In 398, Peruma City finds itself at the cusp of revolution. It’s the ‘Day of the Barricades’. Director Purul, along with her secretary Milana Maran, is heading to meet the Council in Low Town. When they’re “side by side on the edge of the (Unity) Bridge”, they sense an unusual tension in the air. Soon, the “ground bursts open”, felling the director and the secretary. Through the smoke, two “feet away, blotting out the sun, stood a man”, Jagat R, the director’s assassin, a martyr in the eyes of the Commune. His last words: In the name of the Commune, unborn, die.
Thus begins Gautam Bhatia’s meticulously structured speculative fiction, The Sentence. Its gripping prologue is followed by a crisp timeline of the Peruman Empire to the day of the Revolution. The story, however, begins in 498 in the ‘Chapterhouse of the Free and Equal Confederation of the Guardians of Peruma’—the “Fortress Drab”.
Its atmosphere signals an anticipation of a verdict: Whether the Mandalium Agreement (a “revenue-sharing formula”) must die? The Executive Committee wants to divide the Guardians into two six-member teams—one for the Commune and one for the Council—to ensure everlasting peace in Peruma City.
Before the teams are announced, Guardian Nila—the principal protagonist of the story—and her colleague Maru, with the help of their ‘wristheld’, are trying to gauge what the media thinks of the situation.
The headlines eerily resemble how divided the press is in the contemporary world, as if they’ve picked a side—wrong or right, it doesn’t matter, but one that’s certainly against the profession whose ethics it must uphold. But Nila, “pupil of the Confederation of the Guardians”, is in for a surprise.
She isn’t part of either team. Instead, someone calls her from a “masked ID” using her “guardian key”. She’s asked to be present at ‘The Well’ for a private conference with Ani, Jagat’s great-granddaughter. The latter’s purpose of the call was to reopen the case of Jagat’s death sentence.
Interestingly, in Peruman City there was a culture of announcing a “guilt-free capital punishment” —the sentence, or the sleep of death (“a reversible death penalty”). It was announced only in the rarest of rare cases, such as director’s assassination. And in all such matters, the convict’s body was put in a “cryobox” until someone could prove the guilty innocent. But science has its limits: after a point, it wasn’t easy to revive the human body.
This period was nearing its end in Jagat’s case. Before the “Fifth Inflection Point of Peruman History”, which was a week away, Nila had to attempt to prove Jagat’s innocence, if she agreed to do this job, which she eventually did, for she was born in the Commune and wanted to make her mother (Meera D) proud.
The “central inspiration for the story”, Bhatia notes in the Appendix, was the Paris Commune of 1871. He also shares that the assassination of the director, who’s erroneously mentioned as “Chancellor” in the Appendix, “is loosely modelled on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, by the Russian Narodniks”.
Not only that, but there are also countless books, historical events, and concepts that inform the story, which is principally a crime investigation.
Besides the perennially sleep-deprived but unquestionably motivated Nila, pupil Maru’s and President Mehmandost Naram’s characters are brilliantly sketched by Bhatia.
The way he employs Maru at specific junctures of the story centralises the latter’s role in helping Nila navigate through her research. As no side is willing to trust her, she finds herself utterly helpless except for Maru’s comforting company. On the other hand, Naram’s ways to demotivate Nila from pursuing this case are deftly constituted in this narration, too.
Bhatia’s world building is commendable. He takes great pain in outlining the architecture of this fictional city and describing the characters’ motivations. Furthermore, the way he manoeuvres the narration demonstrates his skills at offering something new to the readers each time he complicates the story’s graph.
The scientific terminology is made extremely accessible to the readers, who find themselves engaged with one of Bhatia’s singular gifts: the art of writing dialogues.
The author has finely executed conversations between his cast of characters. Each time and in every situation, he preserves not only his characters’ voices but also their goals and actions, which are convincing and believable.
While readers can easily notice Bhatia’s attempts at mirroring the conversations one can witness between people with conflicting viewpoints in the modern-day world, the semblances between the shared past in the ‘real world’, so to speak, and this mythic city are uncanny. However, at the same time, some narrative bits can overwhelm the reader, which to underline, is no flaw but the demand of this book.
Nevertheless, as the story moves forward, readers find Nila making several headways into cracking the case, but each time she finds herself defeated in accomplishing her goal, making her realise that it’s a complex cobweb of a murder mystery that she’s trying to untangle to its simplest, comprehensible parts. The methods she leverages to do so, and the conclusion she arrives at, make The Sentence a compelling read.
Bhatia’s world building is commendable. He takes great pain in outlining the architecture of this fictive city and describing the characters’ motivations