The Girl with the Seven Lives review: A thrilling journey through India’s urban underbelly
In Vikas Swarup’s gripping thriller with a soul, a young woman assumes many identities in order to survive; it shows how ‘a million mutinies’ exist uneasily at bewilderingly different layers in India
As one races through Vikas Swarup’s unputdownable novel, The Girl with the Seven Lives (Simon & Schuster India), in which the girl protagonist recounts the vicissitudes of her seven seemingly disjointed yet organically connected lives to her captor under mortal threat, one realises it is much more than a racy thriller. At one level, it is about the rapidly changing ‘homopsychogeographicus’ of urban India where survival finds itself pitted against all manners of existential pathologies, where dreams remain still-born and nightmares have a field day.
At another level, a hint of The Arabian Nights is difficult to miss. Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights tells a new story each night to the blood-thirsty prince to keep averting her death and how her stories defy and defeat death in the end. But most of all, it is about how V.S. Naipaul’s India of ‘a million mutinies’ exists uneasily at bewilderingly different layers, defying any rationalisation and generalisation.
Social anthropology of urban India
It is the desperate push and not the meretricious pull that is at the core of migration from the countryside to the cities. Cities are alien, unwelcoming and harsh but going back to the village is an impossibility. Against the background of this dislocating journey, Munni, the protagonist, and her family members are bereft of the grammar that could unlock the city for them. Existing at the margins of existence in slums, death lurks as a permanent probability that ends up consuming her parents and siblings.
Left to fend for herself, Munni finds herself at all sorts of places which promise solace and security, even spiritual redemption but, in fact, turn out to be places full of mayhem and chaos. Munni would have to negotiate this journey on her own. Swarup takes Munni, and with her the readers, to very different locations and settings which promise deliverance, but which fail to deliver. During her journey, Munni assumes different names identified with different religious denominations — a survival strategy but even that fails to redeem her.
Leitmotif through different theatres
What is the common thread that runs through different theatres where Munni finds herself? But let’s first recall the theatres where she willy-nilly finds herself. At traffic intersections where rival gangs, police informers and other shady characters compete for prominence. In the house of an uber-rich female who is in need of a muse for her authentic novel on slum life. At the Muskan Observation Home for Girls, where all manners of perversions and transgressions take place.
In the Ashram of a Godman in a dera in Punjab where the gullible devotees are taken for a ride and where sex and sleaze are rife. She finds herself at Kottayam in Kerala where she excels as a counterfeit queen forging documents and degrees and she finds herself on the run when it is busted. A forged nursing degree takes her to a private corporate hospital in Goa where she feels she has found her bearings but the circumstances conspire against her and she lands in Mumbai. It is in Mumbai that her luck finally runs out and she finds herself at the mercy of the captor.
Common threads
With life on the run, Munni is not without agency. In fact, desperation sharpens her shrewd survival instincts. Coupled with obstinacy, these are the only resources she has had. Second, such institutions as an observation home for juveniles or a spiritual retreat promising redemption underline the gap between their advertised nobility and their actual underbelly.
Third, what we call urban need not necessarily be urbane. The urban anonymity and anomie nurse and nurture all manners of monsters and demons for whom the poor, the vulnerable and the women are easy prey as the demons roam around with a sophisticated veneer but sinister heart. Mistreated, abused and repeatedly violated, Munni develops her own system of justification, of noble and ignoble, of good and bad and she stands by her convictions. It is this resilience which keeps her going against overwhelming odds.
Melodrama and Slumdog Millionaire redux
As with all the thrillers, melodrama is only in order. Those escapes from one theatre to another, with the Police hot on the heels and Munni on the run, Munni assuming new guises and disguises, taking rather effortlessly to new vocations and finding herself — without a penny — in a new city impart thrill to the novel while detracting from its credibility.
The denouement, with a twist in the tale, has the dramatic flair straight out of a Bollywood movie. But a novel is not a textbook and fiction gives the novelist licence to experiment with the newer ways to come to terms with the world. The novel has all the makings of cinematic adaptation.