GJV Prasad

THIS is a debut novel that comes with many enthusiastic endorsements, every one of them well-earned. Vauhini Vara can write well and tell a good story, even if the story is dystopian. Oh yes, this novel is partly (not so) speculative fiction (SF), partly a diasporic novel, and partly a Dalit novel in that the protagonists come from a Dalit family. If this is complicated (I don’t think it is), it is so in an engaging manner in an extremely readable narrative, one many of us will recognise or relate to — especially the dystopian.

One of the reasons this works simply as SF is that the question of identity is approached from the point of view of individuality and self-expression in a corporate united world of globalisation. King Rao is a Dalit born in Kothapalli, in Andhra Pradesh. His mother dies when he is born, his aunt steps into her sister’s slippers and marries King Rao’s father. King Rao (King being the English name he is given in place of the proposed Raja) lives up to his name as he almost rules the entire world and then is the master of all he surveys in his own island. This novel is his story, from his birth till his death. This is not a tale of a poor, persecuted Dalit making it rich in a distant land. The Raos are landowners in a village where, despite the caste hierarchy, many Dalits are well-to-do. One of King Rao’s grandfathers runs a school while the other owns a coconut grove where King is raised. This is the story of how this coconut grove family fares during King Rao’s lifetime, how they move from a tightly-run family and family business to a state where the family drifts apart, and the grove is abandoned. From their land and business funding them, they move to King Rao funding them.

This is also the story of sons and daughters who feel the need to escape from their families, from their smothering spaces, to move to other pastures, to realise unknown dreams. This is a diasporic novel — about a brilliant boy from a small place in Andhra who takes the route of boarding school and IIT to finally make it to the US. He struggles to adjust in a new land, has the usual ‘alien’ experiences of displaced people, makes it big (this is the American Dream), and is a huge success story. He grows away from home and his mother, doesn’t go back for almost forever, like most Indians who went to study in the US in the second half of the 20th century. He is sent there early enough by the novelist so that he can be part of the computer revolution, one of the early software successes, one who sets up what is to become a world-dominating corporation — Coconut (get it?), rivalling the East India Company of yore. He marries his professor’s daughter, Margie, who is a real visionary and a designer, and who is instrumental in building his business empire.

They have a daughter Athena, born much after King Rao is stripped of all power and the death of his divorced wife. Athena is carried to term by a surrogate mother from the parents’ frozen embryo, ironically by an Ex, the Exes being people who had rejected the corporate world of complete surveillance and algorithm policing and control of life — the world of equity set up by King Rao, whose corporation ruled the world simply by taking over governance of various countries. The world was now ruled ‘efficiently’ by a Board and a CEO.

Corporate avarice leads the planet inexorably toward global warming and planetary death. The Exes can only live in hope, and the shareholders (as citizens of the corporate world are called) can only live in ignorance or false belief, but the time is already past for any scientific intervention saving the planet. Athena understands all this not only through her brains being connected to the Internet, but also through her father’s consciousness connecting with hers (all this seems quite possible), and also through her running away from her father to the island of the first Exes, the ones who led the revolution against him. They are still hoping to showcase a truly egalitarian society where each one works according to their skill sets and are taken care of by the community. But the time is past for all this, the world is on its way to annihilation.

The whole story is from the point of view of Athena, and this allows the writer to escape any questions about authenticity. This allows us also the distance from King Rao and allows us to read the novel as SF, something that is very close to our reality, perhaps is our reality, while still not questioning verisimilitude.

This is a book that will get you.