I should warn you about a few things that this review will not do. It won’t tell you what this novel is about, only because it can’t. It will not say that it is “avant-garde”, “experimental”, “niche,” or “post-modern.” It can’t tell you what its plot is, either (spoiler alert: there isn’t one – or, there isn’t just one). And how could it settle with calling it a critique of communism, or revolution, or the state – or even all of them at once – after looking at the words in its title: Leaf, Water and Flow?
The author Avadhoot Dongare puts together this “collage” for us in his novel, translated into English by the translator Nadeem Khan. The narrator, though, is someone else entirely, “ajnya” – a combination of the first and last letter of the Marathi alphabet, (a) and (jnya), we are told, which happens to mean “unknowledgeable.” Then, to reduce the text’s maddening movements between voices, perspectives, and characters to known genres would be insufficient, if not incorrect. The Maoist insurgency forming the backdrop for many chapters makes this a particularly tempting enterprise; the tragedy of victims caught in the crossfire between revolutionaries and the state, characters that exemplify evangelical revolutionaries, and those that remain sceptical – these are themes in which the novel is deeply invested, that could supply easy moulds for us to categorise this novel in any of the buckets I listed earlier.
Connections between characters, moments, and ideas
Looking at some of these chapter titles alone would show us why this may be amiss: “Thus begins” followed, interestingly, by “Prologue,” “Subject,” “A story,” “Die-gram,” “Egret,” “Moh,” “Water,” and (my favourite) “Quilt.” This, then is the novel’s cast of characters and sporadically, narrators –revolutionary Bhaskar’s speech is reported, but the flying Egret comes to us in the first person. As for its subject? “Subject” begins by asking this very question, offering in response a motley of ten stories. We move from a sketch of Virang, with his rehearsed erudition, as he picks up opinions from fellow movie-watchers only to parrot them, after exiting a multiplex, to Smita, who’s trying to learn English and goes excitedly to the same mall which houses this multiplex, only to be startled and turned away by the intimidating security at the entrance. What connects these two, and the rest? Only the mall, on the hillock, in a “good-sized city” in Maharashtra.
Reading this does not make for a disorienting experience. Or perhaps it does – in ways that are useful and meaningful for us unknowing readers of the novel to reckon with. It is precisely this disorienting looseness, connections that spawn intermittently between characters, moments, and ideas through the sprawl of the text, that is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Actually, scratch that – let’s call it the ability, rather than strength of the novel; “strength” rings of winning and weightlifting, but “ability” seems more to the point. A humbler, softer assertion, which also does a much better job of emphasising the novel’s critical work. I’ve learnt to be cautious of “strength” (and to pay attention to words more generally) from the bank clerk whom we meet in the text, as he tells us that a certain Mr Glad must confront complexity in fiction-writing, with which his “non-fiction” works let him get away without doing: “This is the strength of fictional writing, of the novel…Strength – it seems to be a dangerous word to use. What if one seeks power through strength? So then what other word to use? Ability? All right then, this is the ability of the novel.”
These are one of the many “jottings” of the unnamed clerk, offered to us in all their shifting, turning, u-turning, and moving splendour. The clerk also exemplifies here, as he does constantly through the text, a practice of self-reflexivity that undergirds the novel as a whole; not only because the clerk explicitly goes back to and revises what he says, but also because our narrator asks more questions than he necessarily answers, refrains from pronouncing judgements even as he makes sharp, albeit sympathetic, evaluations of the ways that characters look at the world.
Take, for instance, how we move from Bhaskar’s laughter – “a special laugh, an open, straight laugh,” described as “a major gain out of his political ideology” – to emojis that seem to share this “complexity-free” laughter, only for this parallel to be immediately negated (“Even readymade smileys have their own complexities, so what can one say about human beings?”). We end with a pithy rumination on complexity itself: “Bhaskar’s complexities never show on his face, not enough to be noticed. One may even say that he has no complexities that he is conscious of. But one can never say what complexities lie at the unconscious level, some people say.” Bhaskar’s chapter takes up about a fifth of the text, but all that I report occurs over the span of a singular paragraph.
