In Tara Menon’s debut novel, Under Water, the primary narrator, Marissa, talks about reading Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an elegy to his dead friend Arthur Henry Hallam. “I felt like someone finally understood,” she says, pointing out that while our language is overwhelmed by the love and loss of lovers, “there is no place in our language for grief about friends, or love for them.”

Under Water attempts to fill this gap: its emotional core is a heartwarming portrait of a friendship between two girls — a relationship that is tragically cut short. Written in a first-person braided narrative that alternates between Thailand in 2004, around the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and New York in 2012, in the period leading up to Hurricane Sandy, the book opens with an eerie, phantasmagorical scene.

In this dream sequence, Marissa is eating fish in an upscale restaurant with three other men when all the diners begin choking on their food and spitting out human remains resembling her now-dead friend, Arielle. From there, the novel moves to New York, where Marissa lives, working as an editorial assistant at a luxury travel magazine, a job that mostly consists of her writing purple prose about places she never actually visits. 

“Conjuring florid sentences to lure London bankers and Manhattan lawyers away from their luxury home to the greater comforts of luxury hotels comes easily to me,” she remarks, clearly uninspired by her day job and perhaps even the place she lives in: for the most part, she seems lonely, bored and unhappy, often resorting to casual sex or shoplifting to cope with her feelings.

This life contrasts sharply with her early years spent in Thailand, which come across as bright, wholesome and happy, a life spent surrounded by people she loves and in proximity to the natural world. It is here that she meets Arielle, at the age of seven, forging a friendship that would last nearly a decade before her friend’s untimely death, something Marissa has clearly not gotten over. “Since Arielle left me, I feel submerged. I can’t find my way to the surface,” she admits.

Bringing alive places

Filled with pelagic metaphors, rich imagery, intertextuality and references to different forms of wildlife, most notably manta rays, Under Water is also a compelling work of eco-fiction, examining a plethora of environmental issues, ranging from poaching and natural disasters to invasive species, roadkill, unethical wildlife tourism, species extinction, coral bleaching, overfishing and climate change.

“So many people imagine that climate change, when it comes, will be spectacular… but most of the time, devastation is quiet, subtle, humdrum,” points out Marissa, whose anguish for the dying oceans, ecological churn and lost wildlife is as palpable a presence in the novel as the grief she feels for her dead friend.

While novels centring female friendships are not new, these bonds are often portrayed as complicated, fragile and fractious, a cliché that Menon thankfully sidesteps: for Marissa and Arielle, friendship is a safe place, one of nurturing and healing. What also makes the novel compelling is its pacing and immersive urgency, resulting in a remarkably easy read despite its heavy themes.

Equally compelling is how Menon writes place, bringing to life the crowded isolation of New York as well as the ripe lushness of Thailand. In the opening chapter of the novel, there is a scene where Marissa’s editor gives her some writing advice on her first day at work. “Your readers should be able to close their eyes and be there.”

Under Water takes this suggestion very seriously.

preeti.zachariah@thehindu.co.in

Under Water

Tara Menon

Simon & Schuster India

₹699