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Magazine
Fiction
A return to innocence
PRIYA KRISHNAN
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With hope at its core, Gardens of Water is an intensely absorbing novel that allows a man his humanity in a ruthless modern world.
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Gardens of Water, Alan Drew, Bloomsbury, p.338, Rs. 495.
With a storyline and a pace that’s taut, this novel offers not just a gripping read but a finessed understanding of the suspicions that underline the East-West face-off.
In a small town outside Istanbul, Sinan Basioglu, a devout Muslim and his wife, Nilufer, are preparing for their nine-year-old son Ismail’s coming-of-age ceremony. Irem, their daughter, a feisty 15-year-old, resents the attention he gets from their parents. No rites of passage in her life except to wrap her hair under her scarf and stay away from boys. But Irem has a secret friendship with Dylan, the 17-year-old son of their American neighbours, Marcus and Sarah, who are teachers. When a devastating earthquake strikes in the middle of the night, the Kurdish Basioglu family and the American one are caught in the fissures, literally and metaphorically.
Exploring faultlines
In a searing portrayal of deprivation and isolation, Sinan grapples not only with the fallout of the earthquake, but also the problems of being a Kurd, a refugee in his own country, grudgingly forced to depend on his American neighbours. The author, who lived through an earthquake just four days after his arrival in Turkey, offers a convincing account, and raises disquieting questions. What happens when you lose everything? What do you hold onto, what do you let go of? How long can you be resilient? Or, does one make compromises, often, the easy way out. But this book is not about easy decisions. The “aftershocks” and spiralling events push the characters towards difficult, even dangerous choices.
Sinan is etched with empathy despite his failings, unlike Marcus, who is seen as duplicitous. These men have things in common. They suffer loss. Their relationship, defined by the goal of self-preservation, is fraught with misgivings and traverses a tangled course of trust and betrayal. Caught in it are the destinies of Sinan’s children.
Irem’s big hope is Dylan, her window to a new life away from a stifling home. Sinan is sensitive to this threat. He is doggedly determined to shield his children from the pernicious winds of Western culture by moving back to the “safety” of his old village, his “gardens of water”, a phrase, actually a lie, “a hopeful one” that Sinan uses to describe heaven to Ismail. “There are gardens of water with rivers and lakes and tall waterfalls that sparkle like a million cascading diamonds…” It is a metaphor for a yearning, a kind of promised land.
Sinan’s handling of Irem’s “love” and Marcus’ need to “save” Ismail, unravel the tension between holding onto tradition and the urge for freedom. And both men negate their emotional responses for deeply held beliefs, which rob them of tolerance. Sinan’s response as a father is indefensible and Marcus, who insidiously uses salvation as a bait to convert even little children, presents the ugly face of religion that preys upon vulnerability.
Lyrical prose
The only relief from unrelenting gravitas comes from lyrical descriptions of landscapes, especially Irem’s first glimpse of seductive Istanbul, and Drew’s simple, lucid style that makes the weight of the plot bearable. But for those of us fed on a diet of literature and cinema soaked in tragedy, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, the book spans familiar territory. But by staying clear of melodrama, it keeps its compelling honesty.
Drew, much like Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, Khaled Hosseini and other liberal, humanist voices, makes an anguished appeal for the marginalised. He also amplifies the threat to cultures from a new sort of imperialism in the form of globalisation. The book is a powerful exploration of how it manifests itself overtly and surreptitiously through the unholy nexus between religion, politics and economics, to strip a man of the things that are most precious — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!
The protagonist’s rejection of the modern world might be justified; however, his return to innocence seems like a mirage or a temporary escape. But the one image that allows you to accept the end is the image Drew leaves you with — that of the donkey cart, which “for a brief moment, just a few wonderful seconds,… sped along faster than the train.” It lingers not because it’s what you saw last but because it captures happiness, innocence and relief that, amidst all that went horribly wrong, everything is now right with the world.
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