Harvest Of Riches

The Indian novel is now a well-established moneymaker abroad. But for the first time an Indian play in English, usually seen as a cultural dead-end, has won international accolades. Padmanabhan's play tells a chilling story of how "a small family in a small tenement in Bombay is distorted by capitalist money". The year is 2010, and Third World nations have been transformed into 'donor' nations, and the First World into 'recipients'. People in the West buy a poor man in Bombay and keep him in good health so that his organs can be made available to them whenever needed. He is paid to keep his organs in perfect working order and, by extension, forgo his human rights. "Since he has to keep healthy at all costs, he has, for example, no right to be unhappy," Padmanabhan says. "It's a situation that is not acceptable to the family but for them the money is an absolute argument."

Padmanabhan has travelled thru Stockholm, Geneva, Bangkok, Karachi and Teheran with her diplomat father, returning to work in Bombay before moving to Delhi in 1985. She's illustrated children's books, held exhibitions of posters, written short stories for magazines, learnt zinc plate etching, and written four plays. A collection of short stories, Hot Death Cold Soup, was published in '96; her comic strip Suki, about the life of a feminist journalist—"Suki used to be me. Now she is not"—appears in The Pioneer. "I have ideas all the time, I need to for the cartoon strip," she laughs self-deprecatingly. Padmanabhan is determinedly unglamorous and down to earth. "No one can grudge me my success, can they? After all, I'm fat and 44!" Nonetheless, the Greeks loved her.

"I had this idea for a long time, so when I read the brief for this competition—about the human condition in the next millennium, I wrote this play, but in great secrecy."

Her first play, Lights Out!, is about public apathy to rape; The Mating Game Show was written as a 36-part TV serial for Govind Nihalani; The Sextet is "six short plays about sex"; The Artists' Model "an existential play on art and an attack on the art industry". 

So are Meaningful Social  Dramas her thing? Is she an outsider in India taking a detached look at society, one step removed, for inspiration? "Not really. Harvest is quite a racy play, not heavy and ideological. You can't expect an audience to buy tickets, then harangue them with a message. I'm no activist but I did go through periods in my life pondering The Meaning of Life!" 

Padmanabhan wrote her first play after she realised that a newsreport or a journalistic feature would only go so far. "In a play the reaction of the public is instant. After the first rehearsed reading of Lights Out! by Ranvir Shah in Madras, there was an instant reaction. 'Does she only write in English?' I am a Malayali but I don't speak it or read it. As far as I'm concerned, I speak an Indian language called English." 

Padmanabhan's play is free of ostentatious ethnicity. "Perhaps because I'm not part of any 'local' milieu. . it's a pan-human situation." She says for the first time in India it's lucrative for people to write in English. "Possibly because of the way the publishing industry is set up, the way the market works, people who could never be authors as there was no money in it, now can." Anything wrong in literature being a commodity in the market place? "It is a shame, but if more people write, one or two genuine literary talents will emerge."

 She lives in leafy Sundar Nagar, with her American husband, Ethan. "Please don't call him that, he's my friend. I want to be free of the institutional trappings of marriage." She draws her cartoons from what she sees around her, writes short stories and illustrates books. An infectious sense of humour bubbles over every few minutes, eyes gleam with bizarre observations. Padmanabhan says she's been struggling all her life. "I belong to a section of people who had a privileged education and background but had to make my own living." She began working with a small Parsi magazine, Parsiana, her first sale was five Vakil's greeting cards. Now, she's famous and has lots of money. "It's nice," she grins. "It means I can do what I like without worrying."