Newspapers give you statistics: 40,972 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel and killed 1,205 people, said a recent report. Do Not Ask The River Her Name, gives you names and faces, instead of statistics. Written by Sheela Tomy, this deeply moving story about the daily suffering of individuals and their families, caught in a geo-political, never-ending conflict, is prescient. Though written in 2021, in Malayalam, when the trigger for a clash between Israel and its neighbours was different from that of the ongoing one, the book’s English translation, excellently executed by Ministhy S, and published in 2024, seems like a chronicle of current times.
Sahal, a Palestinian, and one of the key characters in Tomy’s book, was only eight years old when he rushed home from a bombed-out school, with his kid brother, Gazan, and sister Sarah, to see the horrifyingly numbing sight of his parents’ bodies charred to death. Years later, he would journal, “On that blazing afternoon, as I stood hugging Sarah and Gazan close to my heart, I was no longer an eight-year-old. I had stepped into the age of eighty. Even after the passage of years, when I remember that day, the odour of burnt flesh suffocates me.”
If Sahal lost his childhood on that fateful day, David Menahem, a Jew old enough to be Sahal’s father, never forgot the twilight evening in Baghdad when, as a six-year-old, he witnessed his uncle being brutally tortured. Those were the days when many cities were up in arms against Jews. On that harrowing night, the Menahems fled to a neighbouring village in a cattle truck. For a long time thereafter, within David’s heart, a little boy would sit trembling in a dung-stinking truck, expecting a murderous mob to attack any moment.
“We will scorch Tel Aviv!” said the pronouncement over Iraqi Radio. The Second World War was raging when the Menahem family joined the exodus to Israel, fleeing for their lives. Only to face utter bleakness there. The Ashkenazi European Jews treated Jews from Arab countries as epidemic-spreading vermin. David saw his father wither away, like a transplanted tree failing to take root. “Which is my land?” he wondered.
However, slowly but surely, David overcame the agonies, learnt to speak Hebrew, studied Arabic literature at Haifa University got married to an Ashkenazi Jew, became a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and reared two children without bitterness. “If you are hampered by the terrors of the past, you cannot move forward effortlessly. Throw away those old bundles,” he tells his caretaker, a Malayali nurse, who has her own share of tribulations.
David’s son, Asher, an archaeologist, is a devoted friend of Sahal, ever-protective and helping him dodge Israel’s all-seeing intelligence agency and ruthless police who have him on their radar from his school days when he lost his brother in a mine explosion, and he was found wandering through the night looking for him. “Afterwards, a hundred stones lay waiting for me by the wayside, whenever an army vehicle came in sight,” he jotted in his memoirs. But he did not pick them up. Rather, he dreamt of better times, of children flying like birds over a country without check-posts. At the UN refugee camp, he did not ask for toys or food. He pleaded for books about children who did not have to cower in front of soldiers. When hungry, he assuaged his hunger by remembering his mother’s knafeh, the delicious sweet dessert she made. Sahel yearned to leave West Bank and move to Malaysia to research about drones. Drones that would shower olive leaves on the hills of Jerusalem. “They took away our soil and our pathways. But nobody can steal wisdom, knowledge or the soul,” he tells his dead brother. And this is precisely why Mossad keeps an eye on him. The agency is wary of educated Palestinians. And why Asher has to shield him from their clutches.
Do Not Ask The River Her Name is deeply layered, laying bare the complexities of this part of West Asia in an unbiased manner. While the stark irony of Holocaust survivors and their descendants subjecting other humans to starvation, thirst, tear gas and bombardments hits you throughout the book, it is also true, as Tomy points out, that the leaders who don the role of saviours of Palestinians grow fatter on the generous funds received from across the world, while failing to unite a hundred different factions.
Sahel can never forget the sight of his charred parents or the blood-splattered body of his little brother. Neither can Asher’s mother forget any of the cruel acts of Hamas, one of which killed her mother. Yet, like a nameless river, the love between Asher, a Jew, and Sahal, a homeless Palestinian, flows unchecked through the book.
Book: Do not ask the river her name
Author: Sheela Tomy
Trans. By: Ministhy S
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages: 328
Price: Rs 499
