When an exercise in style overwhelms plot

Despite its stylistic brilliance, Gurnaik Johal's debut novel doesn't have the heft to grapple with the complexity of contemporary India

- Aditya Mani Jha

British-Asian writer Gurnaik Johal's ambitious debut novel Saraswati begins with Satnam (a Punjabi Londoner), one of the novel's main characters, staring at a well he has just inherited from his dead grandmother at their ancestral Punjab village. Miraculously, the long-dried well has suddenly spouted water, a development that the jetlagged Satnam momentarily perceives as "a trick of the light," before acknowledging that he really was staring back at his own face. "But here it was, water: a reflection. He looked down at himself looking up."

By the time you finish the novel, you realize that, among other things, this opening salvo is a nifty bit of foreshadowing. For Satnam's little family well soon becomes the conduit for a Hindu nationalist plot to resurrect the mythical river Saraswati. This water, conjured out of nothingness, functions as the novel's vanity mirror, used by Johal to reflect the motives and machinations of every single major character on display here.

And there is no shortage of major characters, as Satnam discovers the existence of far-flung relatives across the globe, products of a 19th-century inter-caste marriage between their ancestors, Sejal and Jugaad (whose story is fleshed out in short flashbacks separating the novel's longer "real time" chapters, not unlike the "Inset" flashback chapters in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games).

There's Nathu, the asexual Kenyan archaeology professor, Harsimran the Bollywood stunt double, Mussafir, connected to a guerrilla eco-terrorist group upset at the fact that existing rivers are being diverted to the newly anointed "holy river" Saraswati. We also meet Katrina and Jay, a couple who meet on the island of Diego Garcia after a surprise donkey invasion of the runway their plane was supposed to land on.