Hot Water, Summer Settings and Lockdown Writing: by Bhavika Govil

If you enjoyed our review of Hot Water, read on to hear from the author, Bhavika on lockdown writing, summer settings and literary inspirations.

When I sat down and began writing Hot Water, it was in the middle of the pandemic and I was front of a window facing bright orange gulmohar trees. The world was on lockdown, and I should have been miserable, but a curious, talkative character began to keep me company. It was the voice of a characters in my novel, Mira and her brother, Ashu and their Ma as they were in a car on the way to the swimming pool, passed by an orange tree.

That is where our paths began to diverge. I was at home for the indefinite future, and my characters were out in the world, breaking open the start of a summer. Mira, a nine-year-old narrator, was about to begin swimming lessons with her brother, against her wishes. Ashu, at fourteen, was a reticent boy begins to wonder if there’s more to his friendship with his best friend, Rahul as the feeling behind his knees suggests. And the unconventional Ma has people and things from her past that have begun to knock on her door.

During this transformative season, each of the character begins to keep things from each other in a house so small, you can scarcely hide a shadow.

The story of Hot Water is set squarely in the middle of a hot summer. It is a time when the bright flowers on the trees outside Ashu and Mira’s room had gone from a pleasant orange to a violent red and start to turn crisp and fall off the branches. It’s when blankets become unnecessary things that fall to the floor when Ashu stretches his limbs while sleeping. When the taps in the house gushed out water so hot that if they left their hand under a running stream, they felt their skin burn.

Summer has always been a potent backdrop in literature. Things start to get unhinged, and people’s most oppressed desires—the things they have kept from each other and even themselves begin to float upwards towards the surface. I’m reminded of the powerful scene in The Great Gatsby, when on a hot, sticky day in New York, Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, Tom, set off to the Plaza Hotel in New York, and things are unable to stay contained, and grow more and more chaotic. Other recent novels where the heat plays an important role is Oisïn Mckenna’s Evenings and Weekends which takes place in a heatwave in London, and Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell. The emotional temperature of these novels is often mirrored by the character’s internal states, one affecting the other.

Hot Water, too, is a story in which the heat propels the characters into action, bringing both long-buried and newborn secrets into the open. Summer is a time that evokes childhood, beauty and freedom, but also becomes a setting to set a family’s tensions against, asking if they can ever break out of their own trappings.