‘Water Days’ by Sundar Sarukkai: What it means to belong when everything around you is changing

The cover of Sundar Sarukkai’s latest novel, ‘Water Days’, aptly reflects the melting pot that Bengaluru has become — a city shaped by intersecting languages, cultures and identities. It sets the tone for a narrative rooted in the themes of migration, urbanisation and changing social fabric.

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Often referred to by many names — City of Gardens, Pensioner’s Paradise, IT Capital, Pub City — Bangalore (as it was still called in the novel’s setting) is, for Sarukkai, far more than the sum of its epithets. It is a city of contradictions and convergences, where meaning is forged by a different language — a telling argument in these times of linguisitic chauvinism. As he writes, “A city is not produced by a majority, it is not a measure of numbers. A city is a quality, is yet another language.” And in this language, each individual must discover their own syntax of belonging. This linguistic meditation continues from his earlier novel, ‘Following a Prayer’, where silence bore the burden of meaning. Here, the language is more porous — it’s what the city speaks in the murmur of traffic, the trickle of water, the fragrance of coffee and sampige flowers, and the babel of its migrant communities. Sarukkai admits that this novel is not a faithful translation of what the city said to him, but rather an attempt to capture the truth in the cacophony.

Set in the 1990s, just as the winds of liberalisation begin to reshape India’s urban fabric, the story follows the life of Raghavendra, a security guard-turned-amateur detective, living with his wife Poornima and their two daughters. Around them, the city changes rapidly. Real estate speculators from Andhra Pradesh descend on Bangalore; students arrive in droves from Bihar, Bengal, and beyond; and working-class youth from Kerala and Tamil Nadu seek jobs and shelter. Their neighbourhood becomes a microcosm of India itself — a medley of languages, livelihoods and dreams, with each migrant community fitting well into the spaces apportioned to them.

Amid this churning cityscape, the mysterious death of a 16-year-old girl jolts the residents out of their everyday inertia. An upset Poornima tasks her husband with investigating the incident. What follows is a meditative detective story that spans 13 days — echoing the mourning period when the soul seeks liberation — as Raghavendra collects clues and insights not just into the death, but into the death of something less tangible: the innocence of Bangalore’s past.

Sarukkai’s genius lies in the way he blends the mundane with the metaphorical. Water, for instance, is not merely a backdrop but a central motif. The novel’s title , ‘Water Days’, refers to the days when water arrives in the taps — a moment of ritual and relief, particularly for women who rise early to fill their pots at the public taps. At this gathering, as water collects in the pots, stories too flow alongside. In a city slowly running dry, it becomes a measure of both survival and sociality. And towards the end, it is water again that binds the women in a rare show of strength and sisterhood.

An ensemble of characters embodies the contradictions of Bangalore’s rapid urbanisation. There’s “Commander” Bindra from Bihar, the engineering dropout-turned-don and go-to dada for vulnerable North Indian students; Marimuthu, a migrant from Tamil Nadu, who builds a temple over an anthill and reinvents himself as Mari Gowda, a name calibrated to sound local enough to fend off land-grabbers. These characters, while bordering on the archetypal, feel entwined in the city’s reality.

By the time the novel reaches its resolution — on the final day of mourning — it offers more than just closure to a mystery. It delivers a reckoning. For Raghavendra and Poornima, as for many Bangaloreans, the violent transformations around them signal something else: of a future “contaminated with confused questions about right and wrong”.

‘Water Days’ is not just a novel about a city; it is a novel about what it means to belong when everything around you is changing. Sarukkai does not romanticise Bangalore, but he listens carefully to it, and implores you to do so as well.

— The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based contributor