Category: Fiction
Publisher: Hachette India
Rights: World rights available
The play Harvest is set in an unspecified future time, in a city called Bombay that might just as well be any megapolis, anywhere. Om, an unemployed young man living in a one-room tenement with his mother, wife, and younger brother returns from a job interview saying that they’re about to become “insanely” rich. The catch? The family must live in sterile isolation, so that, when the time comes, Om’s body parts will be available for transplant to a fabulously wealthy benefactor.
Almost the entire action of the play takes place within the confines of one room. The ultimate subject of the play is the transactional nature of human relationships: between mothers and wives, husbands and lovers, buyers and sellers, the powerful and the powerless. It was regarded weird and outlandish, when it was first published by Kali for Women in 1998. But in the decades since then, the futuristic technology in the play, featuring real-time video conferences and virtual reality headsets, has become utterly commonplace. Meanwhile, the global trade in human organs and international childbirth surrogacy, both continue apace.
The author: Manjula Padmanabhan