Gurnaik Johal​ ’s admirable first novel starts with a piece of miraculous regeneration. Satnam, a Londoner, visits Punjab for the first time since childhood to scatter his grandmother’s ashes (this is East Punjab, on the Indian side of the border, predominantly Sikh). He looks down into the old well on the family farm – dry for many decades – and is surprised to see his reflection. Unaccountably, there is water in the well, and the level keeps rising, becoming first a local attraction and before long a headline around the world. This strand of the novel is set in the near future. The gap of time, short though it is, is long enough to make a systemic collapse of the environment plausible. The water is from a new river, or an old one reborn, the Saraswati, flowing through palaeochannels. The Saraswati is the name of an ancient river, once bigger than the Indus, and gives its name to an early Indian civilisation that flourished from about 3300 to 1700 bce.

To start with, the book seems to be a subtle culture-clash comedy. Satnam decides to stay on the farm while his parents return to London. This also allows him to avoid conflict with the London girlfriend he has dumped in a fairly cowardly way. It is a portrait, not unkind, of a beta male. He’s currently unemployed, and not in a hurry to return to the world of work. His previous employers, VertiCrop, grew ‘microgreens’ in a controlled UV-lit environment – a warehouse in Tottenham. He was the diversity and inclusion ‘champion’, spending a fair amount of time deciding on the appropriate snacks for heritage days and ‘ordering in the right bunting’. He didn’t particularly want the job, applying partly to please a friend who worked there, and who would get a referral fee (paid in Amazon vouchers) if he did, and partly to appease his pragmatic doctor girlfriend with a show of career-mindedness. When he was made redundant, the severance package included a bonus box of kale and chard.

One of his new neighbours in India puts Satnam in the category of ‘foreign-returned’, which doesn’t seem to fit: his Punjabi is poor and he still refers to London as home. His luggage didn’t arrive when he did, and the suitcase eventually delivered by the airline was someone else’s, but the courier wouldn’t take it back. He ends up borrowing some clothes from his grandmother’s farm manager. When his father sees him, he asks mildly, ‘Gone native?’ Any amount of dry irony is contained in that dismissive phrase appropriated from the coloniser.

Soon a Brahmin with an Apple watch is turning up to bless the well. Then come the experts, many self-appointed, and the spokesmen for pressure groups and politicians. Once or twice a worrying explanation for the miraculous event is suggested – that it’s a consequence of glaciers melting in the Himalayas (disconcertingly described at one point as constituting ‘the highest water tower in the world’). Whatever its cause, the new river is a physical fact, one substantial enough to justify the building of new cities, as well as a cultural and political one.

An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man River’. To him it seemed obvious that India and Pakistan should share the water of the Indus. The British chair of the Punjab Boundary Commission agreed, and told both countries’ leaders so. Muhammad Ali Jinnah said ‘he would have Pakistan remain a desert rather than a fertile field watered courtesy of the Hindus’; Nehru declared that ‘what India did with its rivers was its own business.’ Water stopped flowing into Pakistan’s canals on 1 April 1948, returning five weeks later after Pakistan agreed to pay for the water supply. Water war is nothing new.

Setting a narrative only a little in the future has the obvious disadvantage that its prophecies can unravel sooner rather than later, but a modest gap nevertheless creates a firebreak in the historical record, making it possible for the writer to portray a recognisable world without the restriction of having to name current political figures. What this means here is the freedom to show the India Modi has made without making reference to Modi. The Hindu nationalist leader in the novel is called Narayan Indra, and rides the swell of the miraculously regenerating river. A local representative of the Centre for Research into the Saraswati River produces his own rhetoric to back Indra up:

Let me make it clear: this is the scientific discovery of a millennium! If you can help support the campaign for returning our great river goddess, we can chart a path to put India top of the podium! In the spirit of the goddess Saraswati, put reason and logic first. You remember praying to Saraswati when studying at school? Doing a mantra in her name before an exam? Why do we do that? Because she is the voice of reason.

In the short term the waking river does Satnam nothing but good. His decision not to sell the farm can retrospectively be seen as shrewd, since he is paid far more for the water rights than he could ever have got for the land. But some neighbouring landowners are less eager to realise their assets. There’s a dismaying moment when the object Satnam is hiding under his shirt on the way to meet one such recalcitrant is revealed to be a crowbar. As it turns out, there’s no one more easily recruited to a lynch mob than a half-outsider with a weak sense of self.

The combination of dark turn and early climax (barely seventy pages into a substantial novel) would seem questionable if this were the book’s only strand, but the narrative is made up of linked episodes of novella length, interspersed with shorter passages of family saga, which would, if they ran continuously, come to roughly the same number of pages. This structure is elaborate but not contorted, just as the writing is rich but not dense. It takes real skill to make the material hang together without going closure mad. There’s no shortage of drama, but it’s rarely brought to conventional climaxes, and Johal is unafraid of loose ends. The episodes generally involve the Saraswati, which eventually runs from Kailash to Kutch, roughly seven hundred miles, and the protagonists are descendants of a couple, Sejal and Jugaad, who appear in the 19th-century segments of the novel and who name their seven children after local rivers.

