After successfully avoiding the curse of the second novel that impressive debutant novelists dread, the only question that journalist Manu Joseph’s third novel had to answer was something that haunts a batsman in top form. Will the law of averages finally catch up? No, it hasn’t. Joseph’s Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous further establishes him as one of most engaging storytellers and insightful interpreters of our times. With the rigour of lean and unsentimental prose, the novel weaves a gripping tale set in contemporary India and echoes all the key whispers and screams that mark country’s conversations with itself.
For a novel having ambitions of a thriller, running along parallel strands of understated satire, Miss Laila is economical in having just the right number of well-etched characters. Joseph resists the lure of overpopulating the plot, and that helps the narrative with characters which either strike an instant chord or get room to grow on you. They include a quirky student of neurosurgery Akhila Iyer, who not only revolts against the memories of her left-wing activist mother but also plays pranks, in form of short films (talking to a gathering called ‘Stand-Up Anthropology’), to expose the hypocrisy and chinks in arguments of all shades of political opinion and activism- right to left. The other key character is, obviously, Laila, a 19-year-old girl from the Mumbra suburb of Mumbai, who is an unsuspecting target of a chain of chilling events planned by the State.
