In Sheela Tomy’s new novel, the foreign observer of Israel and Palestine is not the archetypal Westerner, but a middle-aged Indian woman. Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S, Do Not Ask The River Her Name weaves the past and future into a blood-filled present to tell an emotional and urgent tale. The lyrical prose connects a range of characters across continents and decades into a story that questions the religions, prophets and politicians that have amassed such bloodshed.
Most of the novel takes place in Jerusalem, yet the notion of displacement, and the place-lessness of an uprooting, is what Tomy seems most concerned with. The novel is even dedicated “to those who have no place on their birth-soil.” In the novel, “those” refers first to Ruth, originally from Kerala but compelled to move to overseas to provide for her family, then to Sahal, a Palestinian poet whose home and parents were bombed to ashes when he was just a child, and finally to Asher, an Israeli who struggles to make sense of the bloodshed that surrounds him. Abraham, and the three faiths he spawned, connect the three: Catholic Ruth, Muslim Sahal and Jewish Asher.
After Ruth’s husband suffers an injury that leaves him bedridden, she joins the long list of Indian female emigres who travel across Asia in search of employment.
Many women fought hard for success, crossing double the number of hurdles that men faced. Most women have existences similar to camels. They travel long distances in search of a small oasis.
But a series of catastrophes—and attempts at human trafficking—leave Ruth stranded in Dubai, without a dirham to her name and no contacts in the city. Through sheer luck, and the help of fellow Malaylis, she manages to secure a job in Jerusalem as a metapelet—the Hebrew term for a nurse and caregiver—to the Menahem family.
The Menahem patriarch is David, a retired professor from the Hebrew University and has strong left-wing views on Palestine, believing that the state of Israel was formed at the expense of others. His wife is Esther, whose family was killed by Hamas attacks, fueling in her a lifelong hatred for Palestinians. Ruth settles into the Menahem family with ease, sidestepping their opposing political views with well-timed excursions into the city to capture footage for her YouTube vlog that details the sights and paths featured in the Bible. She is often accompanied by Asher, the Menahem son, and his friend, Sahal. As they walk through Jerusalem, the lines between the past and present begin to blur: At one moment, Ruth is remembering a passage from the Bible, and in the next, she is watching the same scene unfold before her eyes. The violence—of historical events, the present, and the prophetic visions detailed in scriptures—repeats itself in the present. “It was the same path, where in the ancient times, a Nazarene had walked with his own cross.”
The blurring lines make for a fever-dream, where one is unsure if an event is actually occurring or not, and whether this distinction even matters. At one point, Asher “remembered a prophetic warning that the city wall would catch fire and all the eight doors would be devoured by flames.” Is this a vision of what’s to come? Or is it a reminder of something that already happened? Worse still, is it what one witnesses in the present? These questions are purposefully unanswered. Just as one begins to forget Asher’s line of thought, “the skirmish between the police, the Palestinian protesters and the ultra-right-wing Jews, eventually set the city on fire.”
The sense of urgency and hopelessness is palpable; an old man who offered tea the previous day lies shot dead in the street by morning, news outlets refuse to report the violence one sees, and every time one leaves home, there is a chance it might not be standing when one returns, if one ever does. Sahal’s posthumous memoir is interspersed through the story, detailing the destruction left by the Israeli army. “The streets we loved, the beloved square with the fruit shop, bakery, bicycle shop—everything had vanished from sight.” It’s a claustrophobic sensory overload as the smell of burning buildings and olive oil mix into each other. Sahal recalls wading through human remains looking for signs of life, sidestepping “one limb here, a crushed head there.” Between these scenes of terror is a reiteration of the belief that those who have never experienced war have one job: to listen to the horror of the witnesses.
It’s a complex web of interconnectedness—between people and the land—that Tomy masterfully weaves. Shakespeare’s profound question, “What’s in a name?” threads through the narrative. A name can at once inspire centuries of war, such as a sign on which “printed in English, Hebrew and Arabic was the word ‘Gaza’… A word as heavy as the earth”, and yet remains fluid, “Do not ask the river her name/ Never ask the water-creatures/ The land from where they hail.” It’s a cruel twist of reality that October 7th asked harder questions about the names of Israel and Palestine, but it’s cathartic to see the situation explored through the relatively unusual lens of Ruth, a woman with no skin in the game and the simple desire to provide for her family. The knowledge of the present-day disasters in Palestine makes the novel ache more deeply, and it makes the names and stories of Ruth, Asher, and Sahal essential.