Sweet Poison

Namita Devidayal’s Aftertaste tells the syrupy saga of families in the mithai business. The author pleads guilty of a sweet tooth.

There is a cloying delight about entering a mithai shop. The sticky delights, neatly arranged trays of colourful squares of burfi, jamuns floating in syrup, colouredladoos and glittering vark induce a vague guilt. It’s gastro-sinning about wanting things that are overwrought and saccharine, and a fuzzy greed about wanting to feel the sugar rush. Not to mention memories of another time when these sweets were made at home by a gaggle of women who thought it was sacrilegious to purchase these delights from shops and uneasy about whether the best of shops, with their glittering lights and festive air, had messy kitchens and used spurious ingredients. 

The mithai shop is a metaphor for our sensory avarice and its hasty gratification. Namita Devidayal’s Aftertaste takes the metaphor of a mithai shop seriously and goes past the sweet counter to its kitchens and beyond to the people who run the business that makes millions selling treacle and toffee. 

It’s set in the 1980s when modernity was yoked to old ties and Hum Log taught us to become addicted to televised family sagas; the Licence Raj made business turgid and Indira Gandhi was set to get her bullets.  

We are introduced to a traditional Marwari family that has been in the sweet business in Bombay for years.  We are also introduced to an itinerant community which set up hereditary businesses and is flourishing in the trade since the 1960s. 

At the helm of the household is the ‘benevolent, flatulent witch’, Mummyji, who knits sweaters for her sons, is behind machinations that include bargaining and maintaining a tight lease over her warring sons and her business rivals, who can think of innovations like Bournvita Burfi and Maggi Bhujjia in a jiffy, and whose life is incomplete without lording over her faithful retainers and daughters-in-law, in that order. 

Jewellery, inheritance, mistresses, rapacious sons, abused wives and crafty women form the members of this world who use the tricks they know best, be it low cunning or vengeful scheming, to outdo each other. There’s nothing sweet about this world. 

There is no artifice here, only greed, says Devidayal, making the stories of these people both distasteful and intriguing. This is a world where dirty business, family feuds, bitter rivalries and animosities, dark revenge and bitter discords are played out behind the sunny delights of sweetmeats. We are never made to forget it, so even when a wet dream breaks between Papaji’s legs, it’s sickly like rosogolla syrup. Ew!

Devidayal’s language is everyday and devoid of flourishes or empathy, a strong contrast from the lyricism of her debut novel, The Music Room. This is not surprising, for the story doesn’t inspire elegant prose. Instead, it’s as brutal and tepid as the characters that float through this sugar factory soap opera. 

Devidayal does not spare the warts and scars, and cannot be accused of attempting to romanticise. Given the nature of characters and the ties that bind them, it is difficult to grow fond or empathise with any character. Mummyji remains an avoidable character, as does much of her family, even the irascible Sunny or the petulant Saroj.

Take a bite, if you are guilty of succumbing to a sweet tooth.

 

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