Bookmarked Musings: Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi – On Fractional View of Self and Reality by Palash Mahmud

In this literary essay, Palash Mahmud writes about Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar and sheds a light on her verisimility of her life with the story’s root and very reasonably his personal experience and memoir of a grandmother who had been suffering from Alzheimer for over twenty-five years.

It was the night before- a pattern of time dilation that makes different realities, so do our memories- the announcement of the long list of the 2020 Booker Prize, I was returning home from work; I was also thinking about Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eyes (1970) and its 50^th anniversary this year and how can I commemorate her phenomenal literary premier in this tumultuous pandemic age? A notification from Granta had popped up on Facebook alluring me to read an excerpt of Burnt Sugar, an exciting debut by Avni Doshi, an Indian-American writer based in Dubai. As soon as I had tapped the thumb of my right hand, the first line I read is: ‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.’ Later when I started reading the novel and ended at where Antara, the main protagonist, reflects:

I realized it was not only a close-reading of an expedition of the reconciliation of the imagination and lived realities encountered by Avni Doshi but also a meditation and a substantial acknowledgment of the irrationality of our physical repudiation and the veracity of our mental manacle, it denotes the superficiality of our understanding we are hauling about ourselves and the world at large.