THE RIVER, THE TOWN

A mournful but quick-witted slice-of-life story by a Pakistani author.

Ali’s debut novel takes place in a destitute riverside village known only as the Town, on the outskirts of a more affluent City. The river, once “wide and deep,” is reduced to “a thin stream flowing weakly over the ground.” The narrative jumps between eras to show what, like the river’s vitality, has changed. In this story about the irrevocable forces of change, climate catastrophe is inseparable from demographic peril. One of the novel’s narrators, Baadal, whose name means “cloud,” explains that “almost every child born here has been given a name meant to evoke a sensation of coolness, of thirst being quenched.” Water has become so scarce, the heat so severe, that simply surviving the day is a labored effort. In one early scene, as a schoolteacher from the City absurdly extols the “virtue of abstaining from too much food and water,” the classroom fans break down, and Baadal reports, “One by one we fall asleep, or maybe only I do.” The story is told through episodes like this, as if in short bursts of activity that punctuate long, lethargic rests. The all-encompassing fatigue sometimes creates a mood of delirium, in which characters have erratic visions while catastrophic, even fatal accidents occur without explanation. Against this foil, flashbacks—from the perspectives of Baadal’s mother, Raheela; and Meena, an older neighbor Baadal begins to court—and ventures to the City sometimes feel bucolic, but they reveal how trauma and struggle can inhabit hereditary cycles. At times, the City seems to offer a chance to “[leave] behind thirst and thinness, the sense of depletion”—but is its promise merely a mirage?

A tender family portrait, depicted with nostalgia and empathy for a precarious way of life.