Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

  Through Elaine, I contact a life coach in the UK who specializes in helping caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. We fix a time to speak on the phone.

  I tell her I didn’t know that the field was so specialized. She says caregivers need care too. I see later that this is sprawled across the bottom of her website. I want to laugh when she says it, but her voice is deadly serious.

  She believes I haven’t started to fathom the danger I am in, how my own grasp on reality is being shredded.

  I resist this idea at first, but soon find her words make sense. ‘It is causing problems with my husband,’ I admit. ‘Sometimes I hate being married. Sometimes I think I am becoming my mother.’

  ‘Reality is something that is co-authored,’ the woman says. ‘It makes sense that you would begin to find this disturbing. When someone says that something is not what you think of it as, it can cause slight tremors in the brain, variations in brain activity, and subconscious doubts begin to emerge. Why do you think people experience spiritual awakenings? It’s because the people around us are engaged. The frenzy is a charge that’s contagious.’

  ‘Are you saying my mother is contagious?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Though maybe I am, in a sense. We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories, too, in the image of what other people remember.’

  ‘The doctor says my mother has become unreliable.’

  ‘We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not.’

  ‘Why do you suppose that is?’ I ask, barely hearing her answer. We continue to say obvious things to each other, things I want her to say because I need to hear another person say them.

  I know I am pregnant before my first missed period. I feel myself becoming fatter, stretching out fuller, wetter, a little more of everything. For a while I try to hold myself in, remembering from adolescence that to be large is to be feeble, a little out of control. I feel a familiar dread. I know I had planned this, but maybe it’s a mistake. I mark a calendar with the last day I can safely have an abortion. I watch the days go by until there is no turning back. Only then do I feel myself relax, coming to terms with the shift in dynamic, that there is something growing inside of me now that I cannot control and we are at the mercy of each other’s decisions.

  There’s something else: I am beginning to smell different. By the end of the day, I have to bathe. My armpits are pungent and the discharge in my underwear gives off an odour. I fret at this discovery, washing myself several times a day, but that leads to yeast infections, courses of antibiotics and perpetual itching. I change the food I eat, from all fruit to no fruit, from gluten-and dairy-free to baby mash in glass bottles, from fasting to eating every two hours, but nothing seems to help. I suspect it is not me but the environment, that I am a cell in a hypotonic Petri dish, and the smells are being pulled from me in the interest of homeostasis. This is natural, I tell myself.

  Dilip’s boss takes us out for a Japanese meal. The restaurant is expensive, the only one of its kind in Pune, and our food is served in courses. The fish is raw, or sometimes warmed with a torch, before it is hand-moulded on to a cylinder of sticky rice. Each piece lies on the plate like a submissive tongue. Dilip eats a salad while I place the bite in my mouth and feel it melt. Starch, fat and salt. The flesh breaks apart and for a moment I can swear my mouth is dissolving. I wonder if the flavours are more profound because my tongue has come in contact with a mirror of itself, and if the experience is somewhere between consuming and kissing. Dilip watches me swallow, tapping the table restlessly with his free hand.

  Sometimes I imagine different versions of the end of my mother’s romance with my father. In my recent fantasies, I am the reason they are no longer together. Tara tells her husband that she is leaving him, that she has found her guru, that she is carrying his child, and my father looks down at her swollen belly and, for a moment, is torn. He wants her and yet she repulses him – the looming pregnancy, the illegitimate baby. He looks into my mother’s beautiful face and he knows that the creature inside her makes it impossible for him to remain.

  A psychotherapist I visited a few years ago at Dilip’s insistence told me that my mother leaving my father, and my father letting us both go, has coloured my view of all relationships. I thought this was a little too easy and said so.

  ‘And doesn’t it make sense that people want to leave?’ I asked.

  The therapist jotted something down and asked me to elaborate.

  I told her that staying doesn’t have the appeal, the mystery, of escape. To stay is to be staid, to be resigned, to believe this is all there will ever be. Aren’t we creatures made for searching, investigation, dominion? Aren’t we built to believe there can always be something better?

  ‘I don’t blame my mother,’ I told the therapist, though I know I do and always have.

  ‘Did you worry as a child that she would abandon you? Do you worry you are like her now?’

  I stopped seeing the therapist soon after that because she asked too many questions. Wasn’t her job to sit and listen? In fact, worse than the thought of my parents’ abandonment were all the unanswered questions she posed, the ones that continue to float around. Any time I come close to answering one, a whole series of other doubts assert themselves. I wonder at the terror physicists must have felt when the laws of Newton failed under a microscope. They poked a little too far. Many of them must have wished they could un-see what they had witnessed and go back to a simpler time. We dissolve with questions. Even question marks have always seemed strange to me, a hook from the hand of some nightmare.

  2002

  I became an artist the day I was accepted to art school. Never mind that I didn’t attend. I finished my twelfth standard with less than stellar marks, but Bombay’s J. J. School of Art saw merit in my drawings.

  My mother tried to stop me from going. I asked Nani for the money to pay my fees.

  Professor Karhade was a painter and would be my advisor. He was exasperated when I said I didn’t paint.

