The versatile Manjula Padmanabhan has entertained and provoked readers for decades, starting with her beloved Suki cartoons and her elaborately illustrated essays about autorickshaws and such, and even a sweet children’s book about a family going to market. Because it is money that makes news, it was probably her play Harvest that made her famous; it was awarded a staggering amount of prize money in the 1990s. Harvest was also the work in which Padmanabhan took us into a darker country, a future (not unimaginable even back then) in which human organs are internationally traded.
Taxi
Hachette India
Pages: 344
Price: Rs.699
She drew us further into the darkness with The Island of Lost Girls, another dystopia in which girls were almost eliminated. The protagonist of her latest, Taxi, is Maddy Sen, who works independently as a driver for other women. She becomes enmeshed in a particularly, often pointlessly, convoluted plot.
Thin material
At the outset, she is evicted in classic Delhi style, with her belongings thrown out on the street. Homeless and confused, she is contacted by a lawyer who offers her a way out. He asks her to take on a special assignment as a driver for a woman named Verity but in the guise of a male chauffeur.
So we have cross-dressing, a suspiciously convenient saviour, and many unanswered questions. The optimistic reader sits back and waits for fireworks. But for some reason, having persuaded Maddy to drive for a single client on lavish terms, Verity and the lawyer keep trying to talk her out of it. This will-you, why-would-you goes on for nearly a third of the novel. Rather thin material is spun out at length, padded with details of opulent decor and place settings.
Cover of Taxi | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Much is made of secret corridors and multiple entrances, and the reader waits in vain for all that to matter at some point in the story. Even more is made of the logistics of changing costumes en route (in a world without telephone booths, as the characters point out) and of Maddy’s managing to pee while in disguise. So much is said about the joys of cigarettes that we can only conclude Hachette has been bought out by Big Tobacco. And there are stray characters we will never figure out.
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What we miss in the novel is grounded storytelling. Despite a dutiful recital of the roads and colonies of Delhi, the reader is not able to enter a plausible fictional space or time. We get little sense of where Maddy comes from or what makes up her distresses and her triumphs. The story takes a long time to lead up to what we imagine to be the big story or event, surrounding a Supreme Court lawyer and the tribal rights case he is arguing.
Readers look for some substance from Manjula Padmanabhan, but she has written a book that is dressed like chicklit and quacks like chicklit. Old fans should probably sit out this novel and wait for the next one.
Latha Anantharaman is a writer and editor based in Palakkad.
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