The central narrative of the novel Girl in White Cotton revolves around the life-long conflict between the protagonist Antara and her mother, Tara. "I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure… I used to bring up instances of her cruelty, casually, over tea, and watch her face curve into a frown", narrates Antara giving us a glimpse of her relationship with her mother on the first page of the novel – which also serves as a function to perfectly set the tone for what is about to come in pages next. Unlike the typical portrayal of a mostly saccharine relationship between a mother and her child, Doshi takes a much more brutal approach in characterising the central relationship between the protagonist and her mother. The neglect and abuse she suffers primarily from her mother and from the people she is connected to due to the metaphysical tether to her mother in her childhood deeply affect Antara in how she views herself and how her character/persona develops throughout the novel, which reaches a fever pitch at the final pages. 

The constant expectations from motherhood by our society is a recurring theme. Tara's mother-in-law dotes on her son even into his adulthood; Antara's mother-in-law boasts about her taking after her infant son, husband, and the daily chores all by herself. However, Tara lives her life as an antithesis to this requirement our patriarchal society imposes on women. She had Antara because she was expected to have a child and not because she wanted one out of her own volition. Her refusal of the 'ideal' motherhood is constantly punished, first by her family and then by society. Though Tara tries to go on a journey for self-actualisation and agency, it unintentionally inflicts Antara with trauma she is unable to resolve herself off even during her adulthood. During this tumultuous period in their lives, the only motherly relationship Antara experiences come from a surrogate-mother relationship with Kali Mata – their relationship ending abruptly when Tara moves her life away from the ashram.

Reza, a prior lover of Tara and a distant parental figure to Antara during her childhood, has a significant impact on the relationship between the mother and daughter. Antara, who later shares an intimate relationship with Reza, long after him leaving Tara, is a secret she keeps from her mother. The same man her mother confided to her prior as the only person she ever loved. When Tara realises there is a hidden relationship between her daughter and her former lover by happenstance, she feels betrayed by the secret that her love and lover was stolen by her daughter. The guilt Antara experiences for this untold relationship comes to narrative fruition at the very end when an amnesiac Tara declares herself as the mother of Anikka - whom she mistakes for Antara, and Dilip as her husband. In the heightened alienation and paranoia caused by her post-partum depression, she is forcefully removed from the scene unravelling in front of her, during the same time as her own character/persona unravels until all she can see is herself.

Anvi Doshi does away with typical narrative writing and the usual tales of motherhood so revered and ingrained in the Indian zeitgeist. Thus, she can draw upon a complicated relationship between two people who are bound by each other by nothing other than blood, without sanitising all the guts and gore of a complicated human relationship most others would want to look away from.