Inevitability of impending deluge
Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky serves as yet another testament to why the Turkish-British author’s novels are quick to climb the bestselling charts. It is extensive, expansive and utterly ambitious. Otherwise, who can imagine connecting four lives—spanning different timelines, continents, cultures and backgrounds—with a single droplet of water? Yet, that is what Shafak does. “The story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water,” she writes.
And, rightly so. Just like the river Indus birthed the Indus Valley Civilisation several millennia ago, it was across the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia that several empires flourished. And here, in the 7th-century BCE Mesopotamia by the river Tigris, rules King Ashurbanipal, a cultured despot, who amasses a gigantic library that boasts of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Interrupted from his reading of the epic, as the Assyrian ruler orders his beloved mentor to be burned alive for treason, a droplet of water remains settled over his head, as if a silent witness to the cruelty. “Water remembers. It is humans who forget,” Shafak writes.
That droplet reemerges as snow in 19th-century Victorian England as a child is born in abject poverty. Jokingly christened King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, Arthur Smyth is a clever boy who goes on to lead an extraordinary life as he comes across a book called Nineveh and Its Remains, which changes his life forever.
While piecing together the epic, during an excavation in Nineveh, Arthur Smyth falls in love with Leila, a healer, from a family of Yazidis, a persecuted Kurdish-speaking religious sect, disparaged as “devil-worshippers”.
We are now in 2014 in Turkey, where a nine-year-old Yazidi girl Narin stands with her grandmother across the river Tigris before her baptism is forcefully stopped by a clawing bulldozer mowing around for a dam to be built. Narin’s grandmother, also a healer, wants to get her baptised in Yazidis’ most sacred place in Iraq, where the Islamic State is tightening its grip. Unaware of the ISIS, Narin is more interested in Leila, her great-great-grandmother.
Then Shafak takes us to 2018 London, where we meet the recently separated and slipping into melancholy, Dr Zaleekhah Clarke, a hydrologist, who moves to a houseboat on the river Thames. Clarke is interested in the memory of water, and a chance encounter with Narin, who has seen every form of persecution at the hands of ISIS, Shafak deftly circles back to the theme of “water remembers”.
Amid such expansive characters, the author appears to have packed herself, too, here and there. For example, she writes, “Works are like birds… when you publish books, you are setting caged birds free… you never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet song.”
So much packed into a single book can sometimes appear overwhelming, but through each character, the author brings in a different theme. While Ashurbanipal remains in the background, through Arthur, you get a vivid picture of the destitution and inequality in Victorian England. Through Narin, one gets to understand the misunderstood Yazidis.
Through Zaleekhah, the author brings forth contemporary water concerns. Straddling through such varied themes, the author also sounds an alarm at the water crisis that we are increasingly faced with. “Climate crisis is essentially a water crisis,” she writes.
While Shafak is outstanding in bringing forth this pressing issue, here is also where she falters. An overuse of water, rivers, and similar metaphors makes the text heavy: “Women are expected to be like rivers—readjusting, reshaping.” “There is a river running through you.” “Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.”
Having said that, the author deserves all the applause for weaving such disjointed story lines— which have nothing in common, apart from water and Mesopotamia—with such ease and effortlessness. Having employed such a writing style, there are chances that the story of one character overpowers the others, but that hardly happens. She manages to balance diverse themes, ranging from the climate crisis, global inequality, colonial archaeology, and even mental health, with much deft.
In the end, she successfully accords water a personality, which is much needed in times like these when water calamities are becoming increasingly common and erratic, even as humans remain unbothered until they afflict them.