Name of Novel: WEAVING WATER
Publisher: Cutting Edge Press, London, England. 2013
254 pages.
Cover Design: By National Artist Bernadette Persaud.
Lord Shiva’s Trident in stormy sea.
Author: Ryhaan Shah.
In the last generation, whenever a new publication by a Guyanese writer came out, whether it was fiction, history or even mathematics, it was always widely read and seriously discussed by educated groups.Today, Guyanese writers and their writings are much more known and recognized abroad than they are in Guyana and this failing is present even in University of Guyana circles.
Last year , Ryhaan Shah published her third novel, Weaving Water, which has an unmistakably Berbice flavour and reminds one that several of the eminent Guyanese writers, such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, Ian
Carew and the Dabydeens, were Berbice-born.

Weaving Water tells the story of the last indentured immigrant ship from India, the recruitment process, the long sea-voyage, the harshness of the regimen of work, integration into the society, interaction with African neighbours, being drawn into the world of Guyanese politics of the 20th and 21st centuries, and eventually, as part of the Indian community, being forced into a new cycle of emigration. By far the most important sub-plot of the novel is the enigma of a child born at sea in a terrible storm and whose mother died in childbirth, and who was adopted by the childless couple, Ramdat and Parvati.

The novel begins with the milieu of the 19th century Indian immigration fading away into the 20th century with the last ship, the S.S. Ganges. There are still the deceit of the immigrants, the hardships of crossing two oceans in a small, slow vessel, still the regimen of semi-slavery with whipping and the logies with their horrible sanitation and lack of privacy.
Superficially, some of the abuses of the 19th century had been removed, but they were still all there in essence in 1917. The only difference was that the immigrants were immediately integrated into the already settled Indians as part of their jat or community, and this gave them a stronger morale to face the severities of their indentureship and plantation life and work.

The experience of being jahajis, or shipmates, created a bond between the immigrants which transcended all the distinctions of caste, religion, language or province which they knew in the Old Country. This jahaji
unity and being integrated into the settled Indian community created a togetherness which was strengthened by the fact that the Indian community was consistently under siege from the Planter Class which wielded economic and administrative power against them, their African neighbours whose leadership barely tolerated them, the Creole and Western Culture which had no tolerance for their culture, and religions and the threat of a Christian missionary onslaught on their Hinduism and Islam.

The novel then goes on to describe the process of building a new society.
The full understanding that money is not to be merely consumed but must also be used to generate new wealth; the cultivation and growth of the spirit of entrepreneurship and with it the taking of risks and resultant economic betterment; the building of new homes and the acquiring of other material comforts such as furniture. Family life was stressed and marriage and the bringing up of children was a norm which all observed. And religious rites and duties were maintained. In addition to celebrating marriages and festivals, the villagers entertained themselves by games of dominoes and rather club-like gatherings in their bottom-houses. This type of village was typical among the Indian immigrants and their descendants and was reminiscent of the pre-Industrial Revolution village life which George Elliot describes in her novels.

The Indian village had regular contact with the neighbouring African village and socialized in such things as dominoes tournaments. The African villagers carried a life-style which was different from their Indian
neighbours but despite differences, there were good relations and many friendships.
Into this quietude and peacefulness of village life, politics suddenly intruded.
The villagers first heard of Independence and rejoiced at its advent. The Cold War – the global conflict between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union – quickly came to be projected into Guyanese politics and one of the
main weapons of the Western side was to stimulate racism and racial conflict in Guyanese politics. Politics soon deteriorated into racial conflict between Africans and Indians. The economy of the country collapsed, Law
and Order broke down and the standard of living quickly fell to the lowest in Western Hemisphere. Violent criminals who robbed and killed and maimed roamed everywhere and Indians felt they had no protection from the Police or Army. Pushed by real fear for their lives, they fled in thousands to Suriname, the West Indian islands, Venezuela, Canada and the USA and anywhere else they could. Both Africans and Indians saw that the
politicians they supported, trusted and believed to be saviours had their own agendas and were using them as stepping stones to achieve their own ends.
But the chaos had already enveloped them all when they grasped the Reality.
Within this picture of abject despair, there was a faint glimmer of hope that Guyana would once again emerge a happier place and that the diaspora would create something of Guyana wherever they were and that contact
would be maintained with their homeland.
In all of this, there is a strong storyline enrichened by a tapestry of inter-personal relationships, suspense, drama, pathos and the enigma of Neela manifesting the feminine aspect of the Divine, qualities which make the book more than a social-historical novel.

The enigma of Neela is a thread running through the whole narrative. The author offers a puzzle challenging readers to resolve it, providing just a few clues.
No one knows who Neela’s father was and her mother, Taijnie, was a very young girl who isolated herself and never spoke with other immigrants. She was regarded by most immigrants as a pariah and a person of loose morals, despite being a child. Her offspring, when she died in childbirth, was completely different from her. The child, Neela, was very fair with red- brown hair and remarkably beautiful. Parvati and Ramdat, a childless
couple, adopted her, but the other immigrants shunned the child and thought that there was something unnatural or supernatural about her.
At the time she was about to be born, there was a terrible storm which was on the verge of sinking the ship. When she entered the world, however, the waters were stilled, the storm subsided and the ship was safe.
Growing up as part of Ramdat and Parvati’s family, though they loved the child, she never really belonged to them or the community. She was somewhat like Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Neela, from her earliest years, acted in strange contradictory ways and as she became older these characteristics became more marked. As a small girl, she was an ornament to the mandir with her beautiful singing of the bhajans and her uncanny knowledge of the Gita and other scriptures. Yet she was also known to go to the canal in the dead of night and disappear there for hours leading to the belief that she was a water-mamma, an evil mermaid, and there were many other examples of her strange, unexplainable and contradictory behavior.

