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Mint
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Book review: 'Water Days' reveals the secret vocabulary of Bengaluru
Acclaimed philosopher Sundar Sarukkai's first novel, Following a Prayer (2023), was a strikingly original meditation on language, gender dynamics, and the magical power of belief. Although it shone for its light-footed prose and limpid narrative voice, the story had a darkness at its core, and ended on a tragic, somewhat frustratingly open-ended, note. In his new novel, Water Days, Sarukkai returns to the themes of language and gender, with an exploration of urban history thrown into the mix. His gift for storytelling remains sharp and agile, informed by gentle comedy and witty understatement. The plot has a happier ending, though it also veers into the troubled recesses of human mind and motivation. Water Days tells the story of Bangalore before it turned into Bengaluru, and the modern-day sprawl of people, horrific traffic and ugly high-rises it has become over the last 20-odd years. Set in Mathikere Extension, an old residential enclave near Yeshwanthpur in north Bangalore, the novel traces the shifting fortunes of Raghavendra, a security guard-turned-amateur detective, whose real ambition is to open a general provisions store. His humble dream is thwarted by an unwittingly fraudulent business entanglement with Nagaraj, a thug, who uses the alias of 'detective agency" to launch a chit fund that robs hundreds of their life savings. Even as Raghavendra struggles to navigate the threats posed by Nagaraj and his cronies (including a policeman), the ire of his wife Poornima, who is furious about Raghavendra's hare-brained business venture, and the infrastructural woes that plague his locality, he is faced with the first and last 'case" of his career, one that he must solve for his own sake as well as for others close to him. Archana, a 16-year-old Malayali girl who lives in the neighbourhood with her family, dies by suicide one night after she is beaten mercilessly by her father Prasanna, a carpenter, as punishment for becoming pregnant as an unmarried minor. No one seems to know of the man responsible for her misfortunes, though the streets are abuzz with rumours. At Poornima's insistence, Raghavendra grudgingly decides to probe the mystery to find the culprit. As worried parents to two teenage girls, he and Poornima have a personal stake in the mission—and they go to great lengths, at risk of life and limb, to expose the guilty. Sarukkai hangs the plot of Water Days on the scaffolding of a faux mystery novel, though this is not the primary reason why the reader remains invested in the story. The real points of interest, rather, lie in everything else that brews around this incident. As Sarukkai puts it in the 'Pre-logue" to the book, the story he wants to tell is about the language of cities. 'The language of the city is not another human language that we can speak," he writes. 'It may have a relation to it but it is not that in its entirety." Rather, Sarukkai continues, 'it rises in the way the rain falls on crooked tin sheets over uneven walls, in the sound of sliding slippers on slushy roads. It contains the whisper of light under street lamps in the early morning vigils, and the musky sound of breathing dogs under the haze of rainy days. It has the clatter of the vegetable carts, the crumpled sound of a bitten puff by hungry teeth." Such quaint, mostly unheard, melodies are breathed into the rest of the novel, where mundane moments of living and being—petty squabbles, nosy neighbours, drinking coffee, eating a potato bun, or waking up at the crack of dawn to collect Cauvery water—are suffused with a vividly poetic appeal. Few of us savour, or even register, these experiences in the ceaseless flow of our self-centred, technology-driven, isolated lives. But Sarukkai makes us sit up. While making the reader aware of this secret vocabulary of the city, Water Days also buzzes with a heady cacophony of audible words—Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and English—spoken by inhabitants, settlers, migrants and transient populations. The Bangalore of the novel is in the early years of the IT boom, with people from across India pouring in to live, study and work there. The city is already wracked with power cuts and water shortage. Aggressive Hindi-speaking north Indians are clashing with wily Malayalis and enterprising Tamilians. And as the Malgudi-like innocence of Mathikere Extension is being sullied by these incursions, Kannadigas are struggling to preserve their language, identity and way of life. While strongly rooted in this clash of cultures, Sarukkai's novel doesn't lose either its optimism or its edge. That's largely because of his talent for creating endearingly memorable characters, even out of the minor ones (such as Raghavendra's Bihari tenant, Rajesh; the usher at the local cinema, Yediyurappa; and Josephine, who sells packaged milk). The north-versus-south divide is inflected with caste and regional allegiances instead of being projected as a tussle between two monolithic giants. And lastly, the women in this novel, like those in his previous one, are surprising receptacles of strength and resilience even when they are at their most broken. Water Days is as much a call to reckon with the transformation of a city as an object lesson in empathy, observation and community living. As urban India becomes divisive, unliveable and intensely self-serving, it is chroniclers like Sarukkai who continue to do the work that no policymaker or political leader is doing—inspiring us with feelings to make us more concerned and caring citizens.
New Indian Express
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Wheels within wheels: What Sundar Sarukkai's Water Days tells us about Bengaluru and who belongs
People of Water Days The novel introduces a constellation of characters that reflect a city in flux: Raghavendra, a middle-aged security guard who becomes an unlikely detective; Poornima, his sharp, grounded wife; Rajesh, a Bihari student who avoids engaging with the city; Nagaraj, a scheming friend with political links; and Mari Muthu — later Mari Gowda — who reshapes his identity to fit in. But at the centre is Raghavendra — no Poirot or Holmes, just a man navigating loneliness and survival. Sarukkai, a fan of Lee Child and John Le Carré, pairs his protagonist's modest dream of running a grocery store with a reluctant detective arc, using it to question the very idea of crime fiction in India. 'How do you write a detective story in a country where the family is always involved — in everything? In the West, detectives function independently. Here, you can't move without your family's input — your job, your marriage, even where you live.' This social fabric becomes the case itself. Raghavendra's investigation is less about finding a culprit and more about navigating the city's tangled web — of class, language, fear, and fate — all while holding onto his quiet dream. Water Days is Sarukkai's second novel, after Following a Prayer (2023), a more emotionally intense debut set in a remote village in the Western Ghats. That book dealt with rural silences and young girls' inner lives. Water Days, by contrast, is gntler — even lighter. 'With Following a Prayer, people told me they felt deeply moved, even angry,' he says. 'But now, I just want them to smile. And maybe, next time they walk Bengaluru's streets, they notice the small things — the sounds, the silences, the people — that make a city a city.'
