Review: Glass Bottom by Sonali Prasad
Adeptly written and almost poetic, this climate fiction that features daughters and mothers brings the earth’s environmental crisis into sharp focus
“The beauty of art presents itself to sense, to feeling, to perception, to imagination; its sphere is not that of thought, and the apprehension of its activity and its productions demand another than that of the scientific intelligence. Moreover, what we enjoy in the beauty of art is precisely the freedom of its productive and plastic energy,” wrote Hegel in The Range of Aesthetic Defined. Unbidden, the statement came to mind while reading Sonali Prasad’s debut novel Glass Bottom.

The New Delhi-based journalist’s climate-fiction about daughters and mothers that proffers vignettes akin to a Kiran Rao arthouse screenplay begins with a glimpse into the mind of Gulmohar (Gul), who works at a science centre in a cyclone prone area near the Arabian Sea. She is obsessed with her braid and her pride in her long hair is reflected in the envious gaze of others, which further encourages her to maintain the image for them. Other than her, the principal cast of characters includes Gul’s daughter, Arth, Luni, a migrant from the northeast, who works at a beauty parlour and does odd jobs to support herself and her daughter, Himmo (Himani).

The reader soon meets Arth with a “local artist”, a photographer who has put up his collection at a new gallery, centralising the politics of optics, which is pivotal to the novel.
The Arabian Sea, which is both a source of succour and havoc in the lives of the characters, governs the story in the most subliminal ways, as everyone seems to have grown up being fed with myths, facts, and stories about it.
Prasad’s narration is adept. Here’s a description of the science centre: “The dull cream exterior blended into its surroundings, and a ramp draped the structure like a sari, connecting the first floor from the front and the second floor from the back.” This is, of course, from Gul’s point of view because beauty and symmetry are important to her. Everything is performance. She is not only hyperaware of that but also moulds her actions to demand the visibility that she desires. Her origin story, too, is attuned to her myth: she was born on the day of “the shake that claimed her mother”, who gave birth to her under a tree, the Gulmohar of her name. Gul, in turn, named her daughter Arth, Sanskrit for “meaning”. The word’s homophone is “earth”. As it goes, a tree and the earth in which it is rooted must have a complicated relationship with each other, which Prasad adroitly conveys towards the end.
The writing is almost poetic, employing metaphors that perfectly suit the characters and align with their world. Sample this: “Pausing her stitching, Luni touched the place for snow. It was the simpler peace she wanted — not handed over or solving, but encrusted with the exhaled breath.” Then, there are the games that Himmo plays after school, an adventure that involves finding “flip-flops on the beach”. The one to find the most flip-flops “within an hour [gets] to keep them all”. Himmo never forgets the two things her mother has warned her about: “stay close to home and never go into the sea unattended, for that is where creatures like them dissolved.” Luni did mean “dissolve” because according to her: “We mingle and are gone, and there lies the catastrophe.” Her thoughts, and the verbs she uses, signal the duality that the sea represents here as it both lifts up the spirit and washes away the body without discrimination.
Then, a dead sea creature that turns up on the beach brings the crisis of the tumbling earth, its impending and inescapable catastrophe into sharp focus. Greedy multinational corporations are destroying nature even as they create experiential tourism packages for the privileged. It seems tenders for the purchase of unpolluted air will soon be floated.

Amidst all this, Arth, her artist friend, and a diving instructor accompany a distraught mother to search for her boy who has disappeared. But Arth notes: “There was no boy, nothing. She’d known from the start that it was a senseless idea, yet it hadn’t felt like a choice.” Nor does it seem like a choice when you have to pack everything into a few bags and evacuate your home before the arrival of a tsunami or an earthquake. What must you take along with yourself? What are the questions that can arise out of such a situation? This is what a boy asks Gul during a Geology Mondays class at the science centre: “Miss, what colour is an earthquake?”
Much reading and research inform and influence this novel. However, the quake metaphor is somewhat true for its storytelling too as the writing sways between profound observations and breaks in the action. Glass Bottom does not always work in the way Prasad intends; perhaps it is not free enough “in its productive and plastic energy”. Still, this is a novel that will intrigue readers.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
