Manjula Padmanabhan

A satire on the export trade in live organs from the Third World to the West.

Harvest

Janice Pariat

Mitra Phukan

Paro Anand

Bulbul Sharma

Uddipana Goswami

Pratyaksha

Venita Coelho.

Bulbul Sharma, Janice Pariat, Manjula Padmanabhan, Mitra Phukan, Paro Anand, Pratyaksha, Uddipana Goswami, Venita Coelho. Eight of India's best fiction writers come together to produce a book of intrigue and murders most foul.
In Mitra Phukan's story that opens this edge-of-the-seat anthology, She Stoops to Kill: Stories of Crime and Passion, a singing diva chokes to death onstage. The weapon is a poisoned paan--but who would want her dead? And Pratyaksha follows Mitra's entrée with the murder of an equally glamorous victim--air hostess Ginny Kalra. Bulbul Sharma, in 'Murder in the Wedding Season', creates a cosy setting for a wedding in Shimla; but the guests include a politician and a timorous widow whose past will disrupt the party in ways no one had imagined. And in Uddipana Goswami's 'Beloved of Flowers', a folktale about a girl reborn as a lotus leads young Dino to the truth behind a mysterious disappearance.
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Serial Killer' brilliantly explores what it is like to be a perfectly normal person--except that you enjoy the act of murder. While Janice Pariat's delicately nuanced 'The Nurse' shows us another side of death altogether. In the penultimate story by Venita Coelho, Sister, a vigilante eunuch, helps the police solve a gruesome killing in a city slum. And Paro Anand brings the collection to a grand finale with a story that begins with lust and ends with a murder--or two--that may or may not have happened.
By turns chilling, horrific and morbidly fascinating, She Stoops to Kill: Stories of Crime and Passion, is a steaming witches' cauldron of stories that will keep you riveted, page after page.

Stories of Crime and Passion

She Stoops To Kill

Teaches young readers about many different languages, and some English words that originated from them.

I Am Different! Can You Find Me?

This is the story of Meiji – the only girl who has remained untouched and unmutilated in a country that has savaged its entire female population. Having saved her from certain death in the new Dark Age that has come upon the world, her gaurdian, Youngest, has transported her to the only place where she can remain safe – an Island where wounded girls are, sometimes literally, stitched back together and given a new life. But the Island itself is a menacing place, and Meiji may be in more danger than ever before. To see what has become of his beloved girl, Youngest must find a way to infiltrate its odd environs while keeping the constantly assaulting voice in his head at bay. His struggles against the surreal inhabitants of a world gone wrong and with his own transformed identity only serve to steel his efforts to find the girl, and escape once more... The Island of Lost Girls showcases, yet again, Manjula Padmanabhan’s genius at creating searing landscapes and alternate, sometimes brutal, worlds while reaffirming the beauty and the ugliness, the cruelty and the tremendous compassion that essentially make us human. '

The Island Of Lost Girls

Author-artist Manjula Padmanabhan returns with ten stories: five new, five old, some dark, some funny, all edgy. A vampire visits New Delhi, a space traveler returns to her ancestral home, a character from an ancient epic is transported into the future... To each story Padmanabhan brings an unexpected twist, a touch of satire, a whiff of cynicism, a delicious undercurrent of dark humour. Drawing on her earlier, highly acclaimed anthology, Hot Death Cold Soup, and adding new stories to it, Padmanabhan presents a potent and sometimes disturbing collection that will leave readers asking for more. Published by Zubaan.

Three Virgins and Other Stories

A little girl looks for her cat on a busy street but the cat manages to stay one step ahead of her.

Where's that Cat?

Elli ā bekku?

It’s the General Assembly of the Galactic Union, and the first delegation from SOL-3 is desperate to present its case before it. The crazily assorted contingent of the third planet of the star SOL - aka Earth - carries with it all its baggage of opposing opinions, narrow views, squabbles, secrets and conspiracies. Toilets, whales, racism, food, body size... everything is cause for shouting matches and name-calling as the representatives – 11 human and six non-human – each wait to hold forth. To their shock and horror, they come to know that only one delegate will appear before the Assembly. Fuss and fireworks erupt among the elected leaders of the delegation, while five rebels plot a blow-up of a different kind. Uncertainty rules: Who is that one chosen speaker going to be and what is he, she or it going to say? Will SOL-3 be stuck with being ‘ecologically unfit for full membership to the Union’, or be seen as having ‘potential for change’? Is this interplanetary jamboree an insult, an opportunity, or a test? Among telepathic cookies and high-tech waste disposal, Manjula Padmanabhan sets up a colourfully cast, witty and thought-provoking stage spectacle sure to leave its audience and readers amused, inspired and applauding.

An Intergalactic Drama

Astro-Nuts

The Island of Lost Girls

Age range 6+ Oh you creatures of the day!Can you EVER know the nightYou need light so much for sight,When evening falls you don't feel right. 'What is night?' asks a little girl of the owl, the earthworm, the firefly... Glowing out from the pages, their answers merge into a tapestry of the more mysterious sides of night-time and the curious habits of creatures that come to life in darkness.

