Book review: Do Not Ask The River Her Name
Far away in Jerusalem….
Sheela Tomy, in her second book, the evocatively named Do Not Ask The River Her Name, has moved from the hilly tracts of Kerala all the way over to Israel but the story keeps its roots firmly planted in the land of coconuts.
The book`s protagonist is Ruth from Kollam, who has travelled to Jerusalem to be a metapelet, nurse, to an old Israeli man, David Menahem. It is through her eyes that the reader gets a glimpse of all that is happening in that troubled land; very literally so, because Ruth has a vlog called `Nazareth` which is eagerly watched by a lot of people, Malayalis as well as non-Malayalis. Once she starts, verily following in the footsteps of Christ who once walked these very lands, Ruth goes from strength to strength, often risking the wrath of the security forces in Jerusalem, and definitely coming under their scanner.
Ruth`s tale is a familiar one, that of the expatriate who crosses the seas with more grim pragmatism than hope in their hearts, in search of a job that pays enough to take care of the folks back home; in her case, that is a husband immobilized after a road accident and two growing daughters.
Ruth has had an earlier positively horrifying stint abroad, in Riyadh and Dubai, and managed to get out of that hellhole with the greatest of difficulty and with the help of other Malayalis. Is life better in the Holy Land, `a city of explosions, made of splinters, where the hearts of the residents are also splintered into a hundred fragments,’ to use Sahal`s words? That answer –predictably — blows in the wind, in a story that has as much external as internal conflict embedded in it.
Thrumming with emotions
The other significant characters whose lives intersect with Ruth`s are Sahal, his sister Sarah and the man she grows to love, Asher. Sahal and Sarah are Palestinians, Asher is an Israeli Jew, and their complex tapestry of love, amity, strife and tension plays out in an expectedly disturbing pattern. Soon enough, the reader starts to wonder who amongst the characters will survive these maelstroms small and big, and who will fall prey to them in a land where `the symbols of establishment are transgressions into another`s rights.`
People under siege, geographical, physical, psychological, is the strong motif to the tale, the sub-section being women who undertake these odysseys, sacrificing much in the process of keeping the home fires lit and burning. The author lays out the life struggles of the displaced, expertly intertwining the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths in expressive fashion, then taps into the wellspring of humanity to show that ultimately, kindness and caring, as much as courage and determination, saves the day everywhere. Tomy wrote the book before the catastrophic events of 7 October 2023, and at times the storyline runs on prescient lines.
It`s a story thrumming with all kinds of emotions and a straight telling might have served it better than Ministhy S`s somewhat overwrought translation.
Do Not Ask the River Her Name By Sheela Tomy. Harper Perennial India. 328 pages.
Price: Rs 367
This ran in the Sunday Express Magazine of 22 September 2024.
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Sheila Kumar • September 23, 2024