal in the final scene of the novel, where Tara seems to obliterate Antara’s existence. The latter fumbles away, trying to escape, only to realise that she is unable to.

Doshi writes a poignant scene in the heart of the book, where a fly gets trapped in the many mirrored funhouse of Antara and Dilip’s apartment: “it roams the parameters of its cage, bumping into mirrors and pressing against windows… I watch it fly in circles and wonder how many hours it has been in here. By now it has mapped this place, created coordinates in its mind… I slide open the balcony door and stand aside. I wait for the fly to leave, to catch a scent from the outside, a familiar breeze. But it doesn’t… Once more, the fly passes by the door, gaping as it is. I watch it and wonder if it can see the door at all, or if the map it has made of this era in its little life is so persistent that the outside world ceases to exist. It is blind to the way out. All it knows, as it hits its body against the mirror, against its own reflection, is that something is missing, something is amiss.”

Like the fly, Antara gets lost in the increasing multitude of ways her life resembles Tara’s. She ‘[flies] in circles’, bumping into her own reflection, getting subsumed into Tara’s oppressive one. Her obsessive, desperate attempt to untangle herself from their mother-daughter enmeshment only causes her to lose sight of any escape, as the many mirrored walls of her cage draw in closer and closer around her.