Nine year-old Mira is always on the verge of getting into hot water. When she tries to stay underwater in a swimming pool for as long as possible, her mother Leela panics and fears she’s drowning. When Mira’s teenaged brother Ashu and his best friend Rahul smoke and drink in a secret hiding place, Mira sometimes lurks nearby. And when Leela dates a swimming instructor from their club, Mira learns the true intentions of “Coach” long before her mother does.
Mira is the youngest character in Bhavika Govil’s notable debut novel, Hot Water, a charming and somber story of a single mother named Leela and her two children, Mira and Ashu. Leela has been a single mother since her children first started to form memories. Mira and Ashu often ask their mother about their father, but Leela reveals little.
After the incident at the pool where Mira’s underwater antics incite a lifesaving rescue, Leela stops talking to her children. Govil writes Mira’s character with the voice of a nine year-old.
The Silent Treatment sounds scary like a painful injection given by the doctor, but it isn’t anything like that. It’s when Ma says nothing, does nothing, hears nothing. She plays pretend that we aren’t even there. One time, when I was smaller and Ma gave us the Treatment, I thought I’d turned into a small ghost like Caspar and no one could see me.
Before Leela became a single mother, she and her family lived in Delhi. But once she’s on her own with her children, she leaves the big city for an unnamed smaller town where she can start anew. It’s in this new town that other characters—Ashu’s best friend Rahul and Leela’s boyfriend Coach—come in and out of the family’s lives.
Govil’s writing is clear and descriptive.
But it was June now, when even the mosquitoes that were the eternal markers of summer quietly disappeared back into the puddles they had come from to cool themselves in the heat. The bright flowers on the trees outside Ashu and Mira’s room had gone from a pleasant orange to a violent red and were starting to turn crisp and fall off the branches.
At 234 pages it can be easily read in one sitting. Some chapters are written as flashbacks in Leela’s voice and provide the backstory of her previous relationships and the birth of her children when she was back in Delhi. Mira narrates others. And the chapters are arranged in sections that have to do with the water. Plunge, surface, float, and swim are just several of these section names.
When the story ends, Mira is still nine years-old and may never learn the reasons her mother is unmarried, but Ashu is older and more resourceful. There’s great upheaval in the family, but the strength of the family’s bond prevails more or less.
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