Water. Bapsi Sidhwa
Praise for Bapsi Sidhwa
“The author’s capacity for bringing an assortment of characters vividly to life is enviable. Pakistan’s finest English-language novelist.”—New York Times Book Review
“Sidhwa is a superb storyteller.”—New Internationalist
“Bapsi Sidhwa is a writer of enormous talent, capable of endowing small domestic occurrences with cosmic drama and rendering calamitous historical events with deeply felt personal meaning.”—New York Newsday
“A powerful and dramatic novelist.”—The Times
“An affectionate and shrewd observer . . . a born storyteller.”—The New Statesman
“Sidhwa is a rarity even in swiftly changing Asia—a candid, forthright, balanced woman novelist. Her twentieth-century view of Indian life can only be compared to V.S. Naipaul’s. Sidhwa is among the most invigorating Indian writers.”—Bloomsbury Review
“Sidhwa writes dramatically of marriage, loyalty, honour and their conflict with old ways.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“There is a Kiplingesque quality to Sidhwa’s writing, the congenital ability to make one feel the ambiance of the locale.”—Houston Chronicle
“Bapsi Sidhwa writes with immense vigour and liveliness.”—Good Housekeeping
Also by the Author
An American Brat
Cracking India
The Bride
The Crow Eaters
WATER
A Novel Based on the Film by Deepa Mehta
Bapsi Sidhwa
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
© 2006, Text by Bapsi Sidhwa
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455 / www.milkweed.org
ISBN-13: 978-1-571319-16-6
First published in Canada by Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, Canada, 2006.
First published in the United States by Milkweed Editions, 2006.
Interior design by Marijke Friesen
The text of this book is set in Adobe Garamond.
06 07 08 09 10 5 4 3 2 1
First American Edition
Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from Emilie and Henry Buchwald; Bush Foundation; Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Cargill Value Investment; Timothy and Tara Clark Family Charitable Fund; Dougherty Family Foundation; Ecolab Foundation; General Mills Foundation; Greystone Foundation; Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Notre Dame; Constance B. Kunin; Marshall Field’s Gives; McKnight Foundation; a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders; an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art; Navarre Corporation; Debbie Reynolds; St. Paul Travelers Foundation; Ellen and Sheldon Sturgis; Target Foundation; Gertrude Sexton Thompson Charitable Trust (George R. A. Johnson, Trustee); James R. Thorpe Foundation; Toro Foundation; Serene and Christopher Warren; W. M. Foundation; and Xcel Energy Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Sidhwa, Bapsi
Water : a novel based on the film by Deepa Mehta / Bapsi Sidhwa.
I. Title.
PR9540.9.S53W37 2006 823’.914 C2005-906158-8
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
For Deepa Mehta
And for Mohur, Parizad and Baku,
the other beloved women in my life
Contents
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1936
Setting: A village on the Bihar–Bengal border
All at once, Chuyia tired of playing with her clay dolls. Her mouth craved something sweet. She knew exactly where she would find some ripe gooseberries. She packed up her toys and pushed the box against the wall of the neglected thatched hut that lay at the far corner of their compound. The forest that came right up to the edge of their wall had claimed the hut with swathes of china-rose and a tangle of thick-stalked creepers.
Chuyia squeezed through a hedge of castor-oil trees and skipped along a path in her bare feet. A couple of days back, she had discovered the gooseberry bushes just off the narrow path that ran through some mango and jackfruit orchards and led into the jungle. She had walked a long way into the forest with her