“But I am learning slowly / to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes, / and to sip the medicine of bitterness”
Borrowing its title from Caribbean writer and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s poem “Dark August”, Ira Mathur’s immersive memoir, Love the Dark Days, begins with ten-year-old Poppet, living in Bangalore, in 1976, in her grandmother’s stately but decidedly ageing home. Poppet hankers for Burrimummy’s absolute, inviolable love, a love that her younger sister Angel seems to lay the first claim to. Despite her obvious affection for Angel, Poppet is caught in a cycle of competitiveness with her sister, aware of all the little ways in which she is more beloved, more wanted, more Burrimummy’s own.
A polyphonous life
The book traces the author’s complex relationship with her grandmother, Burrimummy, their shared familial history, and her own unique heritage – a chaotic melange of her Nawabi ancestors in India and the multicultural, multiethnic space she finds herself in in the Caribbean islands. Her parents are classic iconoclasts of their age. Ved, her Hindu father from a nondescript, middle-class family, and Nur, her Muslim mother who traces her lineage to the royal families of Bhopal and the lesser-known princely state of Savanur, are a golden couple – popular, glamorous, and not tied down by banal parenting responsibilities.
Poppet lives in the shadow of conflict – cultural, religious, and emotional. When her father leaves the army for an engineering job in Tobago, the family is thrown into a new kind of conflict, one where their older, settled way of life is constantly challenged, and questions of race and class destabilise their entrenched prejudices. Dislocation, loss of home, and forced hybridity push Poppet into a lifetime of living “on the fringes of love”, ensuring that the insecurities of the child desperate to be seen, to be “loved properly” by her grandmother and her mother, never quite fade away.
There is an obvious polyphony to Mathur’s narrative, not just in the multiplicity of locations and cultural experiences in which Poppet’s story unfolds, but also in the ways in which her life is part of an intergenerational palimpsest. While the memoir is obviously focused on relationships, it is also saturated with the colours of the Caribbean, its history, its layered identities, the violence that has been done to its people and that continues to perpetuate itself, as well as its resolute re-fashionings.
When asked by Derek Walcott, (who appears as a sort of feet-of-clay, Socratic mentor figure in the narrative) why she chose to write about her Raj-affirming, overly critical, clearly partisan grandmother, instead of writing “of the now, of the new world”, Mathur’s answer is as simple as it is a punch to the gut: “I’m writing to fill the ache of Poppet as a child, waiting for her turn. (…) I know there are worse things than a privileged grandmother. Writing helps me forget I live in a country with the highest murder rates in a non-warring state. Life here is as cheap as a scrap of paper. (…) I write to survive it.”
There is no ease here, neither for the writer nor for the reader. Mathur does not allow for an immersion into the lives of Burrimummy, Nur, and Poppet to the exclusion of the harsh social realities of either India or Trinidad. She is also quick to remind us of the pitfalls of expecting absolute truth in a memoir. What she writes is filtered by memory and is not “the truth of recorded and verifiable facts”, she says, coaxing a critical distance between the Poppet we meet in the text and the author who writes her. Our cast of characters, therefore, is just one, entirely subjective version of Poppet and the women who shape her life.
Mothers and daughters
Mothers and daughters, that atavistic story that was efficiently written out of canonical literature in all patriarchal cultures, has begun to assert itself in fiction as well as non-fiction in recent years. Dark Days is an account of successive generations of mothers and daughters, re-creating patterns of love and hostility, negligence and heartache, over and over again. It takes a little bit of piecing together, but once you do, the reader is rewarded with a fascinating family tree that travels from Central Asia to colonial India and further, to an assertively post-colonial Caribbean. Burrimummy’s great-grandfather, Sir Afsar-ul-Mulk Bahadur, came from Uzbekistan to India with his father who fought for the British against the 1857 Mutiny. He was adopted by a British officer after his father’s death, was enrolled in the British army at the age of 16, and, subsequently, was appointed the general of the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
Sir Afsar’s daughters, descendants across generations, were pushed into marriages that consolidated the family’s connections with power and privilege. Burrimummy’s mother, Khaliq un-Anisa, the Begum of Savanur, was forced to give up a potential career in medicine to marry a man her father chose for her. Burrimummy herself had to give up her dreams of being a concert pianist and settle for marriage to a man who soon after their wedding, lost all interest in her, and from whom she separated, giving up her cushioned existence in the royal palaces of Bhopal. Her daughter, Nur, breaking this generational curse, chose to marry outside of her religion and broke, irretrievably, her mother’s heart.
Poppet, a child made to live in the in-between space between two communities, neither of which ever fully accepted her as their own, performs her own replication of her mother’s choices in marrying a man her parents disapprove of. The daughters all blame their mothers for taking away “everything” from them, where “everything” ranges from love and dreams and aspirations for professional success to property and identity. And yet, their very definite sense of self, their resilience in the face of absolute hostility, percolates down from their mothers, and perhaps, even more, from their grandmothers, keeping that circle of mothers and daughters inviolate.
Trinidad and Tobago
Much of the book seems to be a search for balance between contradictions – her parents who could be both dazzlingly liberal and cloyingly authoritarian, her love for and resentment of her husband, Sadiq, her inability to let go of the past and live fully in the present, her conscious distancing from certain aspects of Trinidadian culture, her desire to connect with a family that only ever othered her. Trinidad and Tobago forces Poppet to recognise and respond to both class and race.
Mathur writes extensively and engagingly about the history of indentured labour in the Caribbean. Poppet’s husband, Sadiq, claims his descent from both Hindu and Muslim indentured labourers from India and seems to have shed entirely, the past and any residual nostalgia for it. His family speaks Creole, celebrates the Carnival in the capital city, participates in Hindu and Muslim festivals as a community, and has become what Walcott expects Poppet herself to be – someone who inhabits a dynamic present, recognises their newness, and takes pride in belonging to a place that has not been defined by any ancestors.
Mathur writes into the story of Burrimummy two household workers – Beulah and Jaanaki, both of whom claim space in language and actions – in ways women of their class have not been allowed to before. The episode of Jaanaki, accused of theft, punishing her employer, is a particularly well-wrought piece that speaks the truth of colonial and class exploitation.
In the course of a weekend she spends as a guest at the St Lucia home of Derek Walcott in 2016, the author wonders: “Could this be the way to get through our brief lives: creating form, beauty, redemption out of menace and chaos?” Mathur chooses to not use the reified category of “art” when she talks about the act of creation. This, perhaps, is the perfect exposition of what Love the Dark Days is. Rejecting any claims to absolute truth, steering clear of all aestheticisation, the memoir attempts to untangle the knots of familial relationships, without apologising for the inadequacies of the people it brings to life. It acknowledges jagged edges without attempting to make them whole.
The narrative chooses honesty over artifice, plunging the reader into the dark depths of a family that is just as dysfunctional as any other seemingly put-together social group. Bookended by funerals, the book is a celebration of life, messy relationships, failed beginnings, half-forgotten dreams, and the human effort that goes into finding meaning in imperfection. It could have been yet another self-indulgent story of a privileged family re-living its glory days. It is, instead, an insightful study of the politics of love and the long shadow cast by exclusion and loss.
Love the Dark Days, Ira Mathur, Speaking Tiger Books.
