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Of Mothers and Other Perishables
Of Mothers and Other Perishables is an exquisite articulation of grief. It is also the sharp-eyed tale of a city tethered to violence and bursting with nazms.
The morbidly funny voice of a dead woman echoes through the walls of her beloved storeroom, a compact space that contains her earthly cupboards full of silk sarees and baby clothes, albums of black-and-white photographs, a collection of vinyl records, a record player, old leather suitcases, an ebony-and-gold sewing machine. She reminisces about the past, and about the disease that causes her untimely death.
Her storeroom becomes a quaint Bioscope of her life in Delhi as a young woman in the 1970s and 80s, decades that bring her romance, marriage, motherhood.
The novel oscillates between the dead woman’s yearnings and the immediacy and excitement of a parallel narrative — her daughter’s. Nicknamed The Wailer (from the band Bob Marley and the Wailers), the dead woman’s daughter offers a sardonic glimpse into the world of advertising — the night before a presentation, temperamental colleagues, the buzz of writers and art directors at work. But the peculiar dynamics of The Wailer’s advertising firm alter drastically, when protests break out in the city of Delhi. Protesters swarm the streets, hollering against a new bill that persecutes the Muslim community. A Muslim art director is drawn to the pulsing heart of this movement. The Wailer, too, is inadvertently involved.
Both narratives — the deceased mother’s digressional memories, and The Wailer’s palpable reality — also tell of Toon, The Wailer’s younger sister, who is the CEO of a coffee startup. Their worlds converge to offer shards of the past, and navigate through a turbulent present. Personal and political histories collide in this haunting tale of many betrayals.
The morbidly funny voice of a dead woman echoes through the walls of her beloved storeroom, a compact space that contains her earthly cupboards full of silk sarees and baby clothes, albums of black-and-white photographs, a collection of vinyl records, a record player, old leather suitcases, an ebony-and-gold sewing machine. She reminisces about the past, and about the disease that causes her untimely death.
Her storeroom becomes a quaint Bioscope of her life in Delhi as a young woman in the 1970s and 80s, decades that bring her romance, marriage, motherhood.
The novel oscillates between the dead woman’s yearnings and the immediacy and excitement of a parallel narrative — her daughter’s. Nicknamed The Wailer (from the band Bob Marley and the Wailers), the dead woman’s daughter offers a sardonic glimpse into the world of advertising — the night before a presentation, temperamental colleagues, the buzz of writers and art directors at work. But the peculiar dynamics of The Wailer’s advertising firm alter drastically, when protests break out in the city of Delhi. Protesters swarm the streets, hollering against a new bill that persecutes the Muslim community. A Muslim art director is drawn to the pulsing heart of this movement. The Wailer, too, is inadvertently involved.
Both narratives — the deceased mother’s digressional memories, and The Wailer’s palpable reality — also tell of Toon, The Wailer’s younger sister, who is the CEO of a coffee startup. Their worlds converge to offer shards of the past, and navigate through a turbulent present. Personal and political histories collide in this haunting tale of many betrayals.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 25, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 18, 2024
What happens to those we love when they have died? Do their souls pass blissfully into an illuminated heaven or a blissful nirvana, never to commune with us anymore? Do they cut all ties to what bound them to earth, to friends and family? Or do they, perhaps, linger on? Not as those benevolent (or otherwise) spirits that hover about, occasionally glimpsed or heard, the stuff of chilling stories?
Or perhaps, as in the case of the part-narrator of Radhika Oberoi’s Of Mothers and Other Perishables, they do linger around us, but are never seen, never heard. Only felt, perhaps, and that too vaguely to be tangible. This narrator is a woman who died of cancer in the spring of 1993, but who continues to inhabit her marital home. She lives—or does not live—in the locked storeroom where, wrapped in muslin, are her saris. Where, too, there are the memories of many decades: photo albums and memorabilia of weddings, birthdays, the childhood of her two daughters.
