Shalini is 43 now, and she was brought there against her will when she was 28. The rules are enforced by ‘wardens’ who are really spies looking for any evidence of non-conformity. Purity Towers is a high-rise of solitary widows sedated into submission and where no children are allowed. The walls that surround The Towers are explained. But despite her ostensible cooperation with the rules of ‘Purity One’, Shalini is a determined woman and she fervently believes that she will be reunited with Leila soon.

Gradually the reader realises that the husband beside her is dead, and that Shalini is surviving on memories. The story begins with Shalini performing a ritual in remembrance of her daughter Leila who was ‘taken’ sixteen years ago when she was three. And as Leila shows, while the novels segregates its walled communities by religious disposition, it’s as much about protecting possessions (including women) as it is about maintaining ‘purity’. All these are intimations of an obsession with security and a fear of Outsiders. Electric operated gates that only an owner can open.

All those apartments with keycodes for the front door and burglar alarms on ordinary suburban houses. At the domestic level there is the emergence of gated estates in wealthy western nations. A novel which explores the development of gated communities to keep out The Other has its origins in Apartheid South Africa, in the White Australia Policy, and in contemporary refugee ‘management’. – Neel Mukherjeeīut I think this novel has greater currency than that. It is urgent, gripping, topical, disturbing, and announces a talent we’ll be talking about for years to come. Leila does for the barbarity of contemporary Indian nationalism what The Handmaid’s Tale did for the yoke of patriarchy. The blurb for this novel likens it to an Indian Handmaid’s Tale:

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