This is a wry and likably feisty account of the destructive power an unstable parent can wield over her offspring
W
hen it comes to attempting suicide, Kolia’s mother is a “repeat offender”. A human rights barrister on the verge of being disbarred, Lalita craves her now adult daughter’s attention with such ferocity that, when denied, she throws herself in the river, lies down in the middle of the road or drinks cleaning fluid. “She tells me that it’s my fault,” says Kolia, now in her 20s and tutoring posh kids in London while hoping to go to art college. “She only did it because I wasn’t talking to her.”
Kolia left her mother’s home long ago, “because there were often smashed plates … clothes being cut up or wrists being grabbed or pulled”. But Lalita’s two young sons from a second marriage are still at the mercy of their mother’s chaotic parenting, which is at best inappropriate, at worst abusive or downright cruel. As a young teen, Kolia once complained that her chest was too small; her mother showed her a photograph of a woman whose breasts had been cut off by soldiers.
The fact that Lalita can apparently also be charming and “hypnotic”, with a “wild and flashing” soul and plenty of “passion”, made it hard for me – and, I’m sure, any reader – to shake the suspicion that she must be suffering from some sort of mental illness, if not mania. But here’s where things turn perplexing: though there’s one brief reference to “this kind of bi-polar parenting”, it’s hard to know whether the author means for us to take it literally. And though I don’t generally take much notice of how a novel is described on its cover, it did begin to bother me that this one is billed as a “painful love letter to childishness, innocence and imagination”. A love letter? Really? Am I missing something?