These daughters are never identified by their real names, but their personalities (as that of their mother, and of several other characters) is sharply etched. The elder daughter’s nickname is The Wailer, after Bob Marley and the Wailers, because she wailed so much and so easily. Her younger sister, addicted to cartoons, is called Toon. The Wailer was sixteen when their mother died; Toon nine. Now, it is the Wailer, creative director with an advertising agency, who keeps the storeroom’s keys and visits it every now and then to refold her mother’s saris, to dip into the past, to perhaps share her woes with the comforting dimness there. Toon, working at a coffee start-up and having an affair with her boss, had drawn away from the Wailer long ago, the schism now so wide between them—though they live in the same house with their widowed father, LP—that the two sisters rarely cross paths.
The story is told in two alternating voices. One is the third person, which narrates the story of the Wailer, in the present: in 2020, when the Shaheen Bagh/Kalindi Kunj anti-CAA protests are at their peak. The other is the first person, the Wailer’s long-dead mother, remembering her past: her romance with LP, their wedding, her daughters. And, as is common with the living too, intertwined with that are her comments on the now: on her daughters now, LP now, their lives.
Two narratives, two time periods, two points of view. The mother’s is more personal, more tied to the home and to family; the Wailer’s meshes with her work at the agency. The dynamics at the agency; the suffocating isolation of a talented woman in a ‘beefy boys’ club; the Wailer’s attempts to assert her creativity without kowtowing, yet without being abrasive: these form the basis of her narrative, until that landmark evening when a colleague, known as the Nawabzada, takes her along to Kalindi Kunj.
The nature of grief, the way people deal with bereavement, and how it affects them, forms an important element of this novel. Oberoi, however, handles this with sensitivity and compassion, using occasional wit and a deep understanding of human nature to veer the narrative away from possible melodrama. The story is uncomplicated, moving in an organic, quiet way; what makes it so engrossing is the skill with which Oberoi weaves that tale: the way her characters come alive, the relatable memories they have, the relatable emotions that grip them. The way love and empathy eventually come to the rescue. The humanity which surfaces (and, also, the greed and selfishness which elbows its way to the forefront): all of it so true, so very real.
It is, too, a subtle comment on other matters: on workplaces (and working women), politics, India and Indians today: so obsessed with moving up, with material possessions.
A highly readable, impactful book.
(From my review for Open: The Magazine, here: https://openthemagazine.com/lounge/bo...)
Or perhaps, as in the case of the part-narrator of Radhika Oberoi’s Of Mothers and Other Perishables, they do linger around us, but are never seen, never heard. Only felt, perhaps, and that too vaguely to be tangible. This narrator is a woman who died of cancer in the spring of 1993, but who continues to inhabit her marital home. She lives—or does not live—in the locked storeroom where, wrapped in muslin, are her saris. Where, too, there are the memories of many decades: photo albums and memorabilia of weddings, birthdays, the childhood of her two daughters.
These daughters are never identified by their real names, but their personalities (as that of their mother, and of several other characters) is sharply etched. The elder daughter’s nickname is The Wailer, after Bob Marley and the Wailers, because she wailed so much and so easily. Her younger sister, addicted to cartoons, is called Toon. The Wailer was sixteen when their mother died; Toon nine. Now, it is the Wailer, creative director with an advertising agency, who keeps the storeroom’s keys and visits it every now and then to refold her mother’s saris, to dip into the past, to perhaps share her woes with the comforting dimness there. Toon, working at a coffee start-up and having an affair with her boss, had drawn away from the Wailer long ago, the schism now so wide between them—though they live in the same house with their widowed father, LP—that the two sisters rarely cross paths.
The story is told in two alternating voices. One is the third person, which narrates the story of the Wailer, in the present: in 2020, when the Shaheen Bagh/Kalindi Kunj anti-CAA protests are at their peak. The other is the first person, the Wailer’s long-dead mother, remembering her past: her romance with LP, their wedding, her daughters. And, as is common with the living too, intertwined with that are her comments on the now: on her daughters now, LP now, their lives.
Two narratives, two time periods, two points of view. The mother’s is more personal, more tied to the home and to family; the Wailer’s meshes with her work at the agency. The dynamics at the agency; the suffocating isolation of a talented woman in a ‘beefy boys’ club; the Wailer’s attempts to assert her creativity without kowtowing, yet without being abrasive: these form the basis of her narrative, until that landmark evening when a colleague, known as the Nawabzada, takes her along to Kalindi Kunj.
