Put a frog in boiling water and it’ll jump out, place one in room-temperature water that is boiled slowly and it’ll allow itself to burn to death. Even if modern-day biologists have debunked the actual scientific value of this allegory, it remains popular, and for good reason, especially where human nature is concerned. Bhavika Govil’s debut novel, Hot Water is a clever interpretation of the metaphor while using water-related actions as actual scaffolding for the narrative—the story is divided into Plunge, Surface, Float, Swim, Sink, Choke, Flail, and Breathe.
Nine-year-old Mira and14-year-old Ashu live with their Ma in a close-knit family unit. It has always been the three of them, singing Simon Garfunkel songs in Ma’s sun-yellow car and describing their days as food—though as Mira soon realises, “there are three people in our family, but once, there were four”. All of them harbour secrets that the other two don’t know. Devastating secrets with no neatly trimmed answers.
Summers have always attracted the literary tradition. There is something potent about the season, with its sense of possibility, change, its sudden shifts and the slower evolution especially possible when you’re young and out of school for whole months; on the cusp of adolescence (Mira) or in the early throes (Ashu). Not to mention the summer storms that erupt when the heat and the pressure build up so much that they require an urgent outlet of catharsis. It’s the perfect vehicle for the story the author sets out to tell.
In an interview with Platform Magazine, Govil has spoken about how she was intrigued by the gap between observation and understanding in a household as unconventional as this one where the children are more privy to more aspects of Ma’s adult life. Her choice of three narrators allows her to layer the story with these different perspectives and construct a more complete eventual picture as the pieces slot into place. It also broadens our understanding of each character and their interpersonal connections, which are weighed down with a lot of revealed and unrevealed unspoken baggage. Even here, the narrative choices suit the story—Mira gets a first-person point of view, Ashu an intimate third-person one, and we get to read excerpts from Ma’s journal that drip light on the Before—and each voice is refreshingly distinct. I have to especially commend the author for the way she has crafted the children’s points of view. There is an intuitive understanding of their psyches, and she treats their eventual realisations about the adult world with sensitivity, and a welcome sense of humour along with the appropriate gravitas.
Hot Water is as much about childhood as about motherhood. The major defining experiences and the intimate, quieter revelations—as much about coming of age as about coming apart and beginning, not afresh, but a new, and trying again.