It was Billa Kotiah, the very intelligent, able and balanced Madrasi, who knew the secret and the explanation of the enigma of Neela. He was a full and complete devotee of Mariemmen who was known as Kali/Durga in
north India, and generally as Devi. It was his absolute belief in Mariemmen/Kali/Durga or Devi which allowed him to perceive that Neela was Devi incarnate at the time of her birth. And he could accordingly recognize the unity and coherence in all her seemingly disparate and incongruous subsequent actions and activities. He also had the awareness that others would be puzzled by her actions and that it would have to await the unfolding of time for others to grasp how coherent, positive and right was the final resolution of each of her actions and activities.
One of the most striking examples of Neela’s puzzling actions was when she very violently and harshly broke up the marriage arrangements between herself and the son of the Maraj family. She did this when the Marajes and
the bridegroom-to-be were guests of her family. She assumed the terrible form of Kali and terrorized the Marajes and their son. This debacle caused the Marajes great embarrassment, hurt and distress and utter despair to her family. When the Marajes left, Neela returned to her normal gentle self and remarked to Parvati: “You knew Ma. You always knew. I had to save him.”
She obviously meant that if she had married the Marajes’ son, it would have been the persona of Taijnie, the badwoman who would have been the bride and would have brought even greater disaster, distress and despair to both the Marajes and Parvati and Ramdat.
When she took on the persona of Taijnie and became the night-club performer with all its degradation, horrors and suffering, Taijnie’s Being was paying her Karmic retribution, being cleansed and moving nearer to God. Billa was the only one from the village who knew of Neela-Taijnie’s degradation and suffering and on witnessing it, in a fit of disgust, “He turned away and even laughed at her.” On reflection, he realized that it was indeed Devi working out Taijnie’s karma, but when he went back to the club twice to ask her forgiveness, he understood she had gone forever, very likely having satisfied Taijnie’s retribution.
It was Billa who saw Devi dousing the flames of the burning capital city during the racial disturbances: “He saw that the goddess was once again the girl they had always known, the sweet-faced girl Neela and that her hair
flowed and curled and swirled among the waters of the sea and that her voice was gentle and soft, was the sweet rushing sound of a sea-breeze that ran high above the roar of the storm, and as he watched, he saw the wave grow even bigger, even taller, as it readied itself to storm over the wall.”
When Neela left Parvati and Ramdat’s home, she knew the sorrow it would cause them She finally ended those sorrows and suffering by visiting the home after many years when Parvati and Ramdat had paid their retribution for less than sincerely befriending Taijnie and secretly rejoicing in their hearts at her death. During her visit, “they talked and laughed easily with her as if all the years which had passed had never been … whatever it was she had said to them, it made them smile, even laugh. Krish had never seen Aunt Parvati laugh like that in all the years he had known her, had seen her face lit up like a moon . . …Uncle Ramdat and Aunt Parvati had smiled and smiled into the night, as if it was enough that she had returned, even to say goodbye again.”.
And when Sampson was in the process of leading a massive racial attack on Coverton, the Indian village, she became Sampson’s long-lost Mammie and led him to the Canal where he disappeared forever, thus saving the village from attack and bringing retribution for Billa’s murder.

But probably the most memorable action of Mariemmen/Kali/Durga, the Devi in the body of Neela, did in protecting the Indians’ religious and cultural life was her quiet and unnoticed influence on Rev Davies, the devoted and able Canadian Presbyterian missionary who had come to Coverton to convert the Muslims and Hindus to Christianity. Imperceptibly, over the years, the missionary’s belief in the Bible and its miracles faded away and “When Krish came to mention Neela, the Devi who used to walk among them, after a long silence, the Reverend said “She is the only thing I believe in.” The Christian missionary had become a devotee of the Devi!
And when Krish, whose mind and spirit were worn down by the troubles and disappointments of life and politics, had lost faith in his religion, it was Rev Davies who led him back to his Hinduism and after his conversation with the Reverend, “he let out a deep sigh and let go of his doubts and uncertainties, let go of them in the afternoon’s silence”.
Neela, as the Devi, was never attached to anyone or anything. She seemed to be different personalities at the same time – gentle and harsh, destructive and protective – but whatever she did, always eventually resulted in a positive and correct conclusion and Billa clearly perceived the unity and consistency in all her actions. He therefore saw the answer of what others saw as an enigma.

The author, without being confrontational or abrasive, quietly asserts the important role of women in Society and the fact that men and women are inter-dependent and that Society works better if patriarchal male dominance is eschewed. She neutralizes the myth of the deceitful and innately weak, wicked and evil woman-kind which largely derives from the story of Eve who was responsible for misleading Adam and bringing death and sorrows into the world. This myth, with its multifarious variations, led to the cruel oppression of women over the centuries. In the persona of the Devi, the author asserts the divinity of the female as much as of the male. This feminist strand is a refreshing undercurrent running through the novel.
With its historicity, its account of the building of a new Society, its description of Indian village life, its explication of the subtle strength of yajna deriving from the rural Hinduism of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu as distinct from philosophic Vedanta, its capture of the feeling of despairing for the safety of life which forced many Indians to leave Guyana, its quiet but strong feminist assertion, with its interesting storyline with its suspense, drama and pathos, the novel provides an enjoyable read. It is a notable addition to the corpus of Guyanese literature.
By RYHAAN SHAH
Review by Pat Dial