I didn't set out to write a book about water. I set out to write a mystery, and the water simply refused to stay in the background.
The Kerala backwaters are not scenery. Anyone who has grown up near them knows this. They move, they flood, they silt up, they carry things — boats, gossip, bodies, secrets — from one household to another without asking permission. When I started drafting what would become The Copper Water, I kept trying to write the canals as a backdrop for Mathew Kuruvila's investigation. It didn't work. The canals kept insisting on a bigger role.
Eventually I stopped fighting it. A backwater village holds its secrets the way still water holds sediment — nothing disappears, it just settles, and settles, until something disturbs the bottom. That became the actual structure of the book: not a linear unearthing of clues, but a slow, sediment-by-sediment disturbance of things a community had let settle for decades.
There's a discipline I try to hold myself to in this kind of writing — I've started calling it, only half-jokingly, "Copper Water discipline." Restrained prose. Controlled release of information. Emotion delivered through what a character notices, not what they announce. The landscape taught me that discipline before the plot did. Water doesn't explain itself. It just moves, and you learn to read it, or you don't.
If you grew up somewhere with a landscape like that — one that keeps its own record, whether or not anyone's watching — I'd love to hear about it. It's the kind of detail that ends up making its way into a book eventually, one way or another.