Book review: Water Days by Sundar Sarukkai
Sundar Sarukkai`s WATER DAYS, Tranquebar Books.
The story is set in the 1990s, just when the IT headwinds had begun to blow across Bangalore, turning the Garden City into a `compooter city,` bringing waves of people from across India looking to ride the boom, forever changing the climate, the traffic, the very vibes of a hitherto laidback town.
Writer and philosopher Sundar Sarukkai locates his motley characters in Mathikere Extension, all speaking in a medley of tongues – Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi – all living their circumscribed lives amidst the `outsiders.`
Central to the tale is the sudden death by suicide of a young girl and how the death impacts the locality in ways startling as well as unexpected. The unlikely protagonist Raghavendra, a man of a meek and mild personality, is pressured by his forceful wife Poornima to delve deep into the mystery of the death, and uncover what led the girl to kill herself.
It takes him about 13 days to do, just in time for the deceased girl`s 13th day ceremony; much happens in these 13 days, all of it culminating in a moving ceremony for the dead girl held by the women at the water taps before dawn.
The book trains a languid spotlight on the politics of language, gender, urban living, all of it stitched through with broad-based almost caricaturing humour, interwoven with a straightforward look at some dark downsides: the water scarcity, the place of women in the suburban jungle, the uneasy shift towards modernity, the nascent suspicion towards the `others.`
Srinivas Bhashyam has done the illustrations all through the book, as well as for the cover, in a way that merits a close look.
Sheila Kumar • August 6, 2025