  ‘The course you have enrolled in is for painting and drawing.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but I won’t be able to paint and draw. I’m very bad at multitasking.’

  He didn’t think this was an acceptable reason. The course was not flexible in that way. Besides, drawing and painting could be the same thing. I could learn to love one as I did the other. Painting could be the finished product, but drawing would always have a place. It was the preparations, the bones, the underpinning.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. That was what I was interested in. Weren’t the bones the part that was essential, timeless? Weren’t the bones what future generations would dig up and marvel at?

  ‘You won’t know unless you dive in,’ he said.

  But I did know. I knew I would not resurface. I told him that I, like the course, was not flexible.

  I left his office with my portfolio of drawings under my arm and meandered past Jehangir Art Gallery, where students peddled their work on the sidewalk. I knelt to look at a painting of a young man. It was accomplished, with thick, painterly strokes. The man looked bloated under the weight of the oils. Something about it felt grotesque, like mopping spilled blood on paper.

  My load felt heavy, and I handed the folder of drawings to a group of children sitting on the stoop of Rhythm House. What I wanted to do didn’t require a teacher.

  I didn’t tell Nana and Nani about my decision, but continued as a paying guest with an old woman who lived next to Colaba Fire Station. During the day, I read about modern and contemporary art, adding to and subtracting from the pictures in the books. I looked at old images, the ones Kali Mata had collected and bound into an album for me. I cut out the faces, the objects I couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, and turned them into black voids. I pasted the pictures on top of paper and redrew the empty parts as I would have wanted them to be.

  In the evenings, I borrowed my lan
dlady’s cotton saris and attended openings and parties at art galleries around town. I spoke to some people. Mostly I sipped wine and drank in what filled the white spaces.

  I learned that what I had done all my life had a name. Interventions. I had been making interventions for ten years. I distinguished, quickly, what I liked, what persisted in my mind. Painting was just an impression. Drawing, I saw, was the grid. Ground, walls, sky. All the things that were real and yet incomprehensible. The city was changing every day, bridges, skyscrapers, new hotels. Small Portuguese bungalows were being levelled to make way for malls.

  Everyone wanted to build up. Only I had the urge to strip down.

  That analysis seems laughable now. The truth is drawing was all I knew. It was automatic, something I did in my sleep. Even now my perception cannot completely fathom the wet complexity of colour. Wherever I look, I see lines.

  We install Ma in my studio again. Kashta is to accompany her, sleeping on the floor beside the single bed, and is instructed to watch over her charge day and night. I clean out most of the studio contents and put them in boxes. Dilip asks where the baby will go.

  ‘In our room,’ I say.

  ‘And my mother?’ His mother is planning to come for the delivery. ‘Where will she stay?’

  I tell him we can switch one of our sofas for a pull-out bed. He seems put out by the suggestion, but doesn’t argue.

  I put Ma on a diet of various fats. A fat-burning brain is a clean brain, I have read. A sugar-burning one is mucky. I start her on a probiotic regime with occasional coffee enemas. I am strict and relentless – a tyrant over her plate. She eats imported avocados at every meal, and I dispose of all the sugar in the house.

  In the morning, we check her ketone levels and record them in a book. If this can all be reduced to a metabolic problem, to some errant mitochondria, to a failure of apoptosis, then we will fix it. Together, we will find redemption.

  I add a tincture of herbal extracts to her routine. Astragalus root and berberine. In only three days, her insulin-resistant brain seems more alert. She asks me how I am feeling, if the pregnancy is giving me any trouble.

  I cry when she says this. I had told her about the baby before, but she’d always reacted like it was new information.

  I tell her I think we should put her on a fast. She smiles.

  I have calculated that she has enough fat stores to live on for two hundred days. That’s plenty of time for her brain to get over its addled sugar dependence.

  ‘You mean I won’t eat anything? For two hundred days?’

  I laugh. ‘No, not so long. Don’t worry, Ma. We’ll do it together. You’re with me now. I’ll look after you.’

  That night in bed, I take out my sketchbook for the first time in weeks. I start sketching the cloudy brain from the doctor’s office last year. This builds into a dark sky. Below, I redraw the scene I presented to the doctor. This time, it is coherent. This time, he would not find anything wanting.

  I begin with stick figures, filling them out with armour to mark their team, their army: leucocytes versus reactive oxygen species. On the ground are dead bodies, cells to be cleared away. The injured ones hold up white flags, signalling their wounded state, and are disposed of. The carnage calls forth an autophagic machine, emerging from a hole in the atmosphere, a mythical, many-limbed creature. In the background, the rest of the planet is at peace. Organs continue their functions, metabolism reigns benignly. The islets of Langerhans sit in the distant sea.

  Autophagy, from the Greek, means to devour the self. I keep drawing, keep willing this to happen in her body, hopeful that I have been able to do what no one else has, that I have found a cure through my incessant research.

  My stomach growls. Heat moves out from my chest but stops before reaching my limbs. I shiver.

  In the morning, I wake up to the blinding sun. The room is sweltering.

  Only then do I notice Ma is in the room. I turn to Dilip’s side of the bed. There is a crumpled space where he slept. I’m sweating and my throat burns. I smell incense. My stomach roars, and I remember I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.

