In search of a lost inheritance

Book Review: Love the Dark Days by Ira Mathur (2024, Speaking Tiger, Pp 248, INR 599/-)

The women in Ira Mathur’s family, for generations, have had qualms with one another. It is a
legacy, passed on like precious cloth and jewels. Antipathy is common between mothers and
daughters: as Ira has for her mother, Nur, for years of neglect and detachment; as Nur has for
Ira’s grandmother, Burrimummy, for depriving her of her rightful share; as Burrimummy has
for her mother, the great-grandmother Angel (after whom Ira’s sister is named), for pulling her
away from a talented life in music and getting her married to a man who would soon abandon
her; and as Angel had for hers, Sadrunissa, for destroying her chances of a hopeful career in
medicine in favor of marriage. Each, with their own brand of trauma, seeks the other’s
approbation, despite their shared disdain. It is this lineage that Ira Mathur – the “homeless,
unrooted girl; neither Hindu nor Muslim, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither Trinidadian nor
Indian” girl – draws in her deeply moving and revealing memoir, Love the Dark Days (2024).
“We all fall into the crevices created by one another’s neglect,” she writes.

Sadness, etched in the eyes of each of these women, is part of their heritage; as is royal
aristocracy, or at least the illusion of it. For a family with abundant wealth, there is much
deprivation that its children grow up with – deprived of warmth, acceptance, and above all,
love. Mathur and her siblings, her parents and the reluctant grandmother, move across
continents, from India to Trinidad and Tobago, and later to London and back. It is the binding
colonial past of the Caribbean, America, and the African and Indian subcontinents that runs in
the backdrop of Mathur’s memoir. The question of collecting stereotypes, like generational
wealth, and of unlearning them, endures. Race, class and gender, hence, are pertinent characters
in Mathur’s life and book. Her story is a testimony to the ‘personal is political’ argument, as
the countries emerge from their colonial influences, only to often recolonize themselves.
However, it remains, first and foremost, a personal history.

One wonders if Mathur’s writing is an attempt of preserving the lost history of her family –
reduced to but a few sentences in footnotes of a web page – as much as it is an attempt to make
peace with it. With roots in Afghanistan, the Mughal era and the British India, Ira Mathur’s
maternal family, finds representation and much redemption in the book. As for her relationship
with the men in her life – father, brother, husband and son – there is much space to explore.
Although they are featured and acknowledged for their influence in her life – good or bad –
there is a certain lack of depth in Mathur’s attention towards them, especially when compared
to her relationship with the women in her life. Nonetheless, it is a telling memoir.

First published in Great Britain in 2022, by Peepal Tree Press, Love the Dark Days is a book
that must have required great courage to write. Through writing and with much guidance from
Nobel Laurette, Derek Walcott, and some influence from another Trinidadian Nobel prize
winners, V. S. Naipaul, Ira Mathur comes to love the dark days of her life – an emotion drawn
from a Walcott poem, Dark August. “To cancel our dark sides is to live in a blank sanitised
world, where no one has the permission to examine the debris of our souls, no one is granted
redemption,” as Mathur learns. “There is either truth or nothing.”

- Nandini Bhatia is an independent feature writer @read.dream.repeat