In the dystopian universe of Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls — one that consists of hyenas, vultures, travelling tubes made of crabs and blood-thirsty hybrid lizards — women are seen as vermin and butchered. The book is a contrast between two extremes; one, a land of sheer brutality, and another, of horrifying discipline and uniformity. In this binary world of vengeance and sexual depravation, the only thing that makes sense is the love of the protagonists — Meiji, and her uncle Youngest — for each other. On the shortlist for The Hindu Prize, the author discusses the art of bending gender and social norms in a fantastical world in order to take on real issues. Excerpts:
It is very difficult to believe that that the creator of the funny, existentialist Suki also penned a dark and dystopian novel like The Island of Lost Girls .
I don’t see it that way. Suki is in print again. So every week, I am reminded that humour is often about brutal truths. Just the other day, for instance, my central character, Suki, was swallowed up by a polar bear! In a cartoon, it can seem funny but the underlying reality is that polar bears are going extinct because the ice-caps are melting. My view of reality is dark even in the comic strip, but I present it with a little twist that makes it seem like a joke.
You have created a parallel world in this novel. How does this alternative reality shape your sense of reality?
We already live in a world in which tiny cameras can travel through a person’s digestive tract, taking photographs, and mosquitoes can be infected with bacteria that prevent them from spreading the Zika virus! Nothing in my novel is more surreal or unlikely than what is happening in the pages of today’s newspapers.
Tell us about your creative process.
A large part of what I do as a writer is to create mental films of the story as I write it. It’s not an effort. It’s just the way I think and live. I believe everyone does it to some extent: when we are about to leave the house, we have a mental image in our mind of what conditions to expect outside. I merely take that same behaviour one step further and create stories. It’s a bit like dreaming, except that I am fully awake. I set up a scene and a handful of characters. Then I set them loose in the set and write down a description of what I see. Often, this can mean days and weeks wasted on tedious story lines or dead ends. It’s a rather time-consuming approach to being an author.
Your last novel Escape was released in 2008. How have Youngest and Meiji evolved over the years?
I began writing The Island of Lost Girls in 2010 but I had been thinking about it almost as soon as Escape was published. But it took four years to finish! It was a long, slow struggle, like climbing barefoot up a steep hill, on a cold wet, day.
You have blurred genders, bent sexual norms and broken the binaries. Why did you find the experimentation of the sexual borders necessary?
Well, the story is centred on Meiji, a girl who must escape the country of her birth if she wants to live, because its rulers have declared it to be an all-male region. So gender issues are fundamental to the plot. She wants to find a place where she can just be herself. Yet even in today’s world, with female genital mutilation and male circumcision, selfhood is a very complex issue. Some people believe they cannot accept a community member who is not a strict vegetarian. Others insist on strict dress codes. In a certain sense, we are all experimenting with sexual/ social borders with every choice we make — whether it is to wear a bindi or to use contraception or to eat garlic and eggs.
There is also a thread of innocence to Meiji that takes us back to stories we have grown up with. Were you influenced by children’s literature, while characterising Meiji?
We lived in Sweden and Switzerland when I was a child, and I loved the Scandinavian, Greek and Roman myths that I was exposed to then. I have maintained that love of myths and fantasy all through my life. Fairytales and science fiction were a major part of my reading landscape. I often re-imagined the stories I read, and entered them as a participant.
Zone and Island, consisting of brutal men and refugee women, respectively, are enemy camps. Is this your vision of the future?
Not really. But the gender-violence that we’re experiencing all over the world is beginning to look like a type of horrific battlefield. It used to be that women were treated with special care, because child-bearing was considered a sacred task. Today however, overpopulation in some parts of the world has created enormous problems. In that sense, the functions that women were traditionally associated with — child-bearing and rearing — are no longer crucial for survival. They may even be something to be feared. I have often wondered whether this is at the root of all the violence we see against women: an unconscious desire to destroy the source of surplus lives.
Do you think the human project is a failed one?
No! Not at all. But we are just one of many thousands of species on a small blue planet. We have the intelligence to live in harmony with our environment, but our greed often leads us astray. If we are not careful, it can destroy us.
