Last girl standing

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape, that releases on November 15, is a compelling dystopian adventure about a young girl coming to terms with her uniqueness.

“What I like about science fiction,” wrote Manjula Padmanabhan in the introduction to her short-story collection Kleptomania, “is that it offers a writer the opportunity to go directly to the heart of an ironical or thought-provoking situation by setting up a theoretical world.”

The situation in Padmanabhan’s excellent new novel Escape is that the story is set in a land almost entirely bereft of women. We make gradual discoveries about this setting — it could be an alternate version of India, but at any rate it’s a country that underwent a great Change a couple of decades earlier. Now it exists in a bubble, cut off from (and ostracised by) the rest of the planet, and run as an autonomous dictatorship by generals who are clone-brothers to each other.

Their attitude towards the now-extinct women, referred to as the Vermin Tribe, is symptomatic of the death of individuality in this world. “Females are driven by biological imperatives that lead them to compete for breeding rights,” explains a General in an interview with an appalled reporter from the outside world, “In order to control breeding technology and to establish the collective ethic we had to eliminate them.”

The one survivor is a young girl named Meiji, who has been raised on an Estate managed by her three uncles, known only as Eldest, Middle and Youngest. They have kept her existence a secret, but eventual disclosure is certain and the brothers realise that Meiji’s minuscule chance of long-term survival rests with her being transported into the world beyond. This entails first making a long journey across a wasteland to a distant city, and Youngest has the difficult task of escorting her on this journey.

Along the way, he must maintain her disguise as a young boy, shield her from curious eyes and, perhaps, hardest of all, help her understand her own uniqueness and deal with ideas that she was never brought up to imagine. Throughout, he must also stay mindful that his baser instincts as a man could override his avuncular feelings towards Meiji.

Escape works on many levels: as a solid adventure yarn, a well-realised work of speculative fiction, and a sensitive character study. Padmanabhan nicely balances Meiji and Youngest’s internal conflicts with the external details of the places that they travel through and the people or creatures they meet — from the sadistic but dimwitted groups of Mad Max-like riders called the Boyz (who blow each other up at the slightest provocation) to the mechanical slaves known as drones. (“Drones are what the Vermin Tribe should have been: servile, dumb and deaf,” reads one of the many quotes taken from fictitious manuals, and provided at the head of each chapter.)

But the book is driven by conversation and character development. Especially notable is the sensitivity with which it depicts the confusion in Meiji’s mind: her exchanges with imaginary friends, her predicament as the innocent abroad, so accustomed to living in confined quarters and familiar settings that she is afflicted by agoraphobia when faced with the “crushing limitlessness” of the outside world: “She could not so much as control how far her own steps would take her, or the sound of her voice upon the air. Even her shadow, that kindly, friendly companion that had danced with her upon the walls of her room, allowing her to fashion it into antlered deer and knob-nosed swans, had here become a stranger, a monstrous giant.”

In her earlier works like the play Harvest — about organ-selling in a dystopian world — Padmanabhan has shown her skill for creating disturbing, morally complex, even cringe-inducing scenes; there’s an honesty and transparency to the most shocking passages in her work and you never get the impression that she’s making a deliberate effort to be subversive. Escape is for the most part a gently flowing narrative, so the edgier passages, when they do appear, are all the more effective.

There’s the description of a prosthetic penis that Meiji must wear to pass off as a little boy, and of her first period. A sudden, entirely unexpected burst of violence directed at a helpless creature. A passage where a character recounts a distant memory of a woman’s vagina in threatening terms, as “a great scarlet gorge, ringed with writhing black serpents”.

What adds to the complexity of the tale is that Meiji and Youngest — equally compelling and sympathetic characters, with their own dilemmas — inevitably become distanced from each other as their journey nears its end. All of this adds up to make Escape a book that’s difficult to classify. As an adventure and a work of imagination, it has more than enough that will appeal to younger readers, but it is an intrinsically adult book, and very much a novel of ideas.

In India, science fiction and fantasy are often thought of as “genres for children”, but this is slowly changing. Along with the work of such writers as Samit Basu, Vandana Singh and Priya Sarakkai Chabria, Escape helps expand the possibilities of what can be achieved within a very dynamic genre.

ESCAPE
Author: Manjula Padmanabhan
Publisher: Picador
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 428