Much like his earlier novels, The Wall and The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has created a secondary world with action taking place within a single city in his deeply interesting new book, The Sentence. On one level, this is a story about two sections of a divided city, Peruma, one ruled by a Council of corporations and the wealthy, the other organized by its worker population under anarchist principles and called the Commune. Like Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the novel examines that clash of ideologies but sets it within a powerful story of a search not only for justice but also for the emotional truth that may guide the future of this divided city to peace or catapult it back into civil war.
The story opens with a chapter that recounts the defining event, or inflection point in the novel’s terms, in the history of Peruma. The city was once the capital of an empire embracing the entire “subcontinent” (this is not a place in our world but sounds like India) but is now a city-state racked by class divisions between wealthy resource owners in an area called High Town and the workers who live across the Urai River in Low Town. One day, a hundred years before the present of the story, the Director of the city, accompanied only by his assistant, is crossing the river on a bridge when an explosion occurs and as the dust settles a young man appears, uttering a brief sentence, and a shot kills the Director. The man, known as Jagat, is arrested and tried that same day. He says not one word in his defense and is quickly condemned, in the absence of a death penalty, to the “sleep of death” or cryosleep. Jagat becomes the hero of the anarchist revolution of the workers’ section of town that immediately follows.
After a bloody war, a difficult peace becomes possible that allows the Commune to govern itself and the High Town, now known as the Council, to follow its own form of governance. Disputes are to be handled by laws and courts in the charge of a strictly neutral cadre of attorneys who devote their lives from an early age to impartiality. They live in their own section of the city known as the Chapterhouse. The economy, which depends on the mining of a mineral called Mandalium, is secured through a separate agreement, and both sides agree to an organized forgetting of the war and to revisit the governing structure after one hundred years.
That brings us to the beginning of the present day when the greatest law case of all, Council vs. Commune, will decide the future governance of Peruma. Primarily at stake is the Mandalium Agreement that divides mineral profits between the two sides of Peruma. It is an agreement the Commune regards as unjust, and they long for a victory that would put everything up for renegotiation.
Nila is the star pupil of the Chapterhouse and is widely assumed to be one of the senior pupils to be assigned to the case under the guidance of the Guardians who are the fully licensed practitioners. Yet, for some reason, she is passed over. While she is trying to absorb this shock with her friend Maru, she receives a message from the great-granddaughter of Jagat. She wants Nila to take a private case seeking to overturn the sleeping death sentence. There is a strict time limit of one week to resolve the case since at the end of that time Jagat’s cryosleep chamber will be shut down, and he will die. And so a countdown begins, quite literally, as Nila accepts what all assume is a hopeless case.
Nila begins her search for evidence about what really happened on that bridge a hundred years before. As she gets deeper into the case, she has to challenge a lot of long-accepted beliefs that, whether true or not, underlie the fragile peace between Council and Commune. She is challenged every step of the way by leaders of Council, Commune and the Chapterhouse and has to sift fact from fiction when new documents come to light. Are they real? Were they planted to steer her in a wrong direction? She also has to look into her own past, since she was raised in the Commune, and her mother is a well-known and influential figure in a city that claims not to have any leaders.
Some of the most compelling chapters are those in which Nila revisits the Commune and her home and finds out how much the working people have come in just a day or two to count on her winning the case and bringing Jagat back to life. Along with a victory in Council vs. Commune, which would do away with the Mandalium agreement, Nila’s case has built hope in all the workers of the Commune.
Nila is the beating heart and soul of this narrative. While she follows the logic of law in her thinking, she is mostly intuitive and constantly dealing with her emotional sense to guide her actions. In a story with little action, she keeps it on a compelling level because every twist and turn means so much to her. Where I might have expected Bhatia, who is a constitutional lawyer, to discourse on the difficult questions of morality and governance that are involved in Peruma’s history, he is always focused on the human meaning and struggle and cost that are the real drivers of social and legal change.
He brings Nila to life not just through her emotional reactions but through her heightened responses to all the physical sensations she encounters. Perhaps, this sensitivity is the result of her getting back to her home surroundings and other parts of the city that her studies have kept her from, but these passages are touchstones of her humanity that no amount of courtroom drama could reproduce.
Unfortunately, this great story has only been published thus far in India, though you can get a paperback copy through American outlets in about a week. I’m hoping this novel finds publishers in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere because it richly deserves wider publicity and distribution.
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