The narratives tend to unfold in environments that are both numinous and degraded. The Hakra farm was blighted when Satnam arrived, with despairing local farmers ‘taking sulfas’ (swallowing pesticide) when unable to afford to buy new seed to replace the last lot, which has been genetically engineered to be sterile – never mind that even in the remotest villages you can now order manure on Flipkart. The sharpest contrast between treasure and trash comes in the third section, when an expedition hoping to use a submersible to unearth a stone tablet from a 19th-century wreck passes through the Indian Ocean garbage patch, seen through a porthole. ‘Caught adrift in the churn of the South Equatorial Current, the plastic objects – crisp wrappers, fishing nets, energy-drink bottles – were undergoing a slow metamorphosis … slowly breaking down within the shimmering epipelagic zone, until one day they would coat the stomachs of fish eaten by fish eaten by fish.’ The stone they are seeking may provide the key to the Saraswati language, just as the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphics. This is of more than archaeological interest, since Indra’s administration is anxious to establish or fabricate a continuity of culture between the Saraswati civilisation and modern India. The mission is a success. AI instantly consolidates the translation and ‘meaning spread through the archives with the speed of a virus.’ The newly translated sentence reads ‘A cow is worth seven chickens; a pot is worth ten beads,’ but only a non-archaeologist could be disappointed by that.

The location of the second section, Diego García in the Indian Ocean, largest island of the Chagos group, isn’t obviously blighted. In fact it would meet most of the requirements for an island paradise, though not for the Chagossians, who were expelled in the 1970s. It isn’t a paradise for those who are billeted there, since it is an American-British military base, but two people posted there form a passionate and lasting couple that offers the greatest possible contrast to commitment-shy Satnam. Jay is there to design new trails on the island for training purposes, Katrina to do her utmost to eliminate the yellow crazy ant, an omnivore that spits out acid and wipes out species after species until there’s no ecosystem left. Her weapon of (she hopes) mass destruction is fishmeal dosed with fipronil sprayed from a helicopter into the tropical forest. The ants die in spasm after their nerves and muscles become hyperexcited. Sitting on the beach watching the swimmers, and realising that she can see no military buildings or uniforms, she thinks that if she took a photo of the scene and found it years later, she would assume it was a holiday snap. But somewhere nearby ‘the queens were moving, their colonies crawling over carcases.’

Jay and Katrina may be working for a US/UK outpost, but his mother is from Trinidad and her parents from Mauritius – they had actually left India as emigrants heading for Trinidad but got no further than the boat’s first stop. Throughout Saraswati British imperialism is presented indirectly, not exonerated but depersonalised, as if it was only a spell of bad weather that lasted a few hundred years. Even in the sections set in the 19th century, when they were in charge, the British are referred to as ‘Angrezi’, a word that seems to have reached Indian vernacular by way of another colonial language, French (it’s a version of anglais). In one of the 21st-century sections the Raj is blamed for a modern Indian’s difficulty in gaining muscle mass (‘Our very bodies carry the story of their plunder’), since man-made famines favoured the survival of those whose bodies store fat efficiently. Not such an asset for a gym bunny.

Johal takes occasional risks, usually successfully, in his handling of point of view. Satnam experiences the move from London to India in cinematic terms, as a change in aspect ratio, ‘a shift into widescreen’. At one point he seems to lose track of himself in the frame, when fog on the farm blots out all outlines during a visit from yet another team of scientists: ‘Satnam headed out towards them, the hard edges of his body softening and dissolving into white, until he was gone entirely.’ A transposed element of film language often on display in Johal’s prose is an extreme focus-pulling, even a pouncing zoom threatening to destabilise the composition. On a single page Katrina’s awareness shifts from the far past, back to ‘the Big Bang and whatever came before that’, to the product she is using in the shower, ‘a single travel-sized bottle of conditioner containing enough far-off ingredients to make a medieval man rich’, and then to the pattern of hair radiating out from Jay’s bald spot, all the other hairs pointing away from it, like grass in the wind: ‘It looked like a hurricane as seen from space, an approaching front.’ Finally her virtual gaze goes inside his body imagining ‘empires and civilisations of minute beings, which, in making out and fucking, would also have crossed over into her body in a kind of mutual colonisation’. Colonisation, though, seems the wrong image for an equal exchange.

