Review: The Girl With The Seven Lives

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SB Veda

Known best for the novel, which was adapted into the multiple Oscar winning film, Slumdog Millionaire, author Vikas Swarup returns to the slums, once again, in his latest offering, The Girl with the Seven Lives, published this year by Simon & Schuster India.

The Girl With The Seven Lives Publisher ‏ : Simon & Schuster Ltd (1 January 2024);
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 340 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8197278903
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8197278907

As in Q&A, better known as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, the reader meets the protagonist at the height of peril: she finds herself kidnapped, a black hood around her head, hands bound behind her back, feet fastened to the legs of a hard chair, in a dingy basement of an unknown building, gun to her head. She notices a camera fitted on a tripod and assumes she will be raped and murdered, the act perversely preserved for the perpetrator.

However, the masked man holding her assures her no such violence will be meted out by him, though has an ominous request: confess your all the crimes you’ve committed, and this will all be over.

The protagonist who goes by several names in each of the ‘lives’ she feels compelled to live by circumstances was born as Devi, and though feisty with her captor, deep down, she has been expecting trouble, for she has been living under a cloud of endangerment for much of her short life. “Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later,” Devi confesses.

She learns that her confessions will not result in her release. Rather, the feed from the video is being watched by persons unknown to whom her fate will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.  We learn that Devi has made more than a few enemies in her life thus far, and on this is her judgment day.

So begins Devi’s life story narrated by her to the camera and her jailer. The reader is treated to her thoughts as she goes through this, hoping to find some means of escape, prolonging the confessions by providing as much detail as she can recall or weave. Whatever gets the job done.

We learn that Devi comes from a small village where her father was a farm laborer, and that he had moved her along with his wife and two sons to a slum near the railway station called Rail Basti. There, the family lives underneath a tarp as the father becomes a transitory construction worker, moving their makeshift dwelling from site to site as he gets work. There is no running water, and the family must clear their makeshift home of water with buckets when it rains. Delhi has a heavy monsoon season, making living in such a place a terrible hardship.

Mosquitoes and other pests buzz around not to mention rats – all carrying some kind of disease. Devi’s father was caught by the lure of the city, and the promise of a better life than that of toiling in the fields on farmland belonging to another. But their plight is no better at Rail Basti.

Their situation improves as her mother becomes a pregnancy surrogate for a wealthy American couple. The family is showered with gifts, and they are paid so much money that Devi’s father need not work. Her ambitious elder brother, Rajinder gets the funds he needs to pursue an education. They move to a small flat in the better part of the bast, which has its own bathroom, and enough room for the family.

Their relative comfort and security is threatened when the money runs out. By then, Devi’s father is no longer accustomed to the hard days of working construction. He relapses into periodic drinking binges. When a hit-and-run, and corrupt police end up taking her siblings from her, it destroys the family. Her mother dies and it is not long before her father drinks himself to death.

Orphaned, she must fend for herself on the streets where she struggles to survive, finding an opportunity to exact revenge on the corrupt policeman who let the killer of her younger brother off the hook, and who she believes has tortured and killed her elder brother. It is a daring first step into a life of crime especially as she gets away with it.

Her only companion is an abandoned purebred German shepherd whom she names Sheru. She shares everything with him, including what little food she can get.

After a news feature about her and her dog comes to the notice of a high-ranking banking executive, Devi is offered the opportunity to live with the woman and her family – not as a domestic but as a member of the family much to the ire of the woman’s daughter, her domestics and the indifference of her day-trading husband. The woman is caring seems genuinely interested in Devi’s life up till that point. Devi is given her own room in the main house, not those quarters reserved for servants. While averse to pets, the woman even accepts Sheru into the house.

At last, Devi feels that fate has dealt her a winning hand. She enjoys the comfort, the television, the clothes she is given – and the freedom that comes with living at the house, even if she isn’t accepted by all of its occupants.

As with all of Devi’s adventures, all is not what it seems, and the seemingly altruistic woman, has an ulterior agenda:  Devi whose name is changed by her benefactor to Deepa has been welcomed into what seems to Devi to be a palace compared any domicile she’d experienced, only to serve as a window for the kind lady of the house into slum life; unhappy as a successful banker, she wants write a book about the other side of the tracks, and gain fame and self-actualization for it. She even gives Devi a video camera and orders her to go back to the slum to record what goes on to give her a visual account of life on the other side of the tracks.

Devi’s inquisitiveness with the camera gets her in trouble, and she is turned out of the house, being shipped off to a home for wayward girls accused of some crime. As one might imagine, this is a far cry from the living situation, which she had just enjoyed. Still, Devi is a survivor. She must use all her skills to survive this situation.

As one might expect, things go awry, and Devi must reinvent herself, once more, ending up in Punjab in a religious cult. She reinvents herself as a Sikh girl named Dasmeet Kaur, dutifully carrying out her duties until she is moved up to becoming the right hand of the secretary of the leader.

A takeover is imminent – but the actions taken by those around Devi reveal the sinister nature of the power-hungry secretary. Devi realizes she knows too much – and must escape, jumping on a train that takes her to South India.

There are, of course other stories, in each of the chapters but to summarize the whole book would be to take away from its enjoyment.

As each story comes to a close, the reader is brought back to the present predicament Devi finds herself in of being a captive to someone with a vendetta against her. During each of her life’s chapters, Devi ends up making certain enemies – through no real fault of her own – these nemeses she has made are from actions taken to survive her awful circumstances. The man with the gun reveals what the going rate is to auction off Devi’s fate at each juncture. All the while, Devi is trying to figure out how to get herself out of the situation into which she has been trapped.

In the process, Swarup, as he does in his other works, gives the reader insight into the darker side of India – what happens in the shadows and makes the headlines. That Devi assumes the identities of girls of different religions may also be an attempt to narrate from the perspective of India’s plurality.

With seven chapters narrating seven distinct stories under the umbrella of a seemingly inescapable fate, the tales of The Girl With the Seven Lives are told in an atmosphere of suspense, the tension building with each chapter as we Devi moves closer to the fate her captor has in store for her. It is neatly organized into novel that could easily be made into a serial with seven or eight episodes for an OTT streaming platform.

Swarup’s return to the novel, with its depiction of the myriad of Indias that make up this complex and paradoxical country, while welcome and page-turning, is certainly not an attempt to turn away from his previous style of writing. This is commercial fiction at its zenith. And, the book seems perfectly organized for a streaming platform as these companies reach increasingly to novels to provide source material for adaptations. It seems virtutally certain that it won’t be long before Swarup’s readers and a far wider audience get the opportunity to binge-watch Devi and her seven lives.

 

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