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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  A new horizon
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A new horizon

An elegant debut novel that explores survivor guilt in a contemporary context

Where Earth Meets Water: Harlequin India, 288 pages, Rs299Premium
Where Earth Meets Water: Harlequin India, 288 pages, Rs299

Earth meeting water, the point where drudge materiality meets redemptive, fluid formlessness, is something each of Pia Padukone’s characters is searching for in her elegant debut novel, Where Earth Meets Water.

From the outset, readers cannot escape the fact that Padukone’s earth is a powerful one, ravaged by natural and man-made disasters. Karom, the protagonist, has had a brush with the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004—all of which he has freakishly survived or escaped. The solid fact of his existence, in spite of these appalling events, haunts him thereafter. Through Karom’s struggles, Padukone explores a philosophical conundrum—why some must perish in such disasters, while others live on.

As it happens, Karom has been orphaned twice. He loses his biological parents in 1984 and, then again, his adopted family in the tsunami. At Harvard he is tenderly consoled by his roommate, Lloyd, who restrains his flailing limbs during his nightmares, sniffs his clammy skin, and wants much more. But it isn’t until Karom meets Gita, his spirited opposite, that he embarks upon his slow journey towards psychological freedom. Padukone’s creation of Gita is one of the triumphs of the novel: She is fiery, fiercely loving, and her unwavering dedication to Karom’s healing is beautifully portrayed.

Unlike Lloyd, who is angered and frustrated both by the shockwaves of Karom’s survivor’s guilt and his own unrequited love, Gita bravely shares Karom’s condition with him. Her flooding tears at the close of the novel, when Karom finally invites her to his closed family home in Brooklyn, symbolize the weight of the emotional burden they have carried together. This is just one example where Padukone’s novel subtly explores how platonic bonds can extend far beyond familial ties.

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Padukone’s protagonist has had a brush with three tragedies including the 9/11 attacks in the US. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Karom begins to heal after the couple make a trip to India, around which most of the novel is focused. It is here that Gita unknowingly helps Karom on to the path of acceptance by introducing him to her grandmother, Kamini—a writer of popular fantastical fables of love, suffering and survival.

Kamini’s own story is also tinged with tragedy: In her narrated chapters we learn of a young woman, bullied and eventually abandoned by her abusive husband. During his visit to Delhi, Karom is inspired by Kamini’s stoic resolve, and the semi-auto-biographical account of her struggles that she presents to Karom leads to a seismic shift in his world view. Reading her words on the flight back to New York, Karom finds great solace in her suffering and her pious forgiveness of the past.

Padukone’s treatment of Kamini is another strength of the book: Her steadfast response to an email she receives from the husband who fled her side years earlier is a deeply touching testament to her character. Like her granddaughter, she inspires and heals others with her strength and refusal to be made into a victim. Beyond Delhi, however, Gita and Karom’s trip lacks vividness. There was an opportunity for Padukone to embed her characters more deeply in an engaging and hugely liberating landscape, but their trip has transparent holes in it. Towards the end we learn that they have “traipsed the Golden Triangle, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur", though the reader hears little of this, and the trip’s ghostly presence becomes a marked contrast to the huge psychological distances that Padukone’s characters have covered.

The novel also switches between characters, locales and timeframes, sometimes abruptly, though Padukone’s language remains delightfully rich yet accessible. The twists in the plot and historical events are often revealed in obtuse ways: through photographs, diaries and emails. It would be encouraging to see a movement away from these stock plot development tropes in Padukone’s future novels.

In the final reckoning, Where Earth Meets Water reveals to us a fresh horizon. As we follow Karom’s path to acceptance, we also share with him a renewed appreciation of the present moment, moving from guilt to gratefulness for that which we already possess. This is not a horizon where the sea meets the sky, but something more tangible and proximate: where earth recedes into water.

Philippa Malicka is a freelance writer and publishing consultant currently based in New Delhi.

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Published: 05 Jul 2014, 12:03 AM IST
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