A few pages after these extreme camera angles she asks herself a related question: ‘At what point, she thought, did a person first imagine themselves from a bird’s-eye view?’ The classic way for literature to produce a three-dimensional model of human behaviour has been to supplement subjective experience with the notionally objective, not operating from the side (the way our neighbours might see us), but from above. Recently, though, this angle has become ominous. The silently patrolling drone, in the short time since it was devised, seems to have taken over from the bird flying overhead as the natural way of imagining a scene if not from a personal perspective. This has darkened our understanding of the world, now that invisibility, which didn’t seem altogether precious while we had it, is gone. An eye in the sky takes much less imagining now that it may really be up there.

More than one variety of omniscience is on show in this novel. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually one able to slip in and out of the minds of a modest number of characters, something we are unable to do away from the page, although literature makes it seem some sort of birthright. This is empathy in action, though exempt from the possibility of contradiction. Our culture sees empathy as a virtue that recognises and celebrates the reality of other people. Jay has a different take on it: ‘To hunt … the predator has to think like its prey. Empathy has its roots in killing.’ Perhaps this is meant to link up with an idea of Satnam’s – picked up from a podcast – that human beings, no longer having predators to fear, have turned inwards.

If empathy started as part of a predator’s armoury it has come a long way, though the fascination exercised by villains like Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter must be based on the paradox of their combining psychological acuity with a contempt for the human race. The omniscience displayed at a couple of points in Saraswati is intuitive knowledge on a startlingly grand scale, bursting the banks of any single consciousness. It seeks to conjure up a creature able to detect the echoes of every interaction, one that might

interpret the sound of pickaxes deep within rare-metal mines, interpret the music of calls on hold and the steady thrum of cruise-ship engines, as well as the buzzing moon-like glow of their cabin lights luring migratory birds from their routes home, and the beat of insect wings as they veered towards the headlights of cars, the veined shadows their spreadeagled bodies cast across the rain-slick road still humming with the aftershock of seismic charges from gas prospectors using sound to see like the bats, who’d fled their roosts to escape the noise of LEDs, leaving the insects and frogs they would have hunted to grow more confident in their mating calls and, no longer haunted, to sing not just for continuance but for the sake of the song.

Somehow a spiralling catastrophe has been wrenched back into affirmation.

A second cadenza a hundred pages later, accompanying a storm described as ‘an airborne river’ that is carrying 25 times more water than the Mississippi as it heads from Hawaii towards the west coast of Canada, can’t manage the same feat, though the deluge might quench some forest fires. The storm drifts north along the Athabasca River up to the vast tar sands where water falls

on the miles of hot bitumen, filled the enormous dumps of heavy-haul mega-trucks, hit the tailings ponds that threatened to overspill, rippling at regular intervals as the bird blasters sounded to stop migratory ducks touching the toxic surface; and somewhere, not much further east, at some invisible border, the rain stopped and there was land it did not reach, burning trees that it could not touch.

The comfort and excitement of her new relationship make it hard for Katrina ‘to take the burning, melting world seriously; it was nothing to her.’ It’s striking that those who do take action in Saraswati set out to damage or destroy. A teenager trying to cross the closed border between India and Pakistan falls in with an old man driving his cattle. The timeless pastoral image lasts right up to the moment of realisation that the old man has infected his herd with the disease rinderpest, supposedly extinct, using serum stolen from a lab. This is no eclogue. In the fourth section Gyan, a Canadian singer-songwriter, applies for a residency in an art colony in the forest in order to provide a base for a group intending to disrupt logging operations. The saboteurs drive spikes into selected trees, being careful to leave a mark so the loggers don’t risk injury by trying to fell them. But one of the group doesn’t feel that destroyers of the environment deserve such courtesy – a thriller plot line that is left hanging.

When Gyan learns that another wing of the group is attacking the pulp mill where her mother works, she visits her blind father at ‘the gurdwara, opposite the mall’ – a phrase that could hardly be bettered as an epitome of assimilation – where he volunteers. If you wanted to devise an entirely purposeless activity, it would be hard to beat waving a yak-tail fly whisk, as her father does, to protect a holy book from insects. In Sikh tradition, though, its central holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib, is the consummation of a long line of gurus and must be accorded the status of a person. There isn’t the expected, virtually obligatory, confrontation between generations and choices here. The dialogue goes like this: ‘You know, you’re not the first radical in the family.’ ‘I’m not a radical, Dad.’ Her father doesn’t point out that both her parents work in the same industry as the loggers (he too worked at the pulp mill until he lost his sight). It’s family mythology that the arrival of an invasive beetle, resulting in a surplus of substandard timber to be pulped, provided the prosperity her parents needed to start a family.

There’s one public protest against injustice in the book, not exactly an altruistic action but at least one undertaken on behalf of a displaced community. A delegation of Chagossians charters a boat and lands on the island, protected by the UN’s ruling that Britain has no sovereign claim to the archipelago, and more practically by the presence of journalists and cameras. The plan is for a photo opportunity, with the Chagossians dropping to their knees on the beach and kissing the sand, but one woman, Marianne, insists on staying. ‘The only place to protest is here. On the land. With this air in my lungs, with coconut flesh in my gut.’ In the furore Katrina’s assignment is cut short, making this a symbolic victory but a real defeat, because the yellow crazy ant gets a reprieve.

