One single drop of water. It falls from the sky onto Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king. From then on, it alters its structure but not its DNA, and enters the system of the other main characters: King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, that self-taught genius who grows up by the Thames; Narin, the young gifted Yazidi girl in a settlement by the Tigris; Zaleekhah Clarke, the scientist studying the nature of water in London, living in a houseboat on the Thames. Author Elif Shafak binds these four disparate characters in a bond that is tensile, giving us what might be her best story yet, in her new novel, There are Rivers in the Sky.
We follow the time-honoured tradition here: the storyteller spins us a fascinating yarn that melds the historical with the contemporary, and the reader absorbs it in its entirety, coming out of the spell it has cast only after turning the last page.
It is ‘olden times’ and we watch Ashurbanipal in a scholarly setting, his fabled library where the jewel in the crown is the Epic of Gilgamesh; we recoil in horror when we witness his sanction to an act of extreme cruelty — burning alive his old tutor.
An epic trail
We then go the banks of the murky Thames; it is 1840 and a boy has just been born to a tosher, a riverbank scavenger. Living in extremely penurious circumstances, young Arthur Smyth makes the best use of his gift, a prodigious memory, and slowly teaches himself how to decipher cuneiform, climbing out of the gutter. Arthur eventually starts to work at the British Museum, and makes it his life’s quest to find the missing eleventh tablet from the Gilgamesh epic.
Then we make the jump to 2014 and to Zerav in Turkey, where the construction of a new dam puts the little settlement by the Tigris in danger of flooding, the villagers in danger of displacement. Narin is just nine years old but slowly going deaf, though her grandmother tells her that her gifts will intensify as she grows. The child has no idea what these gifts may be but she knows she comes from a family of women seers, including her ancestor Leila, who incidentally, Arthur Smyth falls in love with some 200 years ago, when he goes to Nineveh to excavate the missing Gilgamesh tablet inscribed on a lapis lazuli surface. We watch with a defined sense of unease as the grandmother and granddaughter set forth to Iraq, even as the Daesh/ IS is slowly tightening its cruel hold over the region and picking out Yazidis, the “devil-worshippers”, for special treatment.
Then we hurtle forwards to 2018 and watch hydrologist Zaleekhah Clarke battle a breaking marriage, depression, a feeling of drifting through life in a futile manner. She meets Nen, the owner of the houseboat on the Thames that she is currently renting. Nen is very taken with yes, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and introduces Zaleekhah to its healing powers.
And by the end of the story, it all comes together conclusively, not in a joyous manner but in a way that does promise some hope and redemption to some of the characters, if not all of them.
Author Elif Shafak | Photo Credit: Getty Images
European supremacy and the Orient
The author conveys much through the story-binding device of water: how the once green lands of Nineveh in Mesopatamia first get flooded, then turn into barren desert. How water filled with effluents, the Thames of the mid-19th century in this case, spreads cholera faster than the blink of an eye. How water is poisoned by people out to destroy a tribe. How the Yazidis, victims of genocide and sheltering on Mount Sinjar, crave a drop of water to pour down the parched throats of their children. And just outside but not too far away from the theme of water, how the British looted other countries’ treasures with impunity, the greater implications of this looting being the idea of European supremacy needing an Orient imbued with deprivation and despair.
If her style is typically florid, it holds this immensely researched story of what happens by the banks of three mighty rivers — the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Thames — cohesively together. Because Shafak wishes us to understand that “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.
There are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak
Viking
₹899
Published – October 18, 2024 09:41 am IST
