Plunging into dark and murky depths

Hot Water by Bhavika Govil is a debut that takes the reader on a swim through its pages. While recent debut works of Indian women writing in English have followed one protagonist (mostly a woman) on a journey to the self, this novel has a family of three. With secrets, lies and humour, it establishes Govil as a writer with a flair for cadence and empathy.

Set across a scorching north-Indian summer, we follow Mira, Ashu and their mother Ma as they navigate their lives in a household where there are tons of hugs but also silences about what they truly feel and experience. Written in the act of a body going for a swim, the novel begins with their mother taking them to swimming classes. The children watch their mother befriend the coach and get down to their own theatrics.

Ashu, the elder sibling, finds his sister juvenile with her questions and likes to find comfort in his friendship with Rahul. Mira does not like Ma being friendly with the coach and her brother holding hands with Rahul for too long. She wants their attention until she begins to get it from elsewhere. The three of them harbour secrets from one another that come tumbling out in the present summer. Govil’s debut is a book of secrets, love and hate that screams in families where fissures and brokenness have been left to decay for too long.

Secrecy, according to the German sociologist Georg Simmel, is a form of interaction that straddles knowledge and ignorance. One can know somebody to be able to live with them peaceably, but some lies and secrets keep individuals ignorant of the other after a point. Govil seems to be employing the theme of secrecy across her characters, and with the imagery of hot water that makes life uncomfortable. Each one of them toes the line around their families and friends with their own secrets because, as Simmel says, when one knows too much, ‘it would drive everybody into the insane asylum.’ The house feels exactly like one. There is a claustrophobia that Govil builds inside their house; none of them wants to remain inside and find excuses to be out. This image of a house brings to mind the Lisbon residence in Jeffrey Eugenides’ coming-of-age 1993 thriller The Virgin Suicides. Readers can viscerally experience the hot water entering the nostrils of family members, making it unbearable to be with one another.

Govil’s novel is at its best when it employs the voices of each of the family members to tell the story. The novel peaks when Mira speaks. It is witty, funny, sad and intelligent when we listen to her and how she sees the family. Ashu’s is written in third person, and while his journey of finding love with Rahul is heartening, it does feel lost to the reader after a point. What could have been a solid ground to tap into the consciousness of a queer child is lost to yet another dramatic rendering of suffering and pain that has already become commonplace when characters with divergent sexualities are written.

The mother’s voice, less heard in the beginning, gains dominance as the novel nears its end and causes too many imbalances in the story. First, we stop hearing Mira almost completely in the latter half, and the reader misses the story of the family told by her. Second, the mother’s narrative feels rushed with too many loopholes in the plot, rendering it clumsy. Not only does this sacrifice the promise with which the novel began, but it also simply makes the dramatic climax unconvincing, as was the case in Anees Salim’s 2022 novel The Bellboy. Both novels began with much promise but lost their way by the end.

That said, Govil’s novel does manage to keep the readers glued with its impeccable writing. The pace and the mystery the author creates with the family’s relation to the secret bind the reader to the text as they experience a hot summer, tearing the fabric apart. True to its epigraph from Marquez’s ‘time was not passing’, this stagnation within the family breeds Mira’s humour, Ashu’s vulnerability, and Ma’s recalcitrance to life’s breakdowns.