Burnt Sugar (Avni Doshi)

Book Review by Priyanka Zielinski

I first heard about Avni from my literary agent, Kanishka, as he excitedly mentioned he knew another writer living in Dubai. I looked her up and added Girl in White Cotton to my reading list.

Cut to some time later, stunning Avni’s pictures were all over the newspapers as her novel, Burnt Sugar, is first long listed and then shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. I felt some increased pressure to get to reading it but life gets in the way.

Last week, I started it and in three days finished it. My goodness, what a beautifully written book, I have the main characters in my head, I can see them, I can hear them talk so clearly in my head. It is also eerily close in the way it resonates with how I have felt and thought so many times, but reading it in Avni’s novel was almost scandalist. I would think, “oh no, she didn’t just say that!” How brave to recognize and pin down such intentions, revealing such dark sides of our being.

But also how perceptive — I loved when she says “Dilip is prone to exaggeration. He says his sister is beautiful when she is decidedly not.” I thought to myself, exaggeration is just like the Indian way of describing anything. We defer to the hyperbole as a normal, don’t we? Although I do get that in this case, Dilip is genuinely able to see the best in people.

OMG, the tongue-cleaner. Hello — why has no one asked about this before? Avni was spot on. My husband and I have discussed it many times as one tongue cleaner sits on my side of the basin, and my husband, the dental-hygiene freak, is trusting the toothbrush to do it all.

“Isn’t conformity something I have always craved?” — She had me here again. Isn’t it something we all crave? To be like everybody else, but better. Same same but different. To climb the social ladder by doing all the same things and then just doing some of that tad bit better to stand out.

What a unique exploration of a mother and daughter, with the daughter at war with herself as much as she is critical of her mother, the unshakeable connection they share and the ripples it sends through lives of others around. I am trembling and I am not sure its because of the excitement of reading such great writing and or because I have never read felt more exposed.