Mama, What Is the Night

A Picture Puzzle Book

Same & Different

Picture living in a world that has you constantly tethered to an oxygen tank, covered from head to toe in a body suit and buying dated air that you can sniff without your head gear on for cheap thrills. A world where the elders tell their children stories about the time their ancestors lived and breathed through an air cocktail—like savages! As if it wasn't already hard living in a world like this, imagine having to go through the pressure of attending "sharing air" parties that everyone seems to be going to these days. Apparently, membership at The ToxiClub society is at an all-time high. Whether or not you believe you can handle the ToxiClub, "Sharing Air" is a fascinating glimpse into a world that's scarily plausible. Science fiction offers a writer an opportunity to go directly to the heart of an ironical or thought-provoking situation and by setting up this theoretical world, Manjula Padmanabhan hits the nail right on the head with equal literary aplomb.

(Penguin Petit)

Sharing Air

Twelve Short Stories

Hot Death, Cold Soup

Sitaram Desai, a researcher and the scion of third cousins from Mahatma Gandhi's bloodline, has just managed to invent a toxin from a vial of ashes belonging to the greatest man the Indian subcontinent has ever seen. The Gandhi-toxin, when diffused through the blood, has the ability to disarm aggression vectors in mammalian brains. Of course, if mass-administered, it can cause catastrophic pacifism and widespread loss of competitive urge—a formidable weapon indeed. Aidid and Isabella, Supreme Commanders at United Gene Heritage, are aware of the threats, which is why they launch a mass release of the toxin through specially engineered mosquitos that can even cross enemy lines. However, no one has ever managed to predict the long-term effects of genetic manipulation and it looks like the Supreme Commanders are in for a supreme surprise. Science fiction often manages to look closely at present-day issues through a fairly made-up world. In Gandhi-toxin, Manjula Padmanabhan cleverly uses her literary prowess to build a dystopian—although not entirely unbelievable—near future to make a point about the world we live in today. Funny and incisive, this short read is for anyone who's ever wondered about the future of our world.

Gandhi-toxin

Five powerful, hard-hitting monologues in which the playwright tackles head-on issues of violence, intolerance of others, narrow concepts of community and nation, each with a twist that lifts it into the realm of real drama. Award-winning playwright Manjula Padmanabhan, in her attempt to come to grips with the violence of these times, excels in this suite of short one-handers which leaves the viewer both shaken and thoughtful. Manjula Padmanabhan is a playwright, writer, illustrator and cartoonist living in New Delhi. Her play Harvest was awarded the Onassis International Cultural Competition Prize for Theatrical Plays in 1997.

Monologues

Hidden Fires

This is the story of Meiji - the only girl who has remained untouched and unmutilated in a country that has savaged its entire female population. Having saved her from certain death in the new Dark Age that has come upon their homeland, her guardian, Youngest, has transported her to the only place where she can remain safe - an Island where wounded girls are, sometimes literally, stitched back together and given a new life. But the Island itself is a menacing place, and Meiji may be in more danger than ever before. Now Youngest must find a way to infiltrate its odd environs to see what has become of his beloved girl, and escape once more...The Island of Lost Girls showcases, yet again, Manjula Padmanabhan's genius at creating searing landscapes and alternate, sometimes brutal, worlds while reaffirming the beauty and the ugliness, the cruelty and the tremendous compassion, that essentially makes us human.

In the country she inhabits, Meiji is unique. The only surviving female in a land where women have been exterminated, she has been brought up in secret, cloistered and protected, by three men she knows as her uncles ? Eldest, Middle and Youngest. Now, as she approaches adolescence, her guardians must ensure that the dictatorial clone Generals who rule their world never get to know of her existence, and it falls to Youngest to escort Meiji on a long and treacherous journey through ravaged landscapes to the very edge of the world known to them. An adventure story like no other, a tale of love and self-discovery in several unexpected layers, Escape is a novel that is as unsettling as it is unputdownable. In its captivating portrayal of tender relationships blooming and thriving in a vicious, forbidding landscape, it bears out Manjula Padmanabhan?s genius as a creator of compelling alternative worlds.

Escape

This is Suki!

"When she looked into his eyes, she could see every thought of his, strung out like washed shirts flapping on a line." Gautam is already a little high-strung because of his sister's wedding when he meets Bahaar, the groom's cousin, who claims to have "arranged" this meeting of theirs. Gautam, who is struggling with his possessive feelings for his sister and his doubts over the suitor, who in his opinion isn't all that suitable, gets increasingly peeved with every sentence that Bahaar utters. Not only does she seem to possess supernatural powers, the likes of which he has never experienced before, but she also seems to be weirdly obsessed with him. After all, it isn't everyday that a weird girl with superpowers asks you to have sex with her while their families are socializing with each other. Needless to say, Gautam is speechless. But Bahaar still has one more trick up her sleeve. Can Gautam handle it? Originally written to appear in a magazine, The Girl Who Could Make People Naked is in the author's view, a cheeky look at Delhi's strait-laced, uptight social milieu that sometimes takes itself a little too seriously. Weird, wonderful, and almost absurd, this is Manjula Padmanabhan at her finest.

Manjula Padmanabhan

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