The nature of grief, the way people deal with bereavement, and how it affects them, forms an important element of this novel. Oberoi, however, handles this with sensitivity and compassion, using occasional wit and a deep understanding of human nature to veer the narrative away from possible melodrama. The story is uncomplicated, moving in an organic, quiet way; what makes it so engrossing is the skill with which Oberoi weaves that tale: the way her characters come alive, the relatable memories they have, the relatable emotions that grip them. The way love and empathy eventually come to the rescue. The humanity which surfaces (and, also, the greed and selfishness which elbows its way to the forefront): all of it so true, so very real.
It is, too, a subtle comment on other matters: on workplaces (and working women), politics, India and Indians today: so obsessed with moving up, with material possessions.
A highly readable, impactful book.
(From my review for Open: The Magazine, here: https://openthemagazine.com/lounge/bo...)
May 20, 2025
The thing that makes mothers perishable is their stupid determination to endure. To poke their dead noses where they are besides the point, even if the point is not clear, even if there isn’t a point. To preserve smells of babies, sarees, cassettes, flowers, sepia-tinted memories, and paraphernalia out of pure sentimental lunacy. To stop the hands of time, or at the very least slow it down, while the true goal is to actually reverse them… to a time that was their prime, to a time that was their joy, despite whatever immense affliction they tolerated.
Through this useless endurance as bodiless sounds, all they could achieve is to bear witness. Bear witness to a world bereft of them, watch husbands torn between the past and the future, watch daughters lock horns with a motherless present… lock horns with the corporate beefy patriarchal bullies, lock horns with an unquenchable machine that is capitalism, lock horns with the many conundrums of existence, pain, and love, and mostly lock horns with each other.
They cannot not be empathetic, these mothers, they cannot not be masochistic, they cannot not be purposeful wanderers, they cannot not be a bothered something. And so, despite the stabbing agony it causes in their structureless presence, they endure to witness a passage of time… a slow collapse of their reality.
So, how then are mothers perishable? These lifeless dots that linger in musty corners, befriending semi-conscious creatures, lost in objects that indicate the timelessness of time, floating in a sea of emotions that is mostly nostalgia, constantly longing for a metaphysical hug and a saliva-free kiss. How else could they perish, but a forced ejection from the minds of the ones they love?
Through this useless endurance as bodiless sounds, all they could achieve is to bear witness. Bear witness to a world bereft of them, watch husbands torn between the past and the future, watch daughters lock horns with a motherless present… lock horns with the corporate beefy patriarchal bullies, lock horns with an unquenchable machine that is capitalism, lock horns with the many conundrums of existence, pain, and love, and mostly lock horns with each other.
They cannot not be empathetic, these mothers, they cannot not be masochistic, they cannot not be purposeful wanderers, they cannot not be a bothered something. And so, despite the stabbing agony it causes in their structureless presence, they endure to witness a passage of time… a slow collapse of their reality.
So, how then are mothers perishable? These lifeless dots that linger in musty corners, befriending semi-conscious creatures, lost in objects that indicate the timelessness of time, floating in a sea of emotions that is mostly nostalgia, constantly longing for a metaphysical hug and a saliva-free kiss. How else could they perish, but a forced ejection from the minds of the ones they love?
March 4, 2025
I can't get over this book anytime soon. Who would've thought that the dead feel so much, think out loud, have opinions and an eagerness to talk and share!
The pace of the book perfectly matches the plot. The voice holds your hand and takes you on a journey.
The book is as much about its characters as it is about Delhi and its people.
If everything and everyone is perishable, who's to say memories aren't? Or feelings aren't? Or thoughts aren't?
The pace of the book perfectly matches the plot. The voice holds your hand and takes you on a journey.
The book is as much about its characters as it is about Delhi and its people.
If everything and everyone is perishable, who's to say memories aren't? Or feelings aren't? Or thoughts aren't?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 15, 2025
The filial relationship lends itself to multiple meanings and expectations, bound within the circle of duty, love, care, regard and respect.
Of Mothers and Other Perishables, by Radhika Oberoi, is a dead mother's account, overseeing her husband and offspring cope with the fallout of her passing away. She observes the goings-on from the space of the store room of her home. Fully invested in her family's well-being, her life story unfolds - her views about their lives, the advice she wished she could give and her anxieties about the family's dynamics.
