Of A Future Mephistopheles

MANJULA Padmanabhan has done for the Indian play in English what Arundhati Roy has done for the novel this year. Harvest , her play about the human organs bazaar which won the $250,000 (Rs 86 lakh) Aristotle Onassis International Drama Award in Athens in September, is a dark, bitter, savagely funny vision of the cannibalist future that awaits the human race. It is a parable of what will happen when the rich denizens of the First World actually begin to devour bits and pieces of the Third World poor.

Before I say more, let me state a personal prejudice: futurist and science fiction fantasies leave me cold. Barring Lindsay Anderson's

If... , the films of Kubrick and Tarkovsky and an occasional foray into Arthur C. Clarke, I am not taken in by the genre. Excess of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, technical wizardry and travels in hyper-reality make me irritably flick pages. When the manuscript of Harvest arrived, its stage references to 'donors', 'receivers' and revolving strobe-like TV modules suspended from the ceiling carried the risk of glazed-over eyes. But although the three-act play runs to two-and-a-half hours on stage—as a script it is read in half an hour flat—there is not one improbable situation or a single boring line.

Padmanabhan uses a futurist situation and electronic gadgetry to disturbing effect in what is essentially a modern morality play. With unnerving aplomb, she employs the incendiary dramatic device of fusing horror with hilarity. "To me the most reassuring part of the play at its first reading, was that people laughed," she says. "When audiences laugh aloud, their defences are down. They're susceptible to anything I might really want to say. It is my way of disarming people." The originality of the play stems from its bleak vision sheathed in the blackest of comedy.

Harvest is the purest form of gallows humour to flow from an Indian pen since the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.

It is set in a Mumbai chawl in the year 2010. The cramped one-room tenement is occupied by a typical four-member family: Om Prakash, the jobless down-at-heel clerk; Jaya, his worn-out young wife; Ma, his poison-tongued harridan of a mother; and Jeetu, his good-looking younger brother who works as a male prostitute. To ward off starvation in a city wracked by poverty, unemployment, food shortages and other unnamed conflicts, men such as Om Prakash join queues outside Inter Planta Services. This is a high-tech contract firm that chooses able-bodied candidates to 'donate' their bodies to Western buyers who live in perpetual fear of old age, accidents or the faintest sign of bodily decay. Once the donor commits his life and limbs to a wealthy receiver, the receiver pays for the donor and his family's upkeep—and also keeps daily tabs on them by way of regular long-distance calls on a video module.

The result of Om's Faustian pact with Ginny, an irresistibly gorgeous blonde in far-off California, who appears on the video screen at regular intervals ("I see you!...oh, my God! I see you! Is that really you? Auwm? Praycash?") is at first exhilarating, then terrifying. Overnight Om Prakash and his family's material needs vanish. The dingy tenement is transformed into a shiny

well-appointed bed-sit, an air-conditioned chamber with fitted kitchen, toilet, gym and computer where Jaya sits painting her nails all day long and crabby old Ma is glued to the New TV set. But Mephistopheles lurks behind Ginny's admonishing and seductive video image. And by the time Ginny is ready to redeem her side of the bargain as a receiver, Om Prakash and his family are already set on the path to destruction: Om will betray Jeetu, Jeetu will betray his lover and Ma will sink into the abyss of TV-controlled oblivion.

By putting a surprising new spin on situations that are intrinsically Indian—the relationship between brother-in-law and sister-in-law, for instance, or between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law—Padmanabhan unmasks a wide range of emotion, from raw sexuality, vicious backbiting to whimpering cowardice. Moulding the gritty realities of life into a 21st century fable, she powerfully questions the limits of poverty and material want, and in a searing final scene between Jaya and the reincarnated video image that is a model of denouement writing, weighs up the price of vaunting human ambition against the cost of individual dignity.

Message-mongering, however, is not Harvest's main purpose. It is not a play to think heavy thoughts by; its chief merit lies in its lines, delivered in rapidfire bursts of shrapnel-sharp dialogue. "If you take my play apart it is about lines," confesses Padmanabhan. "And I can explain where my on-board training in dialogue-writing comes from. It comes from being a professional comic-strip artist. I don't watch TV so I am not contaminated by tele-gibberish. But if for six years you've sat down to produce a comic strip on a near-daily basis, you learn to spend time in refining dialogue within a tight format."

 As book illustrator, cartoonist, columnist and progenitor of the comic-strip character 'Suki', Manjula Padmanabhan has been an established byline for more than 20 years. Less well-known, until now, have been her forays into writing plays, film scripts and short stories.

Harvest , in fact, is her fifth play. Her first, Lights Out! , about six people who watch a gang-rape and do nothing about it, was written in 1984. Hot Death , Cold Soup , her collection of short stories published by Kali for Women two years ago, drew universal raves. It has just come out in Britain and is startling as much for its bizarre subject matter as for the range of forms explored, from surreal fiction to an exposition of Indian Gothic. Were Edgar Allan Poe let loose in modern India, he might have penned the long title story. It is about a young woman journalist, the classic newsroom scooper, who follows a phone call to a small town in the hills from an American widow who has planned her own sati and wants to go down in a blaze of publicity. The ghoulish scheme is electrifying for the meticulous arrangements made for the death, a mode not dissimilar to Ma's electronic annihilation in Harvest .

Do tales of ritual suicide, gang-rape, dowry murder and the bazaar in human organs make her Manjula the Morbid? Or Padmanabhan the Flag-waving Feminist? In fact, she is irritated by labels and fascinated by identity, not ideology. "What I have chafed against all my life is fixed notions, of being an Indian, a daughter, wife, even a woman. I don't like the idea of a single sexual identity. If I had my way, gender would be a neutral state of being. It is just another of the disappointments of life. But, then, I would be maladjusted living in any society."

Hers has been a rolling stone's life. Looking back on her 43 years, she supposes the rootlessness to stem from growing up in many places as a diplomat's daughter. Although born in Delhi, she did not set foot on Indian soil again till the age of eight. "It was an awful shock," she says. That early feeling of being the outsider lingered. Later, life in boarding school in Kodaikanal and Elphinstone College, Mumbai, exacerbated her sense of being at odds with the world. BJP MP Vasundhara Raje, her best friend at school whom she has hardly seen since, describes her as being "odd but brilliant". Among other habits, Padmanabhan confesses to "a reputation for ending friendships abruptly and completely". She refuses point-blank to talk about her marriage but describes her father's last years ("his life crumbled completely after retirement, he was totally unprepared for life after government") with a candour that is sad, funny and spot-on. Her views on the subject of children are akin to those of songwriter Cole Porter who, when asked whether he liked them, replied: "Yes, on toast".

Determined to make her own way in the world after college, she has been on the fringes of journalism and publishing, describing her Grub Street existence as an "impetuous, rough ride on the edge of bankruptcy". But the hard facts of life have never held as much appeal as the world of make-believe. In 1995 she saw a small announcement in an Australian paper inviting entries for the Onassis Award and began to write

Harvest , in utter secrecy and within a self-imposed deadline of three months, rewriting and revising every single day. She is definite about both her ability and her achievement. "The reason my story-telling veers off into science fiction or the surreal is because it enables me to cut loose from the annoying constraints of realistic detail," she says. "I've not had a life easy for others to recognise. It's always been easier to manufacture a reality. And it's also my way of living other people's lives."