Dry Spells

"A beautiful, vivid and atmospheric ... story of loss and redemption" - Fiona Valpy

A devastating drought. A city ripe with secrets. A family with a past just waiting to be discovered.

Recently, Shyamala Mehta’s life in LA feels stagnant: she’s undervalued at work, newly single, and constantly clashing with her marriage-obsessed mother. So when she’s offered a transfer to Mumbai, she travels halfway around the world to the now drought-stricken city her parents left behind.

Staying with her mother’s sister Vini, Shyamala is struck by the contrast between them. How did Vini become such a joyful, unconventional soul while Pramila drifted quietly into traditional life? Far from home and surrounded by echoes of the past, Shyamala finally has a chance to learn more about the mother she barely knows. With Arjun, the neighbor’s wild-haired son whose love for India pierces through the oppressive heat, she starts to see the city of Pramila’s youth in all its beautiful complexity.

But as the taps run dry, Shyamala finds herself at the crossroads of her family’s history and her own destiny. The air is heavy with secrets, but when the deluge finally comes, will she be ready for what it might reveal—about her mother, herself, and the maddening city she’s starting to think of as home?

Born near Chicago to immigrants from India, Archana Maniar relocated with her parents to Mumbai at age four. After the culture shock abated, she fell in love with her homeland until chance brought the family to California. During vacations and family occasions, Mumbai was a frequent destination. She attended college at UCLA, where she studied political theory and biology before attending medical school at the University of California, Davis. As a professor of medicine and practicing infectious disease physician, she was a frontline healthcare worker from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and was deeply involved in health system pandemic preparedness. Always a writer in the margins of her day, storytelling became an obsession during her medical career, a way to process her observations about human nature during health, stress, and sickness. With a stubborn case of wanderlust, when she is not working or writing, she is usually traveling somewhere with her family.