Manjula Padmanabhan

The first novel in this series, Escape, is set in a future dystopian India, one where all women have been eliminated. The men reproduce through cloning, and neutered "drones" carry out the undesirable labor. There's just one woman left alive, Meiji, and Escape chronicles her attempt to escape the country in the company of her uncle (but actually her father), Youngest. It ends with them (if I recall correctly) making it over the border, implying a sequel. Now I am finally reading that long-awaited follow-up, though so many years on, my memory of the original book is vague.

The Island of Lost Girls begins with Youngest crossing into the outside world, carrying Meiji on him in a sort of stasis chamber. Youngest has been forcibly made into a woman by the General, the misogynist ruler of India, and the General is letting Youngest go forward as part of a plan to dominate the outside world as he has dominated India. The opening is captivating and intense, as Youngest tries to navigate customs and immigration and find help without being taken advantage of; I liked the woman he meets, Aila, who like Youngest was born a man, but she wanted to transition, unlike him.

The novel, however, lost me when Meiji is taken from Youngest and sent to the titular island to be mentally rehabilitated by a group of women, though they steal her memories. The first novel had clear stakes and a strong throughline, but I found this one very amorphous and circular. It's frustrating for a novel about the oppression of women to make its main female character so unessential to the narrative; Meiji's scenes didn't have clear points to me. I wasn't sure what she was trying to do. Which, I think, is the point, but that still leaves it frustrating. Similarly, I felt the stuff with Youngest trying to get to the island (to rescue Meiji and/or do the bidding of the General) went on and on, and the stuff about the deadly competitive games in the outside world seemed tacked on.

Weirdly, the part of the novel I tended to enjoy the most were the scenes of the General waiting on his yacht with Aila, I suppose because he had a clear goal and strong desires, no matter how abhorrent, as did Aila. I knew where those scenes were going!

The opening has the worldbuilding I enjoyed so much in Escape, but once the action moves to the island, the novel feels too confined. Even if it would ultimately turn out that Meiji and Youngest needed to "escape" again, I think it was a mistake to reduce the scope in the sequel instead of opening it up.… (meer)

I got into Manjula Padmanabhan as part of a project on Indian science fiction (I eventually published an article about her in an academic journal). Her most famous work is the horrific dystopian play Harvest, but I was really won over by her short fiction. It's been collected in three different volumes, of which this is the earliest, the other two being Kleptomania: Ten Stories (2004) and Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013).

Hot Death, Cold Soup collects, as the subtitle implies, twelve short stories, both previously published stories from 1984 to 1995, and a set of unpublished ones written over the same time period. The most famous of these is probably "A Government of India Undertaking," one of the science fiction ones: a desperate narrator discovers the government bureaucracy that controls reincarnation and tries to figure out who she needs to bribe to get out of her current life and into a much better one-- an amusing idea with a nice final scene.

I feel like much of Padmanabhan's non-sf is driven by an sfnal impulse, to take a single idea and follow its permutations and implications through to their ultimate conclusion, such as the title story, about a white American widow of an Indian man who's determined to commit sati, or "The Calligrapher's Tale" (probably my favorite in this book), about a wealthy young man who hires a highly skilled calligrapher to write out erotica for him, or "Teaser," about a sexual harasser who finally accomplishes his greatest goal.

Padmanabhan is skilled at capturing human pettiness and balancing it with the meaningful and the profound: I enjoyed, for example, "Mrs Ganapathy's Modest Triumph," about a woman trying to marry off her unconventional daughter, and "The Copper-tailed Skink," about a white English biology professor doing field work in India who's struggling with a different culture with different customs. One of my other favorites was "Stains," which concerns a black American woman engaged to an Indian man, and the cultural differences she considers irreconcilable-- the "stains" of the title are menstrual blood she leaves on the sheets, to which her future mother-in-law reacts quite strongly.

I guess as I write that I realize that a number of these stories deal with cultural clash, which Padmanabhan handles in an interesting and provocative way, as someone who's spent her own life passing between India and Britain. Like her other volumes, highly recommended.… (meer)