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Elif Shafak’s work abounds with references, memories and a deep love of Istanbul. She talks to AANCHAL MALHOTRA about the significance of home and those who shape our recollections of the past

- AANCHAL MALHOTRA

My paternal grandfather migrated to India from a small, fertile village called Malakwal in present-day Pakistan, which was hugged as he lovingly used to say-by two rivers, the Chenab and Jhelum. He could never return to those banks after Partition, and yet it felt like he always carried the rivers with him, his disposition nourished and stories painted with their memory. I hadn't thought about this in a long time until I began reading Elif Shafak's newest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky (Penguin Random House), which made me pause and wonder if, for all these decades, the rivers of my grandfather's childhood have been waiting for him to return. After all, nature remembers for far longer than humans.

This memory of water flows through the novel. It is a sweeping tale of one lost poem, two formidable rivers and three protagonists connected to one another across centuries through a single drop of water. Our heroes are Arthur, a child with extraordinary memory, born in the grime of the Thames in 1840; Narin, a Yazidi girl journeying with her grandmother from Turkey to Iraq along the war-torn lands of the ancient Tigris in 2014; and Zaleekhah, a broken-hearted hydrologist living in a houseboat in 2018 London.