Unavoidable Bumps

Detail from cover

Any work of literature addressing the sociopolitical and economic conditions of a futuristic India cannot be complete without a mention of the issues involving Hindu(tva) and Muslims that affect (and will continue to do so) the geopolitics of a beast with current approximation of one and a half billion feet. While Anil Menon has successfully harnessed the crises of an imploding Indian milieu in The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, certain glaring omissions like the one mentioned above and ignoring cross currents of religious issues that always inform Indian politics considerably take the sheen off of an otherwise brilliant masterpiece that presents a curious blend of science, fantasy, culture, corruption, decadence, familial crises, bondage, and redemption. Like its youthful protagonist Adi, the novel structurally reflects the gymnastics of parkour—uncharacteristic twists and turns, seemingly unavoidable bumps into familiar thematic walls suddenly shift towards new avenues of improbable occurrences. While geared towards tapping the redoubtable energy of the twenty-first-century "Youngistan" (what emerging India is popularly known as among its current generation), Nine Billion masterfully encapsulates the crises of a supremely developed eastern civilization in a sociocultural flux owing to its denizens' catch 22 with respect to the pressures of a larger communal nexus.

The novel's highlight is the handling of Indianness and what it means to be culturally rooted in one's past despite being heavily sedated with large doses of scientific advancement. It is nothing short of a Bollywood flick where Anil crams in all the imaginable cultural tokens of a dynamic urban milieu against the backdrop of familial relationships—cheesy love and hate fiascos, overly concerned aunts and uncles, weirdly intelligent twins, scheming mothers, and deeply concerned yet distanced fathers. Through a close exploration of a fanatastic urban city of Maharashtra in 2040 AD, Anil brings home the irrepressible truth—local cultures social mores thrive in tandem with the hurried encroachment of rabid fantasies of world domination. While this book is Indian at heart, it deals with the larger implications of the possibility or viability of sustaining this Indianness against the powers being exerted by its doppelgänger, the India that is a global super power, a corrupt and greedy entity threatening to devour everything in its path. Most uniquely, Nine Billion doesn't come across as an apology of an emergent India trying to vie with Western civilization; rather, it documents the tribulations of a redoubtable urban India threatening to challenge the very existence of human beings, of how we live on this planet.

The book's structure is stylistically disconcerting and yet delightful. Every alternate chapter is connected through various sub-plots and ends with a customary twist—a revelation or discovery akin to a detective novel. The reader can capture a linear movement of thought if he/she reads only the alternating chapters. The nefarious vamp of this novel, Vispala, who hates anything academic and structured, would definitely have been appreciative of such a quirk. In addition, the plot functions on multiple layers of perception. The first belongs to the jawan duniya of two sets of brothers and sisters—Adi and Tara (or Tea), Ria and Francis; their quasi-bildungsroman journeys are strewn with discoveries, disappointments, deceptions, emancipation, and exultation. On the secondary level, we have worldly folks like Aunt Sita, Mandira/Vispala (and her sensitized autobahn, Lynex), Mali, Sivan-bhau, Yeshwant, Sunny-bhai, and Inspector Pranay, characters who try to centipede out of their respective crises by embroiling themselves in affairs of genetic engineering, artificial life, Dharma protocol, Free Life, Bene Gene, Bodz, Illusion, Pure grain, and talking parrots. The uncomfortable compromise and clash between these two worlds give Nine Billion much of its razzmatazz. While Adi is the most exciting link connecting the two worlds (Sivan-bhau's son adept at genetic engineering who successfully completes the Shark Project), Ria and Francis are the other-worldly children without navels who have Mandira as their guardian and "artificially" follow their mother's directions to use Tea and...