A fearless exploration of the black hole of the mind

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities is filled with unpredictable, open-ended, and edgy sci-fi stories.

Perhaps Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” conceived octobaby? | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

On the last Sunday of September, a 100 pound metallic capsule fell from the sky into the Utah desert. Should we open it? Or leave it untouched, to be discovered 250 million years later on the supercontinent Pangaea Ultima by the onliest life form (lab-evolved, silica-based, genetic imprint of all previous life)? SuperCreature will be just as apprehensive as you are—until intrigued by the label, OSIRIS REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security—Regolith Explorer).

Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities

By Manjula Padmanabhan

Hachette India

Pages: 288

Price: Rs.599

Then, as now, all it will take to control the unknown is one magnificent lie. And in Osiris (circa 2,400 BCE) began the lie of Creation, of Life, of Afterlife, of Cosmic Order. From then on, an impenetrable Mylar shield—of creation myths, revelations, religions, and DC Comics—has kept us from being scorched by the incandescence of wonder. Cosying up with Osiris assures us of order. In maat, rta, asha, me, tao (call it what you want), we have the universe organised neater than Marie Kondo’s closet. I do not mean just our planetary living space. The darn concept has the cosmos by the short and curlies. Nothing escapes. Even little truant Bennu now trapped in its Osiris box will find a suitable slot.

As for me, strong-armed in Manjula Padmanabhan’s collection of science fiction, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities, I would open that capsule without a qualm. Over the last 24 hours, I have survived a world free of pain, toured a post-apocalyptic Utopia, dined with a cline, and empathised with a pair of vampires discussing reincarnation. I have been a queasy voyeur at the coupling of Sexually Viable Solitaires (since you ask, the trick of it is flexible tubes. Think mosquito sex sans serenade). I have even eavesdropped on the Conference of Gods. After all this, a panspermic dousing from Bennu seems well-nigh therapeutic.

Cover of Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

The human condition

Science can do only so much as fantasy because it is unpredictable, open-ended, and accelerates relentlessly away from human comprehension. It screams out for fiction to slam the brakes on it. Sci-fi supplies a human face and restores a recognisable terrain. Like murder in a detective story, science is merely the catalyst that forces a fresh look at the human condition.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the title story. “Stolen Hours” is eerily close to a common household crisis: gifted teenager, mulish parents, mutual rejection, isolation, aggression, stalemate followed by a moral and degrading resolution. It could be happening next door except that this teenager, dubbed the Rat but really Cyril Aloysius D’Cruz, is genius grade trouble. And he lives in a world that is every writer’s dystopia raised to the power of n. This kind of mind-blowing hate, though common enough in life, is brutishly unbridled in Padmanabhan’s telling. The murderous impasse is broken by the Rat’s neat invention of how to infuse himself with Time drained out of his father. And he does it too, with dire consequences that paradoxically suit both mother and son. This narrative has a visceral malice I thought had died with Roald Dahl. It is a terribly moral tale, told with unflinching honesty and, shorn of its pseudoscience, deeply cynical.

Padmanabhan’s fiction has always impressed me with its adolescent edginess, its capacity to outrage without losing innocence. Perhaps it comes from her understanding of that time of life, beautifully portrayed in the stories “Cool” and “Girl Who Could Make People Naked”. The latter contains two cringe-making paragraphs that made me worry about the writer’s revulsion towards the human body. That apart, this book is mostly lookist heaven, where the protagonists are lithe, high-breasted, and limber, give or take the odd appendage or two.

Open-ended narratives

If you take your satire neat, I recommend “Cull, India 2099”, and “Gandhitoxin”, which I read, shudderingly, on October 2. If you want to add to your growing collection of retold Ramayanas, there are three here. The first is more gender sensitive than old Valmiki’s yarn, but the other two are more fun. “Upgrade” is good for a giggle, and “Nanimals” delivers a Shirley Jackson stab of horror.

I preferred the stories that refuse pseudoscience and embark on a more open-ended narrative. In these, the writer does not sidestep the event horizon but explores, unafraid, the black hole of the mind. “Annexe” and “A Government of India Undertaking” are writerly stories sensitively limned in elegant prose.

Science fiction they may be, but these stories uphold the cosmic order and betray a whiff of comeuppance. Punishment looms in sci-fi, but does it, with science? Yesterday’s sci-fi is tomorrow’s school science—what will it grow up to be? That question is prompted by the last story, “Octobaby”, which appears on the endpaper of this delectably packaged book. Perhaps Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” conceived octobaby? It might grow up, as octopi do, with a different consciousness in each tentacle to make multiple identity the mental order of the day.

Octotopia may not necessarily be cacotopia. Science is too nimble to stay strange for long. That sparkle in your eye could just be quantum dot dazzle. That racing pulse your smile evokes? Just a lashing tapeworm hooking up in a freshly porcine heart.

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their newest book, Bahadur, is out in November 2023.