Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

"We’ve touched upon it even with Ravan and Eddie. It’s called the RSS and it’s a Hindu nationalist organization. It was meant only for men, and they wore khaki shorts. They would go out to do exercises every morning, but they were also learning many cultural aspects. They were being taught right-wing thoughts. For many years it was reserved for men, but if you see the cover of this book, the main character is a woman wearing khaki shorts and high heels. So you know right away that this is a genre-bending book. This is part of the reason why I chose it, because it has these two women characters who completely defy any stereotype: they are irreverent, sharp, fun, unexpected, which makes them such Bombay characters. This woman in the shorts, Akhila Iyer, is trying to make prank videos (this is pre-Tik Tok), where she corners men and asks them uncomfortable questions. She has views on everything: she doesn’t like anyone who is a socialist, Marxist, environmentalist, eats salad and she wants to corner them by making videos. Akhila finds this very Bombay incident of a building collapse. She’s just gone out for a run and a building has collapsed in a heap. She’s called to extricate a man who is stuck in the debris. This man is muttering some secrets thinking he’s going to die, and through those she uncovers what is called an ‘encounter killing’, a police shootout. It’s based on a real-life incident. A young, suspected teenaged woman terrorist has been killed by the police for being involved in a plot to kill a person who later became Prime Minister of India, who happens to have been a member of the Sangh. He is a thinly veiled character in the book. There are lots of thinly veiled characters, lots of satire, and I love that there are women at the center of it. So this encounter killing, this ‘shootout’, was a very much publicized incident where a teenage Muslim girl had been killed and there was this whole debate about whether she was a terrorist or she was not a terrorist. And so while this is a piece of fiction, he uses it as an entry point, through the debris of that building, to make these irreverent but at the same time, very, very sharp, observations about the city, about the country, about what is going on in our country. It’s some of the sharpest social commentary you will see about our times. And he spares nobody. I think you would enjoy it anyway because it’s full of his sharp commentary and full of humour. Manu is known for his clever insights and it’s full of them. So you will enjoy it anyway and it will give you a wonderful understanding. The rise of the right wing is not only in India, it is also happening elsewhere in the world. It gives you a sense of what is happening here, but it does give you a sense of what is going on elsewhere. And it’s full of these outsized, unforgettable characters."