  ‘Where’s Dilip?’ I say. My voice is raspy.

  ‘Office,’ she replies. She is fully dressed, in her walking shoes, as though she is about to step out. Turned away from me, she has her hands in the boxes that contain what was once my studio.

  The careful order is being dismantled. Objects sit askew on the floor.

  Tinted glass bottles.

  Coins from before Independence. Cuttings from newspapers and magazines.

  I feel a surge of panic, swelling into dizziness when I try to stand. ‘How did you get this?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’ I say. I raise my neck, but can’t see what’s in her hand.

  ‘This.’ She turns. It’s a three-by-five photograph.

  I feel the blood rise to my face. Is it still the heat? I don’t want to talk about the photograph now. Didn’t I destroy it? I don’t want to go into this.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  I can tell from her face that she doesn’t believe me. She has a kind of lucidity in her that I haven’t seen in some time. The food, the fasting, or maybe the photograph, has touched a memory.

  Ma is coated in the knowledge that we are on the brink of something, that nothing after this will ever be the same.

  ‘How did you get this?’ she repeats. Her eyes are wide, and her hands close around the picture.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I say. ‘Maybe I took the picture.’

  She shakes her head slowly and places it on the bed. Reza’s skin is the same colour as my bedding. He looks up at me from the photograph, newly creased by Ma’s hand.

  ‘You didn’t take it, because I took it. It was the only time he let me touch his camera. His precious camera.’ She points to the detail in the background, the garish movie poster, the Madras-check shirt he wore while fixing a cigarette behind his ear.

  ‘Then maybe I found it. I found it in the house and I kept it.’

  She sits down at the edge of the bed and smooths the sheet. ‘It was still on his camera when he left. He hadn’t developed the film yet.’

  Ma flips the picture over. The text on the back reads ‘J. Mehta & Sons, Mumbai’.

  She runs her fingers over the words and looks at me. ‘It was developed in Bombay.’

  I inhale and exhale, but she speaks before I can.

  ‘I knew that you were hiding something from me. I knew when I saw your show.’

  2003

  The wine has an acidic tang.

  I top up my clear plastic cup with more liquid from the screw-top bottle.

  Anthropofagio. The rambling curatorial essay stencilled on the wall defines it as cannibalism, which in the history of Brazilian art has long been an important concept. Incorporation and digestion lead to the production of something new. Something specific. The artist on show today has just returned from a residency in Belo Horizonte.

  Another artist I am sharing a cigarette with outside calls the work derivative. I point out some grammatical errors in the text. We giggle and he pulls out a tightly rolled joint. I am obsessed with Paul Thek at the moment, attracted to the fact that he seemed to not exist. He appeared occasionally, as a side note or a phantom’s hand, but never as the main event.

  The other artist nods and goes on to tell me about his mentor in Cape Town. She was a semiotics teacher whose mouth was always painted a pomegranate red. She spoke fervently about how strange and distant our generation seemed to her, obsessed with television and oral sex, and insisted that blowjobs were culturally and temporally specific.

  ‘Do you think for a second that your grandmothers would have ever thought of putting the genitalia of their husbands in their mouths?’ she had laughed.

  The rest of the artist’s story is lost on me when a face I recognize appears close to mine. The face is smiling.

  ‘Reza.’

  ‘How are you? What are you doing here?’ He wraps me
in a long hug. I smell the whisky and sweat only as he moves away.

  Later, I feel him watching me. We are in his one-bedroom apartment. We drank a little more wine at the opening before I agreed to leave with him.

  He’s standing by a dirty sink, full of dishes, and a pile of unwashed clothes. He says his maid hasn’t come today. He makes no mention of his wife. I wonder if by ‘maid’ he means wife but don’t ask because I am afraid to break whatever enchantment the alcohol has woven.

  The whole house feels like decay. It bothers me, but it feels good to be bothered by Reza again, a familiar itch.

  He asks me if I want to go out.

  ‘Where?’

  He says to meet his friends. I nod, and realize my mother never met any of his friends. It feels good to do things she has never done.

  His friends are nothing special but I want to be impressed. There is Namita, with a ring that passes through the middle of her nose. She can touch the hoop with her tongue, wiggle it back and forth. She’s older than me, but not by much. Her boyfriend, Karan, comes as well. He never leaves home without music and drugs. He scratches his beard often and purses his lips when deep in thought.

  We go to a secret party out of town, in a jungle beyond the suburbs of Bombay. It takes two hours to get there. The locations are always unknown until the last moment, and we drive in borrowed cars through the night, looking for handmade signs to point us along. Electricity is a problem, but Karan attaches the music system to the car’s battery. They mix powder and sugar cubes in bottles of water before passing them around. Reza warns me to take small sips.

  The music shakes the ground. I resist the urge to cover my ears. I feel like a bore, like a freak, like all the things I’ve been called before.

  Namita dances by herself in the distance. Her piercing glints and her hair swings behind her. She whips around, an undulating reed, encased in light, encased in honey, sticky like the origins of the world. She dances, coating the trees and ground with every step.