Sonali Prasad’s Glass Bottom is as bold as it is soft, filled with a quiet intensity that draws you in and demands slowness and patience if you are to truly understand it. Reading it reminded me of Hélène Cixous’s hard-to-pin-down notion of écriture féminine, feminine writing – a term I had so far come across only during my BA in literature but now seemed to understand. The writing is dense, it calls on you to linger and return again – prose poetry at its finest. It is not a book to be devoured but one that I found myself holding on to, awed and confused in equal measure.
The land and the sea
The book gives us a glimpse into the lives of two mother-daughter pairs living near the Arabian Sea. We meet Gul, the ageing but still attractive geology professor who is grappling with losing her once-luscious hair and her daughter, Arth, who struggles with an anxiety that Gul cannot understand. Alongside this fairly affluent duo, we are introduced to Luni, who fled from an abusive husband and now works at a barbershop to provide for little Himmo. We see her daughter growing up independently, knowing how to take care of and fight for herself even at the young age of nine. The duos never meet and yet they are bound by the very fact of their existence on the same land – a separation of lives enacted by caste and class but united by Prasad’s attention to their everyday.
The author is extremely mindful of the spaces she writes about. Her characters are keenly aware of the natural world outside that they sense and feel in different ways. The sea, the wind, the storms, the rocks become realities that seep into their everyday lives and emotions. They are deeply affected by the physical worlds they find themselves in, even as they are products of their social realities. Gul feels within her the movements of the Earth as she grapples with the realities of ageing and menopause. Arth’s storminess, her fears, and trauma are reflected in the sea by which she lives. Luni flees to the sea from elsewhere but hears her own laments in the seaside heat. Even Himmo’s childhood dramas and arguments are closely tied to the moodiness of the water. Prasad’s writing suggests that her characters are ultimately products of the natural world, that their emotions are tied to the land and sea by which they live.
The body and the mind
The story itself is simple, almost devoid of a plot. Indeed, very little happens in the book and yet you cannot stop reading it because the writing is simply stunning. This is a book that will make you fall in love with language, that will remind you of how words can be used to hold moments that are otherwise too heavy. As Arth recalls the painful passing of her grandfather, the book asks, What sound does memory make? / Like water rushing down a burn scar. The words are raw, they are alive and awake to every sensation. They ask you to feel the stench of rotting blubber in Gul’s throat and the way the heat licks at Luni’s ulcers as she wears her wedding dress. They demand to be read by not just the mind, but the body itself.
Prasad builds a world that the reader must learn to inhabit. There is something very brave about such writing – it is quietly confident in its ability to get the reader to return, it is resolved to not go back to the old, easily understood formulae but stick with its experiments and novelties. The book is a collage of different kinds of writings – a little play, some poetry, simple storytelling, and dense prose poetry are strung together to build the final piece. I was never bored as I read, because the book was always thought-provoking and unexpected in the most wonderful ways. Such a collage of forms and stories does not materialise from nothing – Prasad is very mindful of the traditions and cultures she references and follows from. Glass Bottom carries resonances and inspirations that Prasad has carefully documented in her endnotes. It is storytelling that is cognisant of all that has come before it
I already know that I will go back to the book and read it again – that there are passages that have stayed on with me for reasons I don’t myself know yet. Prasad has attempted a new and brave kind of storytelling that asks the reader to pay as much attention to the story as the storyteller herself. And when you do, you will find yourself in awe of the writing, the characters, and the worlds they come from.
Glass Bottom, Sonali Prasad, Pan MacMillan India.
