Ira makes her debut with Love The Dark Days

Ira Mathur, an Indian-born Trinidadian award-winning multimedia journalist, launched her book–Love the Dark Days at the Nehru Centre in London on Wednesday. The book is published by Peepal Tree Press.

In 2021 Mathur was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award for her unpublished novel Touching Dr Simone. In 2019 Mathur was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Lorian Hemmingway (short story) and Small Axe Literary Competition. She is the Trinidad Guardian’s longestrunning columnist and has freelanced for The Guardian (UK) and the BBC.

Mathur has degrees in Literature, Law and Journalism, and gained diplomas in creative writing at the University of East Anglia/Guardian.

Frank, fearless and multi-layered This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender. The Victorian India elephant in the room in Mathur’s silk-swathed memoir Love The Dark Days is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen. The book is about accrued intergenerational damage between mothers and daughters in post-colonial worlds.

The story of the life of Poppet, whose privileged family has colluded with the brutality of the British Rule in India, lives with her grandmother Burrimummy, who feels a raging loss at the fading old world. With it, her privilege.

She absorbs her grandmother’s rage, becoming a living memorial of all the pain and injustice the imperious Burrimummy repeatedly hauls back from her past to tell and retell to Poppet. Just as she is constantly pulled into the old wounds, so is the reader. The story is crafted so the reader viscerally experiences how trauma loops around, coming back and back through generations to warp the future.

Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from postindependent India to her family’s migration to post-colonial Trinidad.

Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire.

That damage of unbelonging is repeated when her family migrates to Trinidad, where, in her darkest hour, she meets Walcott, who encourages her when she visits him in St Lucia over a weekend to leave the past behind and reinvent herself. Before she can do this, Poppet must re-enter the past one last time.

Can she find the courage to examine each broken shard of her shattered family and reassemble it into a new shape in a new world? Love the Dark Days is an intricate tapestry with Poppet’s story at its heart.