New Delhi, July 11 -- British-Asian writer Gurnaik Johal's ambitious debut novel Saraswati begins with Satnam (a Punjabi Londoner), one of the novel's main characters, staring at a well he has just inherited from his dead grandmother at their ancestral Punjab village. Miraculously, the longdried well has suddenly spouted water, a development that the jetlagged Satnam momentarily perceives as "a trick of the light", before acknowledging that he really was staring back at his own face. "But here it was, water: a reflection. He looked down at himself looking up."

By the time you finish the novel, you realise that among other things, this opening salvo is a nifty bit of foreshadowing. For Satnam's little family well soon becomes the conduit ...