Conveying the struggle to remain relevant in the lives we are close to, this is often unexpressed or manifested with expectation. The book has a solid theme, it does go off track a bit. Quite like relationships, one could say.
The author does succeed in leaving the reader with plenty of food for thought.
Of Mothers and Other Perishables, by Radhika Oberoi, is a dead mother's account, overseeing her husband and offspring cope with the fallout of her passing away. She observes the goings-on from the space of the store room of her home. Fully invested in her family's well-being, her life story unfolds - her views about their lives, the advice she wished she could give and her anxieties about the family's dynamics.
Conveying the struggle to remain relevant in the lives we are close to, this is often unexpressed or manifested with expectation. The book has a solid theme, it does go off track a bit. Quite like relationships, one could say.
The author does succeed in leaving the reader with plenty of food for thought.
November 13, 2024
How can you not love a book which has a title as intriguing as “Of Mothers and Other Perishables”? There are two main narrators in Radhika Oberoi‘s book- one is the Voice of the mother who died of cancer when she was still a young woman and who never left the storeroom where all her memories are stored, and the other is the Wailer who was sixteen when her mother passed away and who continues to grieve for her mother by wallowing in old memories. The Voice may no longer have a body, but she continues to participate in the life of her family, she remains curious about new technology, she is aware of what is happening to those she loves, and she yeans to reach out and put things right. The Wailer continues to keep old memories alive by spending hours in the storeroom where the Voice lives. She takes joy in arranging and rearranging her mother’s stuff in a attempt to remain connected to her. When she uploads her mother’s photographs on Instagram, the Voice is thrilled because she remains relavant even with new technology. The story is told in alternating chapters with the two narrators together taking the story forward in a seamless manner. Both the Voice and the Wailer and prone to frequent flashbacks. Both live simultaneously in the past and the present. They react very differently to similar stimuli, and between themselves, they paint very realistic portraits of Delhi in the 1970s, in the 1990s and in the 2020s.
The Wailer started as a copywriter in the advertising agency where she is now Creative Director. She is one of the last of a dying breed who believes that copy should be both elegant and grammatically correct- not for her the Hinglish that is in vogue today. And certainly not for her the advertisements that do not seem to understand what makes a good advertisement great. She has a fairly messed up relationship with her younger sister. Toon. Toon was just 10 when she lost her mother and her way of coping with the loss is to completely block it out (to be fair, though, she was always the more irreverent of the two). Caught between the silence between the Wailer and Toon is their father, LP, so named that because of his love for music and his huge LP collection. LP had a sweet romance with his wife, and they were clearly a devoted couple. After his wife passed on, he did his best to be a good father and a good mother to his two children. While there is hint of a second romance, nothing really came of it, and one wonders why.
The Wailer and Toon had their own set of romances which perhaps did not go exactly the way they would have wanted it to, but that is not the defining part of the story. The story is build on the inter-relationship between the various characters- LP’s parents, the Voice’s parents, their siblings and the spouses of the siblings, the friends, the children of their friends. There were so many relationships, many of which fizzled out through neglect- the Voice wants to set them right, but doesn’t know how to.
The book touches upon misogyny at the workplace. The Wailer comes up against the Bro Club, which while not constituting actual sexual harassment does exclude her because of her gender and makes the place quite toxic for her to work in. She also encounters women who have a physical relationship with their seniors- whether it is out of choice or subtle coercion is something nobody can be sure of. Most women who have been a part of the corporate setting will recognise many of the things she describes.
The City of Delhi emerges as a major protagonist in the story. We are introduced to many Delhis- the Delhi where LP and the Voice carry out their romance, the Delhi of the elegant lawns and garden chairs where tea and mint sandwiches were served, the Delhi which witnessed protests during the Emergency, the Delhi of bougainvillea lined parks where teenagers flaunted their plastic earrings in the late 1980s, the Delhi which witnessed the CAA protests, the Delhi of fancy cafes. Though this is Delhi through a particular set of eyes, seeing it juxtaposed on the Delhi with which I am familiar brought a whole new dimension to the familiar.
