Sundar Sarukkai 's Water Days Explores Bangalore's Existential Crisis With A Philosopher's Insight

Sundar Sarukkai’s second novel, Water Days, is set in a frenetically transforming Bangalore—in the wake of the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. With a philosopher’s insight and an anthropologist’s curiosity, Sarukkai observes the goings-on in his city. Change is in the air, not just in Bangalore but all across India. Stories lurk everywhere. But what language does the metamorphosising city speak, the novelist wonders. Not Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Konkani, Telugu. Not English or Hindi. “The city has its own language. It is not the language that the majority of the people in a city speak. A city is not produced by a majority, it is not a measure of numbers,” Sarukkai says at the start of his novel. This preoccupation with language and words and the intricacies of communication pulsed through his first novel Following a Prayer as well.

The city speaks to the writer in its own language. This is how the story of its existential crisis reaches him. This language is sensory. It lives in the clamour of the rain bombarding city streets, the hazy whispers wafting under street lamps, the howls of stray dogs, the clatter of vegetable carts. This story drips from the taps that women in some parts of the city line up in front of at dawn to fetch water for their families. “Parched alphabets drip slowly.” Water in the growing city is a scarce resource, and access to it, unequal. Water is a recurring motif in the novel, sometimes appearing as rain, sometimes as a metaphor for the deprivation that is heaped on less privileged residents of a city that is run by a callous administrative machinery.

At the centre of Water Days is a family of four. There’s Raghavendra, a former security guard-turned detective who plans on opening a grocery store; his wife Poornima and their two school-going daughters. They’ve rented out rooms in their house in Mathikare Extension to two young men: Rajesh from Bihar and Bhaskar from Madurai. Rajesh has failed his engineering exams many times. Bhaskar has completed his engineering course and works in a computer firm. Mathikare Extension is full of migrants like Rajesh and Bhaskar. Students from all over India pour into this neighbourhood because it is cheaper to live in this locality. A number of small businesses have mushroomed here to cater to their needs. Local girls, acutely aware of their presence, “hide their glances behind half-shuttered windows.”

The winds of change tug at Raghavendra and Poornima’s sails, too. Everyone around them seems to be making plans to ride the wave sweeping across the ‘garden city’, once the favourite destination of pensioners and laid-back holidayers. Poornima has no illusions about a just world. She is aware that Bangalore will soon become unaffordable to her and her husband (a family of poor Brahmins), who struggle not to be dwarfed by their “neighbours, the police and the politicians”. She sees Bangalore’s gardens turning into garbage dumps and “its casual life being replaced by impatient, angry, exhaust-spewing vehicles in their hundreds.” Equality is a pipe dream in a city on the cusp of change. There is no justice to be found in this country, she says, convinced that when it comes to the crunch, people like her must fend for themselves, without hesitating to take the law into their own hands if need be.

Sarukkai manages to capture the feverish energy in the air, crackling with uncertainty, ambition and desperate dreams of upward mobility. He paints a convincing picture of  Raghavendra’s bewilderment in the face of change. The inner workings of the characters are presented with a dash of humour, sans authorial judgement. Sarukkai has a good ear for the chatter on the street, whose cadences liven up the pages of the novel. The conversational exchanges between the women in Mathikare Extension, who wake up at sunrise day after day and gather at the shrine of drying taps, provide an insider’s view of the lives of the less privileged in a city hurtling towards progress.

The secondary characters who are an integral part of the story are well fleshed out. Nagaraj, a local ruffian who hassles Raghavendra since he is pally with the cops; Shankar the quiet tailor who isn’t who he seems; the headmaster who swears by the powers of Vedic mathematics—are all caught up in the mechanics of the city’s dizzying expansion and dragged into the debate about who the city really belongs to and who is an ‘insider’. There is simmering resentment against those who arrive at the city gates in search of better opportunities, a better life. But Raghavendra himself is a migrant. His father, a priest whose finances were drying up, had left behind their family home in Udupi and moved them all to Bangalore years ago. Sarukkai nails the irony with a gentle touch, prompting readers to rethink their notions of identity and belongingness.

The untimely death of Archana, a teenage girl in the locality, sparks whispers and a slew of rumours. The dividing line between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ suddenly comes into sharp focus. The narrative takes on the hues of a whodunnit at this point. Poornima urges Raghavendra to put his detective skills to good use to bring the dead girl’s mother some measure of closure. Patriarchy is one of the culprits, that much is obvious, going by the reactions of Prasanna, the dead girl’s father, who migrated to the city from Kerala with his daughters and his wife.

Archana’s death and the 13 days following it (souls of the dead are believed to be liberated on the 13th day) throw up complicated questions in Poornima and Raghavendra’s lives. Things can no longer remain the same because “justice had intruded into their dreams.” Their private world is not immune to the violent changes in the city, “changes that would irrevocably erase the age of innocence in the life of Bangalore.”

Vineetha Mokkil is associate editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories

This story appeared as Coding Of A City in Out of Syllabus, Outlook’s November 1 issue, which explored how the spirit of questioning, debate, and dissent—the lifeblood of true education—is being stifled in universities across the country, where conformity is prized over curiosity, protests are curtailed, and critical thinking is replaced by rote learning, raising urgent questions about the future of student agency, intellectual freedom, and democratic engagement.