LUNCH WITH BS: Manjula Padmanabhan

A fresh life for Suki

Writer Manjula Padmanabhan talks about her repeating cycles of sadness

There is a small hen sparrow exercising her unfledged wings on Manjula Padmanabhan's lawn. The sparrow arrived in the writer's life in traumatic circumstances; since then, she's been nursed back to health, had her cage expanded, been taken on holiday, and rejoices in the name of Catsmeat.

If you can imagine the mind of someone who says she has no maternal urges, who has spent the last weeks nevertheless attending to the needs of a small bird, and who will cackle as she tells you that the bird's dubbed feline fodder, you're getting closer to understanding Padmanabhan.

She's keen to see what Agni, the fusion place at the Park Hotel in Connaught Place is like, so that's where we head after saying our farewells to Catsmeat (also known, in deference to more sensitive friends, as Bird, Boid and Birdie Num-Num).

Agni can make you feel deeply schizophrenic: by night, it's a crowded bar; by day it pretends it's a sleepy coffee shop. It's a good place to take an author and illustrator who can execute shifts between professions, genres and styles with the best of them.

At 51, Padmanabhan has one of the most interesting CVs in the world of Indian literature in English: it includes plays (Harvest, Lights Out, The Gujarat Monologues), a comic strip (Suki), a travel memoir (Getting There), two collections of short stories (Hot Death, Cold Soup and the recently released Kleptomania) and the first in a children's book series (Mouse Attack), and that's not even mentioning her work as an illustrator.

We order luridly coloured mocktails as we discuss how she got here when her original plans included (a) being an IFS officer, like her father, and (b) committing suicide at the age of 30 since that was, in the young Padmanabhan's opinion, the point from which most people's lives go irretrievably downhill.

It was only when her father retired in India that Padmanabhan sought an alternative to the IFS, belatedly realising that she might not live up to the standards of propriety required of a government officer. She joined the staff of a small magazine called Parsiana.

It was printed at the same place in Ballard Estate that had hosted Debonair; the office proper was in the Parsi Lying-In Hospital; it was "a little community magazine, sparky and sweet" with very high standards set by its editor, Jehangir Patel; and Padmanabhan learned in short order to do everything. She illustrated, she wrote, she read page proofs.

"The germinal period is Parsiana," she says, digging into mini-kulchas with tomato chutney-salsa while trying to explain her multipronged career, "it explains everything."

Back in India after a childhood spent everywhere and nowhere, she'd seen herself as irrevocably, unintentionally different. "I didn't belong back in India, but I didn't belong anywhere else either, and that's a strange place to be, a sad place to be."

It shows in her work, but typically, as an asset. "I am not rooted in any tradition. I write about things that don't require a special tradition "" they tend to be fundamental. They deal with the body "" everyone has one "" or very basic emotions, basic motivations. I take what everyone already knows, and then I push it a little bit further."

Language wasn't one of the areas she worried about. "I can't even understand what it would be like to not have English. Those of us who are writing in English are not borrowing a language, it is our language "" but we are hybrids. I'm aware that being a hybrid, I don't have access to any deep roots, and I don't care. I live in an era where I don't suffer, which is unusual. In any other era, anyone marginal suffered; hybrids were always the first to suffer."

Perhaps that's where her empathy for the marginal, alien figure comes from: the young girl in "Betrayal" from Kleptomania whose insecurities leave her open to being used; the family in Harvest whose poverty makes organlegging a seductive option, the albino mouse in Mouse Attack. Padmanabhan met the original albino, a rat, in 1984 "" on the day Mrs Gandhi was shot. She was in a photo studio when she saw a small white shape darting around.

"I said to the man, you have a white rat just behind you. And he said, oh yeah, that's our rat." Someone had told him he could use the albino rat to scare away ordinary rats.

"It is normal for animal groups to ostracise an albino. That was how Mouse Attack arose. I kept thinking about this unfortunate rat "" it seemed okay, but it would have been born in a laboratory, and I was wondering, what could its life be?"