In formal terms it’s an odd choice to introduce a first-person narrator after a hundred pages or so, in the Katrina section, and odd too that the narrator doesn’t become a consistent presence until towards the end of the book. A first-person and an omniscient narrator are not opposite elements of literary technique, but they certainly diverge, giving a compound narrative like this one a lurching gait. The narrator isn’t named (unless I missed it), but she’s a journalist and podcaster, and she too is descended from Sejal and Jugaad. She’s trying to track down others – there’s the technology to do it, in the form of an app called Helix, able to reach back seven generations by using genome mapping. It’s possible that the narrator is to be imagined as the writer of the whole book, though this is a formal solution that brings a new set of problems. The seven narrative strands stop being a piece of literary patterning and come close to promising an overarching plot, something that Johal seems to feel under no obligation to provide. There are hints almost of a team of superheroes being assembled, though it’s hard to imagine what their powers might be. Still, it can’t be a coincidence that the waking river first showed itself on the farm where Sejal and Jugaad raised their children, can it? On the first page of the book, after all, there’s the emptied urn of the grandmother’s ashes and a well that starts to fill: these two vessels may be mystically rather than just symbolically linked. And when pattern starts to turn into plot it can’t be turned back into mere pattern without disappointment.

In the family’s origin story Jugaad is the one who has adventures, risking severe punishment from his drunken father at the age of fifteen after stealing a dead buffalo, skinning it and burying the hide. Later he scrapes the remaining hair from it and sews up the orifices, inflating it to produce a makeshift float that can get him across a body of water and make him employable as a guide for an Angrezi hunting party. But the men disgust him with their cruelty and wastefulness, so he abandons them in their drunken sleep in a remote spot, taking their money, maps and compasses. Later, and far away, he hears that an elderly ferryman has died. There’s a vacancy. ‘He laughed. It was his destiny to live a life of crossing. He headed down the river, drawn by the current towards Sejal.’

Sejal is a storyteller and a needlewoman. All traditional stories seem to her identical, boiling down to ‘two people connect across a divide, and the divide swallows them up.’ She wants to tell her own stories, or at least to break off before the tragic consequences, just as she wants to sew phulkari dupattas – traditional embroidered shawls – in her own patterns rather than using old ones. It’s only in later life, though, that she can fulfil this ambition, making seven dupattas with untraditional designs, some abstract and some representational, all with a line of gold thread. One of them shows seven rivers flowing from one source. Satnam’s grandmother inherited all seven dupattas and kept them locked away. His unsentimental parents sold them, but Satnam quietly kept one for himself (‘“Were there only six?” his mum asked him, as she unfolded the cloth for a prospective customer’), though he didn’t realise that one of the stitched rivers represents his branch of the bloodline.

That’s not the only way Sejal projects herself into the future. She turns her own life into a story, which impresses a professional story-wallah enough for him to incorporate a version of it in his repertoire, which eventually reaches print. There’s also a piece of red cloth that is subdivided with each generation, so that Gyan, more than a century later, contemplates a work framed above her parents’ mantelpiece that’s about the size of a postcard. If she had a sibling it would have been cut into two credit-card-sized rectangles. Her own children, if she has any, will inherit sections hardly larger than postage stamps. It can seem that there’s almost too much connective tissue here. The dupattas are precious and fragile, susceptible to being dispersed but also reunited. The red cloth is of no intrinsic value, but like a talisman in a folk tale, seems not to lose its potency by being divided. Sejal’s conviction that a pattern should incorporate a mistake rather than unpick it complicates the picture.

Towards the end of the book an exhibition of her needlework is put on in New Lothal, the rapidly built city on the Saraswati named after the oldest port in human history. The cloths are arranged so that the line of gold is continuous, and there are plans for a small touring exhibition, a prospect that exhilarates the narrator: ‘I could see a kind of beauty in the dupattas being spread back out across the world, as if the little golden lines connecting them in the gallery would now stretch across the continents.’ But what about the burning, melting world? We’re back to pattern, even if Katrina has returned to the Chagos archipelago as the exterminating angel of the yellow crazy ant.

Perhaps it’s to finesse a way out of the impasse it has reached that the novel in its last pages concentrates on the narrator and her new baby, seeking to relativise a global predicament that seems all too absolute, but at the cost of ending the book on a note both bland and jarring: ‘I wished I could have brought you into a better world. But was that not a sentiment expressed by every generation of mothers? Right back unto the first people of the plains, there must have been mothers that wished that things were better, as they ran from known dangers to unknown hopes.’