The book also talks about politics and of how people react to the politics of others. The Wailer’s colleagure, Nawabzade who creates the most beautiful calligraphic art gets involved in the IT CAA protests, and drags her into it with him. He attains infame when a clip with him accidentally goes viral and he is forced to face extreme consequences.
My favourite part of the book, however, was the beauty of the prose. So many people think that AI can take over the job of writing, but can AI ever come up with the kind of intuitive leaps of imagination that the human brain is capable of? In the very first page, the Voice describes her Banarasi saree as “cool metal and molten desire”, and goes on to talk of the benedictions bestowed on a bride- “may your trembling thighs bring forth generations. It doesn’t tell of catheters inserted in the flute-like body and the sound of retching echoing through the house.”
Read this book if you love the English language, and you want to read an author who is able to make the language sing. The characters and the settings. are so believable- you will recognise scenes from your own life, but told in such a way that it adds a whole new dimension to your nostalgia.
The Wailer started as a copywriter in the advertising agency where she is now Creative Director. She is one of the last of a dying breed who believes that copy should be both elegant and grammatically correct- not for her the Hinglish that is in vogue today. And certainly not for her the advertisements that do not seem to understand what makes a good advertisement great. She has a fairly messed up relationship with her younger sister. Toon. Toon was just 10 when she lost her mother and her way of coping with the loss is to completely block it out (to be fair, though, she was always the more irreverent of the two). Caught between the silence between the Wailer and Toon is their father, LP, so named that because of his love for music and his huge LP collection. LP had a sweet romance with his wife, and they were clearly a devoted couple. After his wife passed on, he did his best to be a good father and a good mother to his two children. While there is hint of a second romance, nothing really came of it, and one wonders why.
The Wailer and Toon had their own set of romances which perhaps did not go exactly the way they would have wanted it to, but that is not the defining part of the story. The story is build on the inter-relationship between the various characters- LP’s parents, the Voice’s parents, their siblings and the spouses of the siblings, the friends, the children of their friends. There were so many relationships, many of which fizzled out through neglect- the Voice wants to set them right, but doesn’t know how to.
The book touches upon misogyny at the workplace. The Wailer comes up against the Bro Club, which while not constituting actual sexual harassment does exclude her because of her gender and makes the place quite toxic for her to work in. She also encounters women who have a physical relationship with their seniors- whether it is out of choice or subtle coercion is something nobody can be sure of. Most women who have been a part of the corporate setting will recognise many of the things she describes.
The City of Delhi emerges as a major protagonist in the story. We are introduced to many Delhis- the Delhi where LP and the Voice carry out their romance, the Delhi of the elegant lawns and garden chairs where tea and mint sandwiches were served, the Delhi which witnessed protests during the Emergency, the Delhi of bougainvillea lined parks where teenagers flaunted their plastic earrings in the late 1980s, the Delhi which witnessed the CAA protests, the Delhi of fancy cafes. Though this is Delhi through a particular set of eyes, seeing it juxtaposed on the Delhi with which I am familiar brought a whole new dimension to the familiar.
The book also talks about politics and of how people react to the politics of others. The Wailer’s colleagure, Nawabzade who creates the most beautiful calligraphic art gets involved in the IT CAA protests, and drags her into it with him. He attains infame when a clip with him accidentally goes viral and he is forced to face extreme consequences.
My favourite part of the book, however, was the beauty of the prose. So many people think that AI can take over the job of writing, but can AI ever come up with the kind of intuitive leaps of imagination that the human brain is capable of? In the very first page, the Voice describes her Banarasi saree as “cool metal and molten desire”, and goes on to talk of the benedictions bestowed on a bride- “may your trembling thighs bring forth generations. It doesn’t tell of catheters inserted in the flute-like body and the sound of retching echoing through the house.”
Read this book if you love the English language, and you want to read an author who is able to make the language sing. The characters and the settings. are so believable- you will recognise scenes from your own life, but told in such a way that it adds a whole new dimension to your nostalgia.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 24, 2025
Sometimes, sparingly, the writing seemed a bit pretentious but for the most part I understood the purpose of the lyricism. The tale is told from two perspectives and I liked one of them a whole lot. I liked the unexpected touch of romance in one of the stories. I liked the ending. I would recommend, this is nice and should probably get more attention.
August 26, 2024
Beautifully written and narrated. A page-turner.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews