‘Love the Dark Days’: Ira Mathur’s memoir is an insightful study of politics of love and exclusion

“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 –...

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