Aftershocks of maternal loss

Radhika Oberoi’s Of Mothers and Other Perishables excavates grief’s lasting impact, portraying two sisters frozen in different stages of mourning.

The characters are trapped in dusty webs of memory and melancholia. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock

At 312 pages, Radhika Oberoi’s Of Mothers and Other Perishables is not a long book. Still, since my work-life balance is always off-kilter, I decided to schedule my reading of it and do about 50 pages a day. That would let me read it comfortably and thoughtfully and still meet my deadline for its review, I thought.

So, I started on the first 50 pages one afternoon, and roughly five hours later, as the people around me asked plaintively for their (fortunately precooked) dinner, I found I had reached the end of the book. Both literally and metaphorically, it had been unputdownable. So why, over the next few days, did I tumble into something like an existential crisis over what I look for in a book?

Of Mothers and Other Perishables

By Radhika Oberoi

Simon & Schuster

Pages: 312

Price: Rs.699

Of Mothers and Other Perishables is mainly about two young women in Delhi, The Wailer and Toon. These were the nicknames given to them by their parents when they were babies, and they are referred to throughout by these names. The Wailer and Toon are sisters, but they have not spoken to each other in years, though both still live with their father in the family home. Their mother died when Toon was 9 years old, The Wailer a few years older. Although Toon has seemingly moved on from mourning her mother’s death, The Wailer has not, haunting the storeroom where her mother’s things are stored.

Also haunting the storeroom, though nobody knows it but herself, is their mother.

Stuck, unstuck

This is not a spoiler. In fact, the mother is the first character the reader meets, and she occupies more of the book than her daughters do, telling stories about her children, her husband, her family, her in-laws, and her household help, caught in dusty webs of memories and limited in her wanderings to the house and its garden.

Now in her 30s, The Wailer, who has been melancholic since her mother’s death, works at a top advertising firm where she is a group creative head. Years ago, when she began work, she was admired as a “wordsmith”, a person whose writing could elicit emotional reactions from people. But now advertising is mainly about digital media and going viral, and she is mostly overlooked. As for a love life, The Wailer has none. She has only had one romantic relationship ever in her life and seems uninterested in seeking another. In many ways, like her mother’s ghost, The Wailer is stuck in a place.

Meanwhile Toon has had an amazing career, which she gave up in favour of a coffee shop chain startup. Toon’s love life is flourishing too: she is in a relationship with the founder of the startup. Her achievements make The Wailer feel even worse about her own life. But all that the elder sister can bring herself to do is return to the storeroom again.

Of Mothers and Other Perishables is mainly about two young women in Delhi. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Then, into The Wailer’s stagnant life come three things. First, a legislative Bill that specifically excludes one community from citizenship is being protested all over the country. The Wailer’s colleague, a young man from Lucknow who has won an award for his artwork with calligraphy, is one of the protesters, and The Wailer joins him on one occasion. Next, the ad agency’s international overlords send in a new boss who seems to believe in The Wailer’s talent. Finally, the venture capitalists have stopped funding Toon’s startup, so her office must move into her home to save rent, and the storeroom must be cleared to store coffeeshop paraphernalia. As disparate as they are, these three events change The Wailer’s life. And Toon’s. And their mother’s.

Of Mothers and Other Perishables held me firmly in its grip from beginning to end, its words and sentences keeping me in a world I was reluctant to leave even when there were no more pages to turn. It drew me in so deeply that I felt as though I had been absorbed into it. But the story these words and sentences told? I wish I could be as effusive about it.

The story of The Wailer (and her mother and her sister) was fine at the beginning. Intriguing even, with the talkative ghost in the storeroom. I was taut with anticipation for where both the story and I might be headed. Even in the middle, which is traditionally the part of any book where a story sags, like the ropes on an ancient charpoy, I could not tear myself away from it. But at the end, I was sadly disappointed. It felt as though the author had suddenly realised that the book could not go on forever and so hastily pulled the strands together and then jabbed a final full stop on the keyboard. It was frustrating, to say the least, particularly because I was still absorbed in the world of the book.

Of course, this is not the only book I have ever read that fizzles out at the end. After my initial bitterness, I usually have nothing but sympathy for the author because writing an ending is never easy, particularly in literary fiction, which does not have the genre fiction advantage of ending with a happily-ever-after or a mystery solved or even a cliffhanger. Still, it has taken me days to come to terms with the fact that I love the storytelling in Of Mothers and Other Perishables but am somewhat dismayed by the story itself. In fact, I am not certain that I am fully over the reading-life related existential crisis it generated in me.

Kushalrani Gulab is a Mumbai-based freelance editor.