Author Bhavika Govil on exploring complex themes with a child protagonist in ‘Hot Water'

The Hindu

23-05-2025

In her debut novel Hot Water (published by HarperCollins) — a portion of which won the 2021 Pontas & JJ Bola Emerging Writers Prize — author Bhavika Govil tells the story of a single mother and her two young children. By channelling the unrelenting gravity of a story rooted in emotional truth, her aim, says Govil, is to highlight the lived experiences of different characters. Edited excerpts from an interview:
Q: How did you go about writing a novel that is both heavily themed, and has much innocence and humour?
A: I'm so glad you found parts of the book funny. I do think it's a funny book. A lot of the time the darkness can overpower the reading experience but there's so much going on, so many lived experiences. From the time I started writing it, it was never meant to be a happy book about the summer. It was a story of a family, and even before I knew the shape of the story, I knew very clearly that I was trying to write some sort of emotional truth. I was intrigued as a writer to tell this story because I wanted to unpeel the layers behind the undercurrents and the complexities in the story and the characters.
Q: Were there parts that were difficult to write?
A: The only part which was uncomfortable was one scene because it's a strange position to be in as an author who at once knows what's going to happen, but doesn't know how it's going to happen; who is at once the adult writing the book, and at the same time, the child. You are stuck between two places of consciousness and imagination, and the adult part of you wants to protect the characters you are writing.
Q: Were you hoping to add more to the conversation with gender roles, being queer, and the inner world of children?
A: I definitely wanted to add to the conversation. I was thinking a lot about gender roles and the norms that we are expected to fit in. For instance, the character of Ma wanting to be a person who breaks the pattern of the family she is born into. Can you be a good mother even if you're not a conventional mother, or how lonely mothers feel, especially single mothers — I wanted to analyse it all.
Masculinity and the ways in which we expect boys to behave is deep-rooted even now. You present a toy car to a boy, expecting them to be more boisterous, and repress their emotions, not teaching them the tools or language to express themselves, or be vulnerable. Those things are frowned upon. I wanted to question it.
Q: It makes you realise that when children haven't yet been socially conditioned, they never look at things and go, 'Oh, that's not normal'.
A: Yes. In the novel, Mira, the youngest, is the most open-minded of them all. I have always loved books with child narrators. When I was telling this story, the adult perspective that was going to look back at a childhood dissolved and it became the voice of Mira, who was clear, strong, curious, and imaginative. The emotions she feels are so true. Most of the layers we put on as adults, she doesn't quite understand it. She normalises the normal. I was thinking about this — she looks at everything with the perspective and fascination of a Martian (laughs).
Q: Speaking about your work in general and Hot Water releasing, is there anything else you'd like to share?
A: One, I think we underestimate the smaller voices in the room, whether they're younger or different. It's been important to me with this book to bring them to the fore. Two, I'm excited about this reaching the right reader, the person who's swimming in the dark and is looking for a little bit of light.
The interviewer is a poet and consulting editor exploring stories on books, culture and art.