Author Speak with Bhavika Govil on her brilliant debut novel, Hot Water!

Hot Water, Bhavika Govil’s stunning debut, announces the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction. With emotional precision and unflinching honesty, she brings to life the story of Mira, Ashu, and Ma—a family held together by silences, split by secrets, and bound by an aching love. Every sentence pulses with feeling, every character is alive with contradiction, longing, and truth.

In a deeply thoughtful conversation with Anushka Verma for HarperBroadcast, Bhavika reflects on the quiet intensity of her prose, the art of building layered, vulnerable characters, and what it means to write about the fragile threads that tie a family together—and pull them apart.

Ques: While Mira may not fully comprehend every nuance, her observations often reveal the emotional truths of those around her, be it Ma’s relationship with Coach, Ashu’s equation with Rahul, or the subtleties of societal dynamics. How did you navigate the challenge of keeping her perspective authentic to her as a child, while still allowing her to help readers uncover the emotional undercurrents running through the story?  

Bhavika: Hot Water is the story of one family—nine-year-old Mira, her fourteen-year-brother elder brother, and their Ma. Mira is born with a question mark etched on her face—in her mother’s words—and is really curious, really observant. She notices everything, and can sense shifts in a room’s emotional frequency, although she is not quite be able to explain it. While Mira is a child—the reader of the novel is an adult. So, I trusted that the reader would be able to fill in the gaps between what Mira sees and what she understands with their own knowledge. For instance, when Mira notes that her Ma smells like burnt paper, or she sees her brother and his friends spending time under the tree or naively believes something an adult says at face value, the reader would be able to sense the subtext and what may really be going on underneath the words on the page—a lot like real life.  

Ques: Leela, or Ma as she is known in the novel, is a deeply nuanced character. As a single mother grappling with a traumatic past, her choices, whether in her subtle hostility towards Ashu or her desire to rewrite parts of her life, often blur the line between questionable and unjustifiable. How did you approach writing a character who demands empathy while constantly testing the reader’s moral comfort zone? Was her complexity always central to your vision for the story?

Bhavika: Leela is a fierce, single mother, and sometimes doesn’t behave in the ways we see a conventional Indian mother usually do. She loves and lashes out equally; she is biting and sharp at times, vulnerable and raw the others, and she takes decisions sometimes that seem to orbit solely her own happiness. Leela—or Ma—is a character I first saw from the perspective of her children. I was determined, after a point, to see who she was between the ‘Ma’ and the ‘Leela’. What were her own hopes? What made her angry? What griefs did she carry? Who was she? I was surprised when I, too, was confronted by her moral complexity and her past, and perhaps I leant into it in the writing process, asking inadvertently, perhaps, for some grace from the reader too.

Ques: Ashu undergoes a profound journey of self-discovery—grappling with his identity, sexuality, and shifting family dynamics. With the novel’s poignant ending, readers are left with a deep sense of sympathy for him. Would you say Hot Water is as much a coming-of-age story for Ashu as it is an unraveling of a family’s long-held secrets, and how did you approach balancing both these threads?

Bhavika: I would say that. Ashu is a really gentle, loving adolescent boy who carries a complex inner world inside him that very few people make the effort to unpeel and understand. He’s left, therefore, feeling rather alone in his own home and finds his safe spaces outside it, in his friendships and quietude alike. I loved writing through the lens of this boy, exploring his own journey, his loves and heartbreaks, his gentle humour and wit. At the same time, I always saw Hot Water as the story of a family at first and well as its members—the whole as well as the parts. I didn’t know how these things would play out, but it seemed right that the family’s unraveling and Ashu’s becoming would be inextricably linked.

Ques: A particularly compelling thread in the novel is its exploration of longing, both romantic and familial—whether it’s the children’s intense desire to keep Ma to themselves, Ashu’s unspoken yearning for unconditional affection, or Leela’s search for love. How did you approach portraying longing as both a means of connection and a source of quiet tension within these relationships?

Bhavika: I suppose that the thing about love is that you can both give it to someone and withhold it. And this withholding of love can be even more sharply felt by someone, especially when it’s been taken away from you without reason, or when you see it contrast to someone else. It’s such a subtle, insidious thing. In Hot Water, I wanted to explore love in its all forms, familial, sibling, romantic, friendship—and the ways in which we long for it when we don’t receive it, and grow when we do.

Ques: In Hot Water, secrecy threads its way through the family’s fragile bonds, quietly shaping their emotional landscape and prompting questions about motive and meaning. Is it a form of emotional governance—a quiet kind of control—or a tender, if flawed, expression of care? And can these contradictory impulses coexist within the same gesture, blurring the line between truth and concealment?

Bhavika: All families have things they aren’t saying to each other—the quiet spaces between words in a conversation, the undercurrents in a room, little things and big things we are keeping from each other—sometimes to protect the other, often to protect our own selves. The family in Hot Water, too, is a family full of such secrets—guarded truths all of them, including the children—keep close to their chest in hopes that the dynamics in the house remains suspended delicate and fraught yet somehow held together. And when these truths begin to pour out, can this ecosystem remain intact?