The River by Rumer Godden (out of print)

In a family of four children that will soon expand to five, Harriet is alone. Her father is consumed with managing a jute mill, her mother is in the final stages of pregnancy. Bea, the eldest, is lost in a haze of beauty and the admiration that this gift has bestowed upon her. The only son, Bogie, is immersed in the natural world and the youngest daughter, Victoria, is reveling in her final moments as the baby of the family. 

Harriet has learned to find companionship within her thoughts and the words that emerge from them. An ardent observer of the life that swirls about her, she does her best to understand what she sees by chronicling it all in her journal and in her poetry.

What she sees is the extraordinary beauty of India, which is the only home she’s ever known. Growing up on the banks of Bengal’s Lakya river, behind the walls encircling a house that’s fashioned after an English manor and is surrounded by an English garden, Harriet goes beyond that sheltering enclosure to watch the river. 

The river contains “ life in and over its flowing,” crocodiles, porpoises, steamships, barges, fishing boats, under “a blue weight of sky.” In its depths are sunset river pearls, brought up by divers and wafting over it are the smells of incense, ghee, and honey. With the changes that are washing over her family, the river’s constancy comforts Harriet and gives substance to her racing thoughts. As she watches the moving water, ideas take shape and emerge in coherency as poems and stories.

Harriet is enraged at the thought of giving up her childhood and it puzzles her that Bea has relinquished it so thoroughly. At the same time, she feels pangs of jealousy that a young soldier, crippled by the war, ignores her in favor of Bea and she finds she’s unable to quell these feelings by playing with Bogie. In fact, she has unfamiliar feelings of responsibility toward the brother who has been her playmate. When he tells her he’s discovered a snake deep within the garden and is obsessed with watching it, Harriet is torn between telling her parents and keeping Bogie’s secret. Her decision will change her life forever.

A slender novella of less than 200 pages, The River is an extraordinary love letter to India during the final days of the Raj, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful child. Harriet’s world is “not entirely European…not entirely Indian,” but “a mixture of both.” She lives in a conventionally English house but when Christmas comes, it arrives with the weather of “a cool fresh summer day.” Equally special to the family is Diwali when the river comes alive with thousands of floating lamps and the sky blazes with fireworks.

And yet when Harriet goes beyond the walls of the house, what she sees is a postcard. Walking through neighboring villages after dark, she passes through “a still life of figures and things, lit and quiet.” In love with what surrounds her, Harriet is a tourist, here for a while, then moving on.

Her life is patterned after Rumer Godden’s own Indian childhood. Forced to leave the country where she had lived since she was six months old, Godden returned when she was eighteen after going to school for five years in England. She remained in India until she was forty and her best novels are ones that reflect her life in that country: The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Black Narcissus. 

The most poignant of these is The River, steeped in the fresh and untarnished viewpoint of a child. Beauty and tragedy, perception and naivete, all combine to give a picture of the vanished lives of the English, yet Indian, children, like Godden and Kipling before her, who will always be torn between two cultures, two worlds.~Janet Brown