Gurnaik Johal’s short story collection, We Move, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2022. Saraswati, his first novel, is out on 12th June.
Find Gurnaik on Instagram and Twitter (@gurnaikjohal)
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EPISODE REFERENCES
Stuart Dybek, ‘Pet Milk’ and ‘Paper Lantern’; Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive?; Richard Linklater, Slacker.
Gurnaik’s book rec: Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove.
TRANSCRIPT
[coming soon; extract below]
There was water in the dead well. It might have been a trick of the light, Satnam thought, or his eyes - his contact lenses in the suitcase Air India had lost - or maybe he was seeing things, still a little light-headed from the drive, from the hours of conditioned air in the rented hybrid, driving up to the Sutlej and back to the farm, his parents looking out at the passing view, noting how things had changed, how nothing was the same, and Satnam nodding along, the emptied urn snug between his knees, warm. But here it was, water: a reflection. He looked down at himself looking up.
He'd asked his bibi about the well the last time he was in Punjab, when he was a child. It had been dry for as long as she could remember, she'd said, his dad translating. The farms around Hakra relied on electric pumps to survive, which were lengthened every few years to reach the ever-receding groundwater - perfect, plastic roots. Still, on some evenings, Bibi would walk to the dead well at the corner of her square plot, and that summer Satnam would follow. She would light the candles sheltered in a small makeshift shrine on one side of the well, and then a cigarette, which she didn't smoke. Satnam would watch it burn out like incense, trying to guess the exact moment the lengthening ash would fall. When Bibi was done thinking, she'd flick the butt into the opening, one more piece of confetti. His parents had explained that the shrine was a samadhi: 'Tradition,’ his mum said; ‘Superstition’, his dad. It was about honouring ancestors, they agreed, remembering the dead.
Satnam leant over the edge of the well and felt something move within him, like the bubble in a spirit level. His left ear was yet to pop from the flight, his body caught between varying pressures. A bead of sweat dropped from his lip into the dark, the sun eclipsed on the surface by his shadowy face. Featureless, he could have been any number of people before him, reaching for water.