When we tuck into gilauti kebabs and Goa prawn curry, both well executed with just a touch of fusion foreignness, I'm thinking that if she'd stuck to the original plan, we'd never have had any of this. No Harvest, very few stories, no ambitious children's book series, no Suki, no Padmanabhan. No Getting There, in fact, in which she first wrote about the joys of exiting stage left once life gets too boring.

"I had planned when I was 17 to die at 30 "" it seemed that everything started packing up after that, your body, your mind "" and I deeply meant it," she says.

"I think I knew a year before my 30th birthday that I wouldn't do it. Suicide had to be not painful, and I had not reached a point of solvency where I could afford an attractive suicide. That was a trivial reason. The true reason was that by 30, I had a worth that I didn't have when I was 17. I did not want to die. At 17, I had done nothing with my life; I was nobody; if I died it would make no difference to anyone at all. But at 30 I felt it would. That was a revelation, I'd actually got somewhere, I'd actually achieved something, I had a reason for staying alive."

Thinking about checking out was a good thing, Padmanabhan explains kindly, sensing that at 32, I'm vulnerable to her special brand of logic.

"It instilled in me a tremendous sense of direction: I wanted to be great and famous and very rich. I wanted to have brilliant affairs and to be a philanthropist. And at 30 I was nowhere! I had not had any great affairs, I was not rich and I was not happy; the only thing I had at 30 was a sense of value for myself that I had not had at 17."

She mentions, casually, that she remained deeply miserable until she turned 42.

It's an interesting number: Douglas Adams used it as the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Why was it so important, I ask her; what changed at 42?

She takes a beat. "It was the Onassis Award. Or maybe it was the hysterectomy. I forget which came first."

Padmanabhan welcomed both. The hysterectomy relieved her of a long-standing discomfort with the essentials of being a woman. (She stopped calling herself a feminist when she realised that she enjoyed very little about being female; she is now married, and has no children by choice.)

She was the first recipient of the cash-rich Onassis Award for her play, Harvest; the sudden influx of money changed her life. It freed her from the struggle, often desperate, never enabling, to earn a living. But it also became a marker in more uncomfortable ways.

"In the Indian milieu, you will not be noticed for the creative work you're doing today unless somebody from abroad notices you. And then your own media says, Aha! You are exciting! The disillusionment was to realise that six years of Suki had no impact compared to that one news event of Harvest. I don't want to be whining but it's a repeating cycle of sadness, that we can't seem to be interested in ourselves for ourselves. There has to be some exterior cachet. It's not like people said about Harvest, wow, what a great play. They only ever said, wow, what a lot of money."

A decade on from Harvest, the inescapable economics of publishing still rule her life. Even prize money doesn't last forever. Dessert arrives; an apple jalebi for me with rabri on the side, chocolate cake for Padmanabhan. It provides a small dose of sweetness in a swell of bitter resignation about today's publishing world.

"They don't publish books as favours to authors. And if the author's work is not supported by readers, sadly, no more work. It's been a bad thing for me that I am unwilling to stump for my own books; it may mean that there won't be more books. Being 'famous' is not of any consequence to me now. But I certainly want to be rich because that's the only way I can continue to support my writing."

There won't be any more books? I'm still reeling at that, even while we're discussing the joys of Myst and Riven, games that the technophile part of Padmanabhan loved being immersed in a few years ago.

"It is the booklover's absolute metaphor "" you open a book, you put your hand on that first page and you are in this other world. It is such a fantastic analogy of what happens through literature, through books. It is that which engages you in a book, that immersion."

Immersion; that's what s her work has always provided, that's why I'm a Padmanabhan junkie, hooked on my next fix.

However, life after 50 continues to surprise, as a post-prandial call testifies. Catsmeat now has a companion; an injured pigeon handed over to Manjula Padmanabhan, Medicine Woman, by a friend. It doesn't have a name yet. But it will, it will.