What will our future be like? What will it be like for women? Will there be real food to eat, air to breathe, trees to touch? Will there be men in our world? After two horrific incidents that occurred in December 2012, which shook India and Australia, 20 writers and artists from the two countries have come together in the anthology Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean to find answers to some of these questions. The title suggests impossibilities, dreams and ambitions, to “embrace the idea of not just eating pie but taking big, hungry mouthfuls of life.” To make you “fat with knowing”. This collection of stories, written by women writers and illustrators, re-imagines our world without men, resources, or the daily struggles of being women. They tell tales of a not-too-distant future that is dystopian yet hopeful.
In Priya Kuriyan and Kate Constable’s graphic short story ‘Swallow the Moon’, women are the future. The tale follows young women who walk through glades of forests, climb hills, dive into oceans, discover the remnants of the world ‘before’ and emerge with the secret to life and living. Constable’s tale is a strange one, made luminous by Kuriyan’s excellent illustrations.
Anita Roy gives us a delightful little story in ‘Cooking Time’, with plot elements borrowed from MasterChef and Doctor Who. Set in the future, Newtri pills have become substitutes for everything from sarson ka saag to warm apple crumble. Can you imagine a world where food is no longer finger-lickin’ good? The mother-of-all MasterChef cook-offs ensues and what happens next is a ‘tiny wrinkle in time’.
The tales are dark yet marked with a sense of hope. Girls and women practicing “magic” are still branded as witches, paraded naked, flogged and left to die just as they are today in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Newborn girls are killed much like in Haryana. But in Samhita Arni’s ‘Cast Out’, these witches and girls find new life among their own, hidden by Demon Clouds, aboard a ship called ‘Pearl’, on the Floating Island in the middle of the ocean.
My favourite tale in the collection, Alyssa Brugman’s ‘Weft’ tells the poignant story of a young woman and the price she (and we) pays for beauty. Botox be damned, will it become fashionable to sell even your kidney for a head of new hair? Margo Lanagan’s ‘Cat Calls’ tells the story of young girls for whom going to school is a daily invitation for men to leer, jeer and tease. Not unlike the girls of Kailashpati Junior College in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh — abutted by not one, but two government-licensed liquor shops — whose lives outside the premises tell tales of harassment. Reminiscent of Anurag Kashyap’s recent short film That Day After Everyday , this is a story that rings true across space and time.
Not all tales in the anthology are about girls, in Manjula Padmanabhan’s ‘Cool’, young Irfan is a SpitRider on Saturn9, the tiny, dark moon of the ringed planet. The youngest and the best SpitRider in the team, Irfan is a descendant of the astronaut clan from the home planet, sending molten lumps of precious mineral ‘Flying Spit’ back to Earth as a much-needed source of energy. He might have moves in space that can put Interstellar’s crew to shame, but in love, young Irfan has a lot to learn. Smitten by his virtual teaching assistant Leila, he learns to waltz, go to school and be ‘cool’.
What if men and boys were not even considered ‘human’? In Isobelle Carmody and Prabha Mallya’s ‘The Runners’, there is no place for men. Shunned and enslaved, men in this world are born unfree. Is there the possibility of an equal world after all? Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean is remarkable for not just the themes it explores and the world it foretells, but for the collaboration between authors across cultures and nations.