Tara Menon’s debut novel, Under Water, is a neat example of tightly controlled storytelling, where as much simmers below the surface as it does, if you will excuse the pun, above sea level. We watch the protagonist, Marissa, wandering aimlessly through the streets of downtown NYC on a day of impending disaster. A typhoon is expected to hit the east coast in the US, and Marissa is seemingly willing to walk straight into the calamity. As we read on, we realise why she is doing so.
Taking up the skeins of loss, friendship, painful memories of a halcyon life lived on a Thai island, and surviving the 2004 tsunami, the story tracks Marissa, a walking ghost with a frightening host of suppressed emotions lying just beneath the surface of her skin.
Wherever she goes, she carries the presence of Arielle, the friend she lost to the tsunami. The rootless Marissa, clearly living with survivor’s guilt, is now an ebullient personality: the one who nicks small items from stores just for the heck of it, the one who randomly and recklessly sleeps with men she picks, the one roiling with emotions she just won’t give voice to.
One would imagine there’s only so much that can be told about the dreadful seismic sea wave which wreaked devastation in 2004 and took an estimated 2,30,000 lives. Yet, in juxtaposing 2012’s Hurricane Sandy alongside vivid memories of another time, another place, another devastation, the author brings forth the helplessness of humans when faced with an elemental fury.
The premise is also Menon’s cue to bring in a strong strain of eco-conservation. In showing and telling us about the beauty of the isle where Arielle and Marissa swam with hawksbill turtles, went underwater to befriend (and name) manta rays, and watched with dismay the bleaching of coral reefs, a light is shone yet again on how important it is to conserve nature, as also to observe and take cues from animals. The way the author details how dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, and elephants sensed the incoming catastrophe, whether in New York or in Thailand, is stark and effective in its telling.
While Marissa employs the early lessons she learned well—that breathing is the most important part of swimming—back on that Thai island on the day of the catastrophe, the reader is left wondering why Arielle, an equally good swimmer, decided to let the waves take her. We learn that the literal meaning of apocalypse isn’t disaster but revelation. We learn that the storm might be spectacular, but most of the time, devastation is quiet, subtle, humdrum. She sets the scene like this: “The water is turquoise. The sky is aquamarine. The sand is a soft ivory.” And in Menon’s hands, the coming disaster unfurls like a deadly datura flower—slowly, inexorably.
The book’s triumph is that the denouement is clearly in sight all through, yet the reader’s attention, absorption, or engagement with the story never flag.
