The Snow Line

Arrival

Four wedding guests disembark separately from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station in the state of Punjab.

Yosh, the yoga teacher, arrives a day before the others, from Vancouver. He has come reluctantly, to work for tourists in the country he vowed to leave behind once and for all five years ago. His father is a millionaire in American dollars now, but many in India have not forgotten that his family was once deemed untouchable. He grips one wrist nervously.

Monica arrives from Toronto with maps and pink fingernails. She buys trinkets and garments souvenirs to fill her spacious suitcase ignoring her shrinking bank balance. She has not yet told her family the truth.

As Reema steps off the train onto the platform, she searches for her Indianness: something that might be bred in bone, or skin, or song, because she left this country before she could speak. The text messages from her Scottish boyfriend arrive with a dissonant ping in the Indian soundscape. She places a hand on her hip.

And then there is Jackson, knees brittle, a coin he has carried for fifty-four years tucked into his shirt pocket. As he sees Reema s hand fall from her hip towards her thigh, a crack splinters in his memory that lets dread through. Unknowingly Reema has brought with her a key that fits the door he had once locked tight. With only one task left to complete, he leaves the train station with strange whispers in his ear.


The stratosphere is dust and water, as well as particles oxygen and nitrogen so small that they are imperceptible. They make the sky blue. From here it s all one shade of blue. But there remember? There, all the colours seem separate, individual, the way the sky over the Himalayas has to stand back so as not to be pierced by the snow-capped peaks. Perhaps that trick of light is responsible for Jackson s blindness all those years in fact for his whole life? And perhaps the slanted light accounts for Reema s

TESSA MCWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her first picture book for children, Where Are You Agnes?, is based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which also won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She is also a librettist, most recently working with British composer Hannah Kendall. Their chamber opera, The Knife of Dawn, premiered at the Roundhouse, London, in 2016, and they are working on a new full-length opera. McWatt is also in the process of bringing John Berger's novel To the Wedding, to the screen, with award-winning film director Andrea Pallaoro. Tessa McWatt is the Course Director for the Master's in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and is on the Board of Trustees at Wasafiri. Born in Guyana, and raised in Canada, she lives in London.

Tessa McWatt s The Snow Line reveals life in overlapping panels: consciousness, memory, scenes of violence and of untenable beauty, everything dangerous enfolded into everything else. Her prose has Michael Ondaatje s el­liptical exactitude, Jane Gardam s terse confidence, but it accumulates, on behalf of her characters a young woman and an old man, friends a singular, lingering effect. The Snow Line is a small marvel. Padma Viswanathan, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist for The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

An exceptional, riveting read. Tessa McWatt s rare gifts never fail to enthrall me. Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish

Vivid, rich, and melodic. Layers of images, memories, and facts ask questions of connections, accountability, and desire political and personal and how we meet the complexities that make us. A beautiful read! Olumide Popoola, author of When We Speak of Nothing

Tessa McWatt s writing is tender, unforgettable, utterly precise. Like performing surgery on a peach. Leone Ross, author of This One Sky Day

Tessa McWatt is one of our greatest living writers. The Snow Line, her new novel, is a profound meditation on love, ageing, and what it is to be a woman of mixed racial identity and culture. Profoundly moving and epic in its scope, this book provides us with wisdom and reckoning on today s world, one that is ecologically fragile and only just coping with a pandemic. Like all mature writers, McWatt s range of reference is vast and her depth of understanding of humanity plunges us into depths we all long to inhabit. She writes her characters with such intimacy we are thunderstruck by the book s final pages. I closed this book and shed tears. Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

A profound meditation on the music that strangers in a place can make together, and on how the music of a strange place can get inside us, and change us forever. I loved the journey the book takes us on,