Book review: How a demented mind thinks

What goes on in the mind of a person with dementia? I’ve been deadly curious about this ever since my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago.

None of my research on medical websites and questions to neurologists got me much more than information about what happens to the physical brain when Alzheimer’s strikes. Though that helped, nothing really got me to understand what my mother might be thinking — and how she’d be thinking.

Fortunately, serendipity and a taste for light crime led me to a book called Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, a story told from the point of view of an elderly woman with dementia. The book was so insightful that I began looking for other works of fiction to help me understand my mother, and by now I’ve read several really brilliant examples: novels that satisfied me both as the caregiver of a patient with dementia, and as an avid reader.

There was one problem, however. All these books were written by British and American novelists. There seemed to be nothing available from authors in India, at least in English, aside from one memoir on the subject. And I craved an Indian book, set in the context of India, so I could learn at least a little about what other caregivers here have to deal with and what they do.

So I was delighted when I heard early this year that Pan would be publishing Mrs C Remembers by Himanjali Sankar, about a woman whose mother has Alzheimer’s.

I tracked that book for months and pounced when it was finally available. And when I downloaded it, I read it immediately. Was it worth the anticipation? That’s a hard question to answer; the only thing I can come up with is “hmmm, mostly, but not quite”.

Because though the book put a genuine smile on my face in its last few pages when I finally figured out what was going on (and also scared me silly for reasons I cannot explain here without giving away the ending), I had already spent far too long wondering where the story was going to be truly bowled over.

Mrs C Remembers is about the relationship between Sohini and her mother, Mrs Chatterjee. Sohini is a feminist through and through; a woman who genuinely doesn’t give a damn about what people will say. She’s been through a lot in her life: first she was a wild child, rebelling against her conservative family where a father and a grandfather want little to do with a daughter and a granddaughter because she isn’t a son and a grandson.

Next she swung in the opposite direction, marrying a man to please her father — a man who turned out to be really creepy in more than a mother’s boy way. Finally, in her mid-thirties, she found her balance as well as the love of her life, Omar, with whom she cohabits, but refuses marriage.

Mrs Chatterjee, on the other hand, is conservative all the way through. She’s grown up knowing that even though her own parents are fairly unconventional, they would never have married her into anything but a conservative clan. She condones her in-laws’ preference for boys in the family (she tells Sohini that boys really are superior to girls). She puts her heart and soul into running her household, despite the real malice of her mother-in-law. She worships her husband the way she worships her gods.

So you’d imagine that Sohini and her mother would never get along, but… oddly, they do. Not so oddly really, because for all Mrs C’s willingness to conform to her in-laws’ and others’ ideas of what’s right and what’s not, she’s totally on Sohini’s side, and instrumental in many ways to Sohini getting her own way. Not that Sohini fully realises this, though she is aware that she means more to her mother than anyone else in the world.

Which brings us to Mrs C’s descent into Alzheimer’s, nicely tied into the changes in Sohini’s life and the early happenings of 2016, complete with the Jawaharlal Nehru University protests that led to the arrests for sedition of student leaders Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid, and the change in the country’s temperament from secular to Hindutva. Though she’s been slipping into memory loss for years, Mrs C keeps herself updated by carefully reading the newspapers, so she can have something to talk about with the wives of her lawyer husband’s clients. Unfortunately, the nature of Alzheimer’s means that the connections she makes between the news and her family are not exactly straightforward. And that brings us to the last few pages of the book: the ones that made me smile and scared me silly. The ending, I must say, is amazing: just what I might expect from a person with dementia, but still in a totally jaw-dropping way. Overall, I’d say this is good book. To be a brilliant book, it would need the suspense to begin much earlier than it does. I wasn’t expecting so many chapters on Sohini’s life; when I finished the book, I understood why there was such a focus on her, but I should have had a clue much before the last couple of chapters. But I do believe you should read this. As I said, the ending is a cracker.