Hot Water
It had always been Mira, Ma and Ashu, with Ashu’s name trailing behind just like he did in real life. The family of three sings Simon and Garfunkel songs together as they drive around in Ma’s sun-yellow car. They watch TV with each other on the sofa. They holiday on a mango farm once a year. And, on monsoon days, within their damp, one-bedroom flat in a small city outside of Delhi, they are coiled together, protective of one another, glued to each other’s side.
But despite this togetherness, the family is in troubled waters. Each of them is wrapped in their own ecosystem of loneliness. The siblings have many questions that they just can’t answer—like where their father is or why Ma seems to love them unequally, Mira more than Ashu, on most days.
As one long, hot summer unfolds, secrets bloom and swell in the sultry heat as Mira and Ashu begin swimming lessons. Imaginative eight-year-old Mira, who Ma says was born with a question mark etched on her face, wants a secret of her own until the coach at the local swimming pool fulfils her wish in the worst possible way. Ashu, at fourteen, has fallen in love with his best friend, Rahul, and is experiencing the joys of boyhood, though society—and his friend’s parents—seem determined to keep them apart. But as the summer ripens softly like an old peach, it turns out that the biggest secret of them all was right beside them all along, carefully wrapped up in memory and hidden in the pages of Ma’s old journal.
Hot Water is a coming-of-age story of three characters, and the different ways in which they grow up, and eventually, apart. It is about our first experiences with intimacies and how they make and wreck us. This is a story of love in all its quiet, exhilarating forms—from the poetry of sibling relationships to the beauty and torment of awakening desire. Lastly, it is a story of how a family lives around each other’s secrets, and the ways in which grief—and even love itself—can ultimately suffocate us.
Request more informationOriginal Language
ENGLISH (Indian Subcontinent) | Fourth Estate/HarperCollins India
Translation Rights
FRENCH | Editions de La Martinière
Prizes
Winner of the 2021 Pontas & JJ Bola Emerging Writers Prize
Reviews
"Bhavika Govil uses imagination, insight and humour to craft a tender but unsettling family tale. A charming and confident debut that I enjoyed tremendously." Amrita Mahale, author of Milk Teeth
"Moving and gentle in the way it’s told, the voices in Hot Water orbit one another precariously, revealing a tender mess, and creating an intimate portrait of family life that’s both heartbreaking and heartening." Aravind Jayan, the author of Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors
"Hot Water is a complex family story, masterfully told. Striking the chords of the heart, Govil is a writer far beyond her years daring to broach the most sensitive and taboo subjects, with delicacy and depth, bringing light to the darkest corners of our humanness." JJ Bola, author of The Selfless Act of Breathing