Shalini’s quest, as a widowed, “tainted” woman, involves understanding what has happened to Leila, herself, and the lives of her loved ones, and and struggling to accept the incalculable loss to both herself and her world.Ī short read, the description of the world’s new, segregated society sucks you in, as you read on with some trepidation, dreading how plausible this world will end up sounding. Leila’s crime? Being the product of a mixed Hindu Muslim marriage, something antithetical to this new society’s rules of purity. The story follows Shalini, the narrator, a mother whose her daughter, the eponymous Leila, has been taken away from her. Class structures are propped up and strengthened. Love, in some of its forms, becomes illegal. In this world of walled rather than gated communities and actively enforced separation, acknowledging the humanity of your fellow human effectively becomes illegal. The inhabitants of urban India, browbeaten by economic recession and a scramble for essential resources like drinking water and clean air, begin to revert to a state of communal segregation. Leila starts off with a bleak, but not so hypothetical scenario. That’s precisely why books like Leila are a breath of fresh air. Which is a shame really, because how can you not realize how perfect a setting urban India is for dystopian fiction? As an enthusiast of both speculative fiction and Indian writing, I’ve noted with some dismay that the contribution of Indian English writers to this unique genre has been quite minimal, or their “Indian-ness” underplayed in favor of a generic, nameless, western identity.
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