And speaking of reporting, let’s look at that final turn of phrase: “Some people say.” One finds versions of this phrase after some part of a character’s psyche is narrated to us, often containing a “take” on the political movements that form part of their everyday. It is of course a simple way for the narrator to distinguish his own perspective from that of the character. But I also think that, as it repeats through the text, this form of indicating a character’s narrative turns our attention to the very act of narrativising itself. The written novel is not the only narrative in front of us; in fact, Dongare painstakingly shows us that we inhabit narratives all the time, whether as simply as the “jottings” of the clerk, or the ones that only revolve inside our head, never making their way to sheets of paper. The narratives we revere, the narratives we tell ourselves, about ourselves. And the narratives that aren’t told, or can’t be told.
Which takes me to the chapter on Lattakka. She only knows Gondi, and the author, Marathi – so all we can gather are bits that she speaks in her broken Hindi, rendered to us as such in English. Her speech quiet literally breaks down, as she loses words while describing how the police hung her brother behind a jeep and drove it until he died. This is why she doesn’t want a road in the village, even though the government says the road will bring “development”: “But why we let road come in our village? Not let. Jeep will come on road. Jeep mean police.”
The translation and structure
What also precipitates the jolting poignance and scathing critique of moments like this (and there are several) is Nadeem Akhtar’s translation. His rendering of English translates the differences between the speech and lingos of different characters and narrators in the text, illustrating the variations in their access to language (or particular languages, like in Lattakka’s example) and how they wield it. The translation’s ability to retain these differences shows the openness – and yet, precision – with which syntax gets chiselled and morphs through the course of the novel, mirroring the imaginative expanse of Dongare’s prose. Far from remaining beholden to an idea of what a novel in English “should” sound like, the translation gives us an English with multiple transformations, that nonetheless never feels alien.
Among the novel’s hybrid cast of characters we also encounter the titular leaf, a dying teak leaf in a pond. While its image inaugurates the “Prologue”, by the time the “Epilogue” is reached, it has learnt our strange language from the narrator and speaking to us in its last moments. As the narrator describe its veins and crevices, its whiteness, its smallness, its impending death, to write about all death, and the many lives and deaths the novel will go on to write, it is as if we were becoming intimate with this single leaf, and through it, with all that the writing takes us to.
And this process is akin to how the novel answers the question of its “subject”: “Bringing our understandings together and stitching up a whole meaningful question, not being satisfied with looking at the stories as little bits and pieces, but balancing that single drop of water from the writer’s eye on a teak leaf and storing it in a safe place, this is the job we will do through this novel.” It is this “stitching up,” then, that the leaf instigates, and which keeps happening through the course of the novel: ideas that appear disconnected are brought together, characters that are never actually acquainted with each other, but nonetheless bear resonances for the reader. Rather than being a carrier for a plotline with demarcated events and encounters that unfold linearly, the novel is an aftermath of this stitching-up: a quilt, a structure that Leaf, Water, and Flow exemplifies and embraces.
This structure can feel confusing, even alienating. How does one make sense of a long interview offering macro-statistics of poverty, prophesying “the revolution,” only to be followed by a description of the interviewee’s fondness for gardening and the vegetables he gifts his mother? I would say that this is a genuine, rather than merely rhetorical, question, that the novel is implicitly posing. What often seems like odd juxtapositions, forays that seem stray and incomplete, become an invitation for the reader to look closely, to interpret, even as we do get explicit, if intermittent, interpretations. Read Leaf, Water, and Flow, then, not just to think about writing – and how we’re doing it all the time – but also to think about how we read.
Leaf, Water, and Flow, Avadhoot Dongare, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan, Ratna Books.
