What’s the need for a specialised breed just to give birth to men, any more than there’s a need for specialised limbs for climbing trees or chopping wood?’ In Escape, the cloned army that rules over a country systematically cleansed of women disdains every aspect of the past. History is a drain on resources; the ‘Generals’, the self-regenerating clone master-race, don’t simply prohibit knowledge from circulating amongst their subjects; they also reject it themselves. Literacy and art are largely outlawed; most significantly, so are standard notions of biology. Women – the Vermin Tribe – are the most obvious casualty of this hideous utilitarianism, wiped out once men have discovered ways of artificial reproduction.

Escape is set in a nation that appears to be India, judging by the few cultural traditions allowed to exist in the face of the eco-cultural disaster that has befallen it. Music, food, costume, even art, are recognisably remnants of the ‘Time Before.’ The world of Escape could have sprung into existence two decades or millennia earlier, but after the end of the ‘Time Before,’ everything exists in a seeming vacuum. ‘True’ humans exist; so do their ‘generates,’ clones who are engineered into existence to take their place. To where, in this milieu, can one surviving teenage girl possibly escape? And how, in the complete absence of a culture that refuses to acknowledge, much less remember her kind, does she learn what it means to be a woman?

Variations on this question lie at the heart of the modern idea of dystopia. Ask Padmanabhan if the thought interested her because of its plausibility, though, and she denies it. “I never intended the book to be regarded as prophetic,” she says. Instead, Escape started out in her hands as an adventure story set against a backdrop of gender apocalypse. “So it’s not ‘about’ the gender gap or gender warfare, since the ‘war’ is over and men have won.”

In Escape, the overwhelming sense of wrongness brought about by the massive gender crimes is underscored by the ecological destruction of the landscape that Meiji and her uncle, Youngest, traverse. Padmanabhan assents to this, the idea that there cannot be this type of depletion without every feature of life being affected, that culture and, in a sense, the very rituals of civilisation, protect and are protected by human ideas of creativity and preservation.

“If a reader sees it and comes to this conclusion,” says Padmanabhan, “great. If not, then – it’s just an adventure story set against the backdrop of an eco-gender catastrophe.”
And it’s an adventure story driven by character and self-realisation. “I like to imagine that a story develops of its own accord,” Padmanabhan says, about her approach to writing. “While I can see the places where I consciously pushed the plot in one or the other direction, most of the time, I allowed it to find its own course from one day to the next.” For all its complexities, Padmanabhan views Escape as a novel of development, moved by its characters.

Both moving and thought-provoking, Escape will leave readers unsettled and eager for more, which Padmanabhan admits is a possibility.

Subscribe to Verve Magazine or buy the Verve issue on stands now!