FAMILY FAILINGS
Sangeetha Sreenivasan’s Acid centres on an addict, her twin sons and her lover—four people who live together in a Bengaluru flat but fall something short of a family. Kamala is the addict, forced into a near-incestuous marriage so that a family’s property could stay within the family. Her mother and uncle were the perpetrators of the act that she never seems able to escape. Her husband Madhavan was equally unwilling, committed to someone else, but ultimately not able to do the right thing. Husband and wife fall apart, more so after an accident leaves their child Shiva paralysed and his twin Aadi takes on the burden of care. Mother-guilt is a running theme in the novel, and Kamala dwells on it incessantly, imagining halfhatched offspring maimed by a mother’s misguided impatience. When Kamala’s own guilty mother dies, she takes the family to the ancestral home in her village. When fictional Keralites return to Kerala, they apparently fall out of the 21st century simply by crossing a state border. Ancestral homes perpetually wear laterite and tile and never have WiFi. The usual cliches come up—rustic neighbourhood, sleepy streets, simple people. But the novel turns as the family enters the old house, and they truly walk into death. The rooms are airless, dark, filthy. Vines strangle anything that stands still, and smoke rises from the cremation ground nearby. Shaly, Kamala’s lover and half-attentive, part-time mother to the boys, tells them to breathe in the pure air, far from Bengaluru’s honking traffic and foamy lake. But instinctively they know they will instead choke on the deadly poison of solitude. Even when bogged down in the writer’s tuneless sentences, these Gothic elements are evocative. If Aadi’s excursions to Bengaluru and Pondicherry, and Shaly’s own story, had been more organically tied to the main thread of the story, the novel might even have been powerful.
Kamala is a frustrating protagonist. She buys drugs, but for most of the novel it is unclear whether it is the acid that has corroded her sanity or an underlying revolt against an impossible situation. Her mind wanders, and the stories she lives are sometimes like a drunk’s late-night rambling, interesting chiefly to himself and pointless for the listener. Her mother-guilt is of a different kind. When Aadi and Shaly are away, she leaves the paralysed Shiva unwashed and alone for days, refusing to comfort him even by a kind touch. The only love in the house, the only love in the book, lives in the twins.
—Latha Anantharaman