The Madness of Now

Every so often you come across a book with a rare quality of depth that sucks you in and holds you prisoner until the very last page. Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape is one such book. From an author who has been consistently producing good work for decades, and who has been unjustly neglected for most of them, this is the title that ought to set the world on its ear. It is a brutal, quietly vertiginous tale about a world of the future that may well be waiting for us just around the corner.

Meiji is a little girl who has been brought up by her three uncles. She has rarely seen the sun, but that's okay because she has her friends Mister Froggie and Mister Piggie, who talk to her through mirrors. Her three uncles, her caretakers, are trying to get her married off. They have to do this in secret, because marriage is illegal. In fact, though Meiji doesn't know this, women are illegal and have been so since the Change twenty years ago. This is a topic that haunts India: Manish Jha's Mathrubhoomi: A Nation without Women (2005) explored it vividly. Escape imagines a world somewhat later than Mathrubhoomi, where the whole of India is womanless and ruled by a conglomerate of clones called the Generals. Society is feudal, with the Estate owners on the top of the heap and drones—deafmute subhumans gestated in animals—do all the work. Meiji's uncles are rich estate owners, and they keep her well hidden for years, feeding her herbs to delay puberty. They teach her and play with her in what they increasingly realise is a quasi-erotic ritual. Meiji cannot stay: she is a constant danger to them as her discovery will mean their ruin. Having debated their options, including the possibility of killing her, they decide to send her away in the company of the youngest brother, known only as Youngest, in the hope that a safe haven can be found for her on the edges of the Generals' realm. They set out, and thus begins the end of Meiji's innocence and her slow discovery of the true nature of the world she inhabits. As they travel, she comes increasingly to realise that she is different, a "monster," and that all those around her are profoundly incapable of helping her or guiding her: her tragedy is not only her difference, but her crushing isolation. She is alternately manipulated, bullied, and protected by Youngest as he Schwarzeneggers his way across the countryside, doing "what is best" in typically male fashion, and failing utterly to tell her "the facts of life"—her life or anyone else's—or make sense of the enormous crime that has produced his world. He is a man of his age and place; he cannot stand outside it and see it for what it is, even though Meiji can and will, as she must, to understand who she is. As the story unfolds, the true extent of the calamity at the heart of this world is revealed slowly, with infinite deliberation, until along with Meiji, you scream to know the truth.

However, the real shock of Escape comes to you only when you stub your toe on the ending and realize just where the book has taken you and left you high and dry. In a city called merely the City, which might or might not be the ancient remains of Bombay, Meiji discovers that, freak as she is, she fits right in. There are women everywhere, teetering on high heels, flaunting their breasts...or are there? Women are dead, right—but Woman, the creature celebrated by the poets of patriarchy, is still very much alive and in business, and men do Woman better than anyone. So Meiji is doubly a freak, small and mousy like the makeup girl to a company of accomplished drag queens as she ponders her fate on the edges of the Generals' realm. Youngest isn't sympathetic. He tells her to get...