Review: Hot Water by Bhavika Govil
Set over the course of one eventful summer, this debut novel centred on a family of three presents a single mother with a troubled past and her two children, each with their own secrets
Indian English fiction titles with child protagonists have been few and far between. So, when Bhavika Govil’s debut novel opens with eight-year-old Mira talking about a visit to the dentist with her Ma and her disdain for swimming lessons (“What if sea monsters come and tickle my feet? Worse, what if they come and pee on my toes?”), it is both refreshing and intriguing.
Centred around a family of three with Ma and Mira speaking in the first person and a third-person narrative focusing on the teenage trials of 14-year-old Ashu, the premise of Hot Water is not unusual. A single mother and two children, each of them hiding secrets and traumas; a mother’s past relationships affecting her present and future; strained sibling and parent-child bonds; the mother’s relationship with a swimming coach that takes a sour turn – none of it is revelatory. But the magic of Govil’s world-building lies in her writing, that captivates from the first page to the last. She’s particularly brilliant in the chapters narrated by Mira. The reader almost forgets the words have been written by an adult, and loses herself in the charm of the little girl’s voice.
Govil won the Pontas & JJ Bola Emerging Writers Prize for unpublished writers in 2021 on the strength of an early chapter written through Mira’s point of view. Within the first few pages of this book, it is easy to see why she won. It takes a certain level of empathy and nuance to see the world through a child’s eyes, and Govil does this with delicate flair. Mira is the shining star of the story, and readers will find themselves yearning for a standalone book featuring the naivety with which she describes her life and its happenings. Here she is describing her Ma’s bouts of depression: “Some days Ma is like a butterfly… But some days like today, Ma is a moth. She is black, she is dark… Ma’s moth days only stay for a while. No one knows when and why they come. But we know they always go.”
Hot Water is set over the course of one eventful summer of swimming lessons for the kids at a local club and its chapters that follow the swim class theme – Plunge, Surface, Float, Swim, Sink, Choke, Flail and Breathe – hint at where the plot is headed. Govil’s descriptions of the season are so good they make you feel the sweat rolling down your back. The reader learns of Ma’s past and sees Ashu grapple with teen angst, question his early life, and explore his sexuality. The sections where he navigates a friendship and pangs of love for his classmate Rahul form some of the best parts of the book: “Ashu wanted to see Rahul again, to explore what it felt like to kiss him, to do it for minutes, even hours at a stretch. To sit next to him in class, push their chairs closer together than before, so that not only would their knees touch, but the tips of their shoes, the sides of their legs too. It didn’t matter anymore, he supposed, who loved him and how much and why, when he could feel this happy.”
While Ma’s point of view is heard through journal entries, it is the children’s parts that are truly engrossing. Leela’s back story is told in quite a rushed manner and barely holds the reader’s attention. Though it is her past – which contains some rather predictable secrets – that binds everything together, she is just not interesting enough. Her chapters could have had more meat to them and delved deeper into the psyche of a woman with her own experiences of sex and love and who made some questionable decisions in her early youth.
The ending also may seem a bit ‘dry’ after getting through a book marked by a stellar first half and a cast of heart-warming characters. Still, this is an intelligently-crafted and deftly written work that’s definitely worth a read. One hopes Govil will continue to write as emotively about her characters’ inner worlds and will bring out the essence of childhood innocence as effectively in future books too.
Huzan Tata is an independent journalist. She lives in Mumbai.
