Book review: Under Water by Tara Menon

Remembrance of loss

 Tara Menon`s debut work is a neat example of tightly controlled story-telling, where as much simmers below the surface as it does, if you will excuse the pun,  above sea level. We watch the protagonist Marissa wandering aimlessly through the streets of downtown NYC on a day of impending disaster, when a typhoon is expected to hit the east coast of the US, seemingly willing herself to walk straight into the disaster. And as we read on, we realise just why she is doing so.

Taking up the skeins of loss, friendship, the painful memories of a halcyon life lived on a Thai island, of surviving the 2004 tsunami, the story tracks Marissa, a  walking ghost  with a frightening host of suppressed emotions just under the surface of her skin.

Wherever she goes,  Marissa carries with her the presence of Arielle the friend she lost to the tsunami. The  rootless  Marissa, clearly living with survivor`s guilt  is now the ebullient personality, the one who nicks small items from stores she enters just for the heck of it, the one who randomly and recklessly sleeps with men she picks, the one who is roiling with emotions she just won`t give voice to.

A tsuname and a hurricane

One would imagine there`s just that  much that can be told of the dreadful seismic sea wave which wreaked devastation in 2004, and took an estimated 230,000  lives. Yet, in juxtaposing 2012`s Hurricane Sandy alongside the vivid memories  of another time, another place, another devastation, the author brings up all the helplessness of humans when faced with an act of elemental fury.

Which is also Menon`s  cue to bring in a strong strain of eco-conservation. In showing and telling us of the beauty of the isle where Arielle and Marissa swam with the hawksbill turtles, went underwater to befriend (and name) manta rays, watched with dismay a bleaching of the coral reef,  a light is shone yet again on how important it is to protect and conserve nature, as also to observe and take cues from animals; the way the author details how the dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, elephants all sensed the incoming catastrophe, whether in New York or the island back in Thailand, is stark and effective in its telling.

While Marissa employs the early lessons she learned well,  that breathing is the most important part of swimming, back on that Thai island on the day of the catastrophe, the reader is left wondering why Arielle, an equally good swimmer,  decided to let the waves take her. We learn that the literal meaning of apocalypse isn’t disaster but revelation. We learn the storm might be spectacular but most the time, devastation is quiet, subtle, humdrum.

She sets the scene like this: The water is turquoise. The sky is aquamarine. The sand is a soft ivory. And in Menon`s  hands, the coming disaster, tsunami or typhoon, unfurls like a deadly datura flower, slowly,  inexorably.

The book`s triumph is that the denouement is clearly in sight all through yet the reader`s attention, absorption, engagement with the story never flags.

Under Water is an ode to relationships, a lyrical dirge to about deep losses, a quietly effective plea for eco-conservation.

Under Water by Tara Menon. Summit Books /Simon &Schuster UK. 218 pages. Rs 699.