Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Breaking Water

3.5 stars. Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature.

Krishna, an Indian man, finds a woman’s corpse when he wades into the river for his morning bath. He pulls the naked body out of the river and leaves it on the shore, despite the pleas of a priest, who importunes him to dispose of the body properly. Later that day, however, the problem takes care of itself: the woman’s corpse reanimates and walks along the shore, pecked at by crows, the first sign of a worldwide zombie plague. All dead bodies who were not cremated are reanimating, trying to escape from their coffins, or staggering out of the river where their murdered bodies had been dumped:

Some were only days old, looking almost alive but for their slack faces like melting clay masks, their lethal wounds and bruises, their paled and discoloured skin, their jellied eyes and the sometimes lovely frills of clinging white crustaceans in their hair, the tiny flickers of fish leaping from their muddy mouths. Others were black and blue, bloated into terrifying caricatures of their living counterparts, who watched in droves from behind the lines of fearful policemen at the top of the ghat steps.

When Krishna hears that the dead are walking, he feels guilty about how he neglected the woman’s body and rushes off to find it, impelled to do what he can to help her and the other risen dead. He claims the undead woman as his wife, despite her decomposing state and the pressure from police to cremate her, and even allows her to bite him and infect him, staying alive through a constant antibiotic IV drip.

Krishna becomes a locally famous guru, and is later visited by an investigative journalist who is the voice of the rest of this story, as she and we attempt to understand why Krishna is acting as he does: is it selfishness, seeking fame and gifts, or altruism? How are we to treat our own dead family members … and how do we ourselves want to be treated when we die?

This novelette is an unusual take on the zombie apocalypse, from an Indian and rather philosophical point of view. The grotesqueness of the walking dead is a constant, explicitly described visual image, as their bodies continue to deteriorate in nauseating ways, but their plight is nevertheless related with sympathy. Breaking Water raises questions about our humanity without offering any satisfactory answers, leaving me with an unsettled feeling.

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