‘Of Mother and Other Perishables’: A dead mother’s vigil for her daughters tells evocatively of love

At many points in Radhika Oberoi’s novel Of Mother and Other Perishables, the narrator apologises for her digressions, returning to what she believes to be the main story, the story of the present. She herself only half belongs to this present: dead for decades, she watches her family go about their lives, floating in and out of spaces that now only barely resemble the rooms that her body has once been in, touched, loved, and eventually abandoned. But Oberoi’s writing is not morbid – her novel is, in fact, lively in its details, telling us quite evocatively of love and strife, even funny at points.

A mother’s vigil

The novel is set in Delhi, its geography made familiar by the many landmarks the author sets up her world around. LP and the girls, she worries about them, she tells us, and so she has stayed in the house, unnoticed by her husband or daughters. While this is often an interesting set-up for a story – a watchful loved one, now dead, keeping vigil – Of Mother and Other Perishables substitutes the intrigue of a ghost with the gaze of a mother who could not, among other things, tell her daughters the stories she had hoped to one day. We go to the past, stray evenings and garden walks, plays and death beds, an audience to the tales that have kept her tethered to this world.

In their old storeroom, our unnamed narrator holds forth to her albums and jewellery, almirahs and old letters; in return, this captive audience keeps her alive to her older daughter. The Wailer, nicknamed so by her father in a nod to his beloved music of the 1960s returns to their old room week after week, sniffing its corners, holding close its many residents, sitting on its floor as the trustee of her mother’s memory. But closets of sarees that have been folded and unfolded over the years, photographs, letters, and other knick knacks rarely see Toon, the younger daughter, christened so by her mother for her great love of cartoons – and in her parents’ eyes, resemblance to them.

To preserve the fullness of her characters, Oberoi opts to switch between the mother’s voice and a third-person descriptive one, following the Wailer around. The book is richer for this choice – it would be a much less appealing story if it tried to be a family history, or aspired to detail the characters to the last bit. Instead, it says, look, pay attention, certainly there is more to loss than mourning – what is the shape of that which is created?

Sisters of the heart

In the years since the mother’s untimely death to cancer and much to her lament, an icy frost has crept up between the sisters, with both of them past any attempts at thawing it. And so in their relationship, punctuated by the hurts of their adolescent years that have since snowballed into a silence so complete that disturbing it feels dangerous, an uneasy quiet prevails.

Toon, now at the top of a coffee startup, has learnt to look relentlessly forward – and there is much to look forward to. Their new experimental cafe – with a fabulously designed ampersand in its name – and a fast-getting serious romance with the suave boss, who is obsessed with his coffee in the true sense of the word (perhaps much too obsessed, as the father frets). The rapid march to big, new things throws some new complications in the sisters’ paths, though, rocking a boat never that stable to begin with.

In contrast, for The Wailer, work is not much of a respite either; the prospect of one new day after another in the world of advertising is not exactly exciting anymore to her. Having started off as a copywriter with both promise and recognition, her days there now have dwindled into daily tussles with coworkers and their big, creative egos, and other times their slimy hypocrisy.

Discontent is also in the air elsewhere: the city pulses with new life that December, angry and resolute, and there are rising whispers of change. Something is rotten, and this sentiment slowly takes hold of many, but it will demand more than words in support from all those it touches. The Wailer, caught in a traffic blockade, catches a glimpse of this, and soon the infection catches.

Through all this, our narrator watches and worries, but she is a mother; she can only, and always, see her children as at least half a possibility. Often she tiptoes to the more hopeful place that was her life, when it was still her life and not her illness’, full of the seemingly endless promise of the family’s time together. The finiteness of their time together makes her yearn, but she remembers their time with clarity, rough edges and all. In this account of absences, Oberoi outlines with subtlety the vast expanse that is the mother-daughter relationship.

Oberoi’s writing flips its tone the minute the narrator’s mood moves, and in its versatility, it expands and contracts to accommodate the limited acquaintance that the reader makes with the characters. You can almost feel the mother observing you as you try to form an impression of her family, especially her children – I think she hopes, quite firmly, that we like them – but Oberoi goes in for something more: she hopes we will find them interesting, perhaps memorable, and most importantly, alive in the way that only those touched by life’s many tricks can be. I reckon she is successful there.

Of Mothers and Other Perishables, Radhika Oberoi, Simon and Schuster India.