Can death lend lifeblood to fiction? In The Small-Town Sea, Anees Salim’s fifth novel, it does. It looks at life through a glass darkly and concludes that human existence is largely about cutting a solitary path: As mortals, we have got to walk alone, forced to collaborate with the great cosmic plan and snap ties of blood, often weathered by time and tide.
The novel, chronicle of deaths foregrounded, is told poignantly by the 13-year-old unnamed narrator in the form of letters to his father’s London-based literary agent, James Unwin.The novel unfolds in two parts. In the first part, the narrator talks about his father Vappa, the latter’s incurable disease and his last wish to die in his hometown that leads to the family getting uprooted—relocated from a big port city to a small-beach town. The narrator, however, has friends in the city and doesn’t want to be unmoored.
He compares his family to a Russian TV serial featuring the cartoon child Yuri or Yeriel. Like the cartoon child, the narrator has a four-member family that includes his toddler sister, Little. Within 15 months in the small town, he loses Vappa and calls it his second uprooting. His Vappa’s message to him is that he should walk alone. It’s as if Vappa had a premonition because after his death, the narrator’s journey becomes solitary, with the family drifting apart.
The narrator’s family, like each unhappy family, is unhappy in its own way. Vappa was an unhappy man, who had always wanted to make it big, but ends up losing more in life than he finds. His life experience—accumulation of the vagaries of time—had taken a toll on him and made him bitter, vulnerable. As he lay dying, he dragged the family from a big city to a small town, which underlines his selfishness. To the narrator, Vappa had always been protective yet distant. With him gone, a story ends. Another begins.
In the second part of the novel, the narrator talks about his life after his father’s death. A death in the family can often mean the end of everything. Salim lays bare the intricacies of emotions of the narrator with tremendous dexterity and empathy. Perhaps he does it so well because the protagonist’s father reflects his own fears and insecurities as a writer and a father. In a way, the narrator’s story is the story of every quiet child everywhere.
The boy narrator seems to understand the ways of the world with great maturity. His only close friend is an orphan named Bilal. There are episodes in his journey that can make one laugh out loud, but mostly it’s sad and melancholic. Life keeps taking away from him and yet he’s the least complaining. He rides the wave of his dark and lonely sea-like life all alone.
His mother gets married to another man and leaves him and the country behind to settle with her new companion in Riyadh. She takes her daughter along and leaves her son with his maternal grandmother. But this is just the beginning of his loss and misfortunes.
The novel is about unhappiness and recurring deaths, unfulfilled dreams and solitary journeys.
It makes for a compelling read.