Different strokes with a touch of class

If you dreamed up a computer virus in human form and put it under the microscope, the picture would come slowly into focus to reveal the quizzical features of Manjula Padmanabhan.

She is subversive; she worms her way into the most recondite networks; her ideas have an astonishing tendency towards self-replication, often showing up in mutated form far from the original source; and she attracts legion of faithful fans whose devotion borders on the fanatic. Put that all together and it says 'virus'. Benign, mostly, but you never know.

Perhaps this is why Manjula Padmanabhan makes some mainstream critics uncomfortable. She isn't easily categorised: she's written strongly feminist short stories, but she's not a feminist writer, she's dabbled in science-fiction but she's not a SF writer, her themes aren't Indian enough to be exotic, aren't exotic enough to be unIndian. She slips through all our theoretical nets, and it takes just a flick of her fins for her to be off plumbing the depths of even deeper waters.

I once privately castigated a (male) critic for leaving her out of his examination of contemporary Indian writers. What she evoked for him "" unread, since he had only skimmed a few columns and none of her books "" was an instinctive discomfort, an instinctive sense that she refused to fit neatly into our matrix of Indian writers in English. I can understand, though not sympathise with, his predicament "" and for his sake, I'm glad he hasn't read Kleptomania.

This collection of ten short stories is as mixed a bag as we've come to expect from a writer as versatile and inquiring as Padmanabhan. Written for various reasons "" some stories were commissioned by various magazines, some grew slowly out of a seed crystal planted in her head years before she wrote even the opening sentence, some are almost pure thought-experiments "" and at various times, they shouldn't be expected to present a unified front. They do, though. They challenge our complacency, they question the shibboleths we hold most dear, they poke around in the darker corner spaces of the human psyche.

Take the title story. It's a set piece, with all the protagonists assembled tidily around a dinner table where the conversation turns to the subject of kleptomania. The hostess works hard at keeping the subject alive, because she suspects that one of her guests has just, under cover of the glass-topped table, stolen something from her "" perhaps an object of no value at all, perhaps a cherished curio, but a theft all the same.

As near-invisible servitors assemble plates and dishes, keep glasses replenished, and attend to the guests, the discourse on kleptomania becomes darker. Are writers thieves, is writing in itself an act of open theft, of borrowing or downright stealing the finest or most wrenching moments of other people's lives?

Kleptomania is a practical lesson in the art of misdirection, though, and it turns out that a theft has been perpetrated "" but not of the kind that the hostess had feared. Instead, what's taken is more precious than she expects; what she's left with is a sense of outrageous loss, of exposure and danger.

Read on, and it becomes clear that Padmanabhan is trespassing on vintage Roald Dahl territory, and like a confident tenant who pretended to be just a squatter, settling in for a long stay. In Betrayal a young woman finds herself playing go-between as her friend plays murky sexual games with a boyfriend. And Padmanabhan breaks all taboos as she introduces the idea that there's a blurred line between consensual violent sex and rape, a line that women cross as often as men do.

The Body in the Backyard is an object lesson in a different kind of violence; it doesn't work at all on the level of a murder mystery, but it does work as an examination of the things we'd rather bury and not bring to light in our lives.

As a diehard SF junkie, I'm less enthusiastic about the science-fiction stories included here "" they are brilliant thought pieces, but not gripping fiction. Even so, the futures she imagines are worth visiting: she'll take you to a time when the idea of sharing air rather than breathing safe O2 in your own personal capsules is tinged with disgust.

You'd have to be brain-dead not to enjoy the semi-fictional Morning Glory in the East of Kailash, her account of the month she spent in Delhi living with "two gay men, their adopted son, a transvestite cook, two spaniels and a Chihuahua named Carmen". I'm not going to spoil the party by offering a synopsis, but this is where you should go if you're looking for vintage Manjula observations: "I wouldn't have minded marrying if it meant that I could have a wife. But that wasn't likely, was it? Because I was a woman. That's why I'd rather be an illustrator than a woman. Less housework."

Of the last story, a light, frothy and most un-Manjulaesque number, let her precis do the talking, too: "It is upbeat. A love story. Between a woman cripple and a man with Down's Syndrome."

Perhaps the reason why I'm such an unabashed Padmanabhan fan is because she injects discomfort under the reader's skin so smoothly that you never even feel the prick of the needle. Or perhaps it's because she writes sentences like this: "He was like a surgeon who has slit open a patient from crotch to gullet and is now looking at the organs thus revealed: the cold, smooth coils of a society hostess; the plump sweetbreads of a wealthy man's wife; the sparkling matrix of taste and intelligence that revealed itself in a flair for ormentation."

Kleptomania makes few promises: it won't open up brave new exotic worlds that look just like the old ones, it won't stand up and be counted in our struggle against etcetera etcetera, in short, it won't help you lose weight, make new friends or change your life. All the same, buy a copy today. Or, if you have to, steal it.

Kleptomania
Ten Stories

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Manjula Padmanabhan
Penguin India
Pages: 201
Price: Rs 250