Harsimran Kaur On Sep 13, 2024, In Book review, There are Rivers in the Sky– Fiction
The fertile land ingratiates the water to reap a good plough.
The clouds, mesmerized by their own intonating shifts, take pride to let water drop in the naked hue of reflection.
The water breathes in me; it comes out breaking the lesions of skin in precipity to be the forbidden stream of intemperate tears.
How am I to judge; is it a warrior or a savior? Does water live in hubris or is stiffened by melancholy? Just look at it—it seamlessly flows in rivers and hangs through the pulsating drops from the clouds; amorphous, scribing adduce of a journey ad infinitum.
Water thus carrying atavistic moods becomes ‘holy’ and in times is bridled by ‘spells’.
What does the water carry in bonhomie and during battlements? Look it slip incoherently in the river stream; its rancor is permissible raddled by human peregrinations. It carries the reputation of being raffish, from it emanates the stern stench. Does the flow of water play an ostinato or knows how to strike back? Often rhyming to the apoplectic storm, it shivers Obstrepously. Auld lang syne, it has carried the de trop, the senile minds making it a bed of carcasses and putrid misgivings; what comes thereafter is diseases and dystopic angst.
The water in the river also carries stories; stories of impressionistic impulsions and crafted pursuance often forming network to the ridged conceit and empiricism. Sometimes, the confluence of two rivers is enough to create an ancestry, from which arise concatenations that surpass the ordinary. The river ‘Tigris’ and the river ‘Thames’ flowing incessantly carry memories of undeniable passions and violable consanguinity; ‘water’ hold three of them and their stories—Arthur, Narin and Zaleekhah.
WATER CARRYING THEIR STORIES
Arthur has an incredible memory surfing the past appendages with exactitude. It’s a mystic apparition to some, and many askance at it in astigmatism. He is born during the 19th century in Central London at the waterfront of ‘River Thames’; poverty to besiege his innocence, held by a disoriented mother, he has the river to embrace him in the soliloquy of rip-roar truncated by a gelid calmness. He is the Arthur of ‘Sewers and Slums’ anointed by a pearl of snowflake crystalized by a water droplet.
He starts to work at the printing press where he gets hold of a book, ‘Nevah and its Remains’. A serendipitous arrival at the British Museum opens up an arcane of ‘tablets’ of the ‘Mesopotamian era’, and finally he is mirrored to his only purpose of life; to disinter the atavistic history of language. Thus starts his percipient journey to travel to the land flowing in the hem of ‘River Tigris’ to find the missing tablets of the poem, ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’.
TURKEY 2014—Narin, a Yazidi girl, living by the ‘River Tigris’ belongs to the ancestry of soothsayers; extraordinary and sonorous in their magnetism towards life. Partially deaf, her reclusive life finds happiness in the stories told by her Grandmother; spiritually transcending and further flow from contrapuntal to contretemps. The family leaves for Iraq to have Narin baptized by the Holy Lalish but all hell breaks loose when the ISIS radicals foment fallacious torments on the culpable Yazidis.
LONDON 2018—Zaleekhah takes a sanctuary in a boat house around ‘River Thames’—water a palliative for the inglorious wounds borne out of broken marriage. Perhaps, these are past contortions that still grasp the mind—a coup de grace! It was to lose oneself to ‘River Thames’ as it was to lose her parents to ‘River Tigris’. A hydrologist, she interprets water in a hedgerow of crenellations sought by humans to disintegrate its essence, and moreover she questions,
‘Aren’t we putting water in a masochistic over-flowing infra dig?
However, Arthur, Narin and Zaleekhah have one thing in common; what seeps through them is the rill of restless water, fighting the rumpus of immorality, and to flow in the arabesque of impressionistic beliefs and impassioned celebration of the ‘self’. Water in its imprudence and contemporaneous serenity becomes the restless river to flow in them.
Elif Shafak has yet again flung another magical story into the literary pond where the metaphor of ‘water’ describes the abundance of flow of life, though often struck by cannonades of ill-disposed tyranny impinged to correct the wrongs.
Arthur thus travels to Mesopotamia to disinter historical aneurysms; airy-fairy to many but the ablazed passion to retrieve the lost poem sticks like a thickness in the throat that he cannot swallow. The purpose is to let the secrets out!
Narin must step on the briquette and burn with it to be acquainted with her ‘power’ like a forceful wind carrying the apocalyptic mysteries.
Zaleekhah knows her boundaries but the time has come to move from dystopian self-exculpating tide to flow in existential dejure; to save Narin that comes as a deus ex machina.
‘There are Rivers in the Sky’ is an esoteric philosophy made to understand with ‘water’ as the metaphor. Think about,
What do we leave behind when we die? Our physicality holds no purpose; what finds resonance are the words that formed stories that still flow like a carnivalesque in the living. The Rivers have carried these tales, the emotions in them and have accepted mortality as an indelible genius. They have cried with us, and have turned into imprecations to destroy our perpetuity to live beyond the impenetrable.
The book talks about the structural power of ‘lamassus’ and the blue stone ‘Lapis Lazuli’ passed on ages as articrafts to remind generations of its formidable consanguinity. What withers in the human body, its mortality buried under the certitude of evanescence; what is left are the eponymous human stories beyond the grave, carried through over-flowing stream of receptiveness and endurance.
TAKE AWAY
Enthralling and submerging…