Sheela Tomy, in her second book, the evocatively named Do Not Ask The River Her Name, has moved from the hilly tracts of Kerala, all the way over to Israel, but the story keeps its roots firmly planted in the land of coconuts. The book’s protagonist is Ruth from Kollam, who has travelled to Jerusalem to be a metapelet, nurse, to an old Israeli man, David Menahem. It is through her eyes that the reader gets a glimpse of all that is happening in that troubled land; very literally so, because Ruth has a vlog called ‘Nazareth’, which is watched by a lot of people, Malayalis as well as non-Malayalis.
Once she starts, verily following in the footsteps of Christ who once walked these very lands, Ruth goes from strength to strength, coming under the scanner of the security forces. Ruth’s tale is a familiar one, that of the expatriate who crosses the seas in search of a job that pays enough to take care of the folks back home; in her case, that is a husband immobilised after a road accident, and two growing daughters. Ruth has had an earlier positively horrifying stint abroad—in Riyadh and Dubai—and managed to get out of that hellhole with the greatest of difficulty and with the help of other Malayalis.
Is life better in the Holy Land, ‘a city of explosions, made of splinters, where the hearts of the residents are also splintered into a hundred fragments’? That answer predictably blows in the wind, in a story that has as much external as internal conflict embedded in i.