‘Under Water’: Tara Menon’s fragmented debut on grief and climate change never quite comes together

When the reader meets Marissa, the protagonist of Tara Menon’s Under Water, all that could happen to her has already happened. The banality of a new, if lax, life taxes her. A home awaits her – one she surely misses. She cannot fathom returning, though. It was in Thailand that a ravenous tsunami had gulped down Arielle, her once-infallible friend.

Six-year-old Arielle, upon meeting a freshly motherless Marissa, asserts that they can share hers. From then on, they share everything. They slice open a watermelon and eat it whole. Their teeth sink into fridge-cold mangoes. They bite into piping-hot pa thong ko slathered in condensed milk. They chug stolen bottles of Bacardi Breezers. For all their shared endeavours, what these two friends don’t seem to share is conversation; their banter is often laconic, even if the narration insists otherwise. No wonder, then, that Arielle, a literal apparition in half of the novel, is a literary apparition in the other. By the time she dies her inevitable death, I know her even less. To be a spirited, beautiful friend in Under Water is to be nothing more.

Such a truncated characterisation is perhaps par for the course for a novel that comes with a thesis: “So many people imagine that...

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