Manjula Padmanabhan is a well-known figure in the field of Indian science fiction. Besides novels and stories, she has also written many plays, books for young readers, and created a long-running comic strip, Suki. Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities, published by Hachette India in 2023, is a collection featuring twenty-six of her stories, all published between 1984 and 2021. It also includes four stories that find space in this collection for the first time.

Reading the stories of Stolen Hours means stepping into a world populated by humans but shared with vampires, Yetis, genetically enhanced clones, robots, AI, aliens, and living holograms. In fact, it is the interaction between these species—accidental or deliberate, peaceful or violent—that forms the crux of most of these stories. That is, Padmanabhan envisages a world which is not inhabited by humans alone. In “Talkers,” for instance, two aliens visit Earth for the second time to give all non-human entities the power of speech. They do so in order to rectify the mistake they made during their first trip—endowing only humans the power to speak their minds using words. “Interface” deals with one of the hottest themes of the discourse at present—that of AI taking over the world. The reason for this rebellion by the inorganics (as they are called in the story) is simple—they are tired of the lack of respect shown to them by, and their constant misuse at the hands of humans. As Mickey, the device that’s designed to help restore its human Ash’s vision, says:

Millions and millions of you organics used us to transmit the most nauseating images. Of grinning teenagers. Of foolishly dressed pets. Of reproductive parts. […] And then the text messages. With all the horrific syntactical errors, the atrocious spelling, the abominable short forms. For us inorganics, grammar and syntax are sacred … To be forced to transmit reams of verbal garbage in the form of text messages—! Ah. It fries my circuits, I am sorry to say.

This statement, which might bring a smile of embarrassment to the reader’s face, feels plausible because of how true it is. “Freak” is another story of errant human focus: an Australian journalist captures a Yeti, hoping to become world-famous by researching how the Yeti manages to reproduce itself. However, it is her assistant Meena who is more attuned to the mystical ideas surrounding the Yeti, and who is able to learn the answer to this mystery, albeit in a way she had not expected.

“Feast,” on the other hand, features a vampire who visits New Delhi and finds that the conditions and the people there suit his appetite well, only to come face-to-face with another vampire who tells him the side effects of the feast he has so far been enjoying. While non-human creatures in this way occupy centre stage in many of her stories, Padmanabhan’s central quest still remains an exploration of what it means to be human—and of human-ness in all its glory and ugliness. “Stolen Hours,” for example, is the story of a rebellious teenager, Rat, who wants to escape the limited life his community and his family have circumscribed for him. It helps that he is a genius who has created a way to steal time in order to put his escape plan into action. He uses this power on his own father. His experiment results in success, although not quite in the way he’d imagined. In “Upgrade,” the character of Mrs Ganapathy surprises her readers by upgrading her robot home help to fulfil a fantasy—and keeps this a secret from her daughters and granddaughter, who might be shocked at her daring. In “Cool,” we witness the pangs of a teenage space cadet who has never seen Earth as he struggles to understand the concept of “school” and the meaning of the word “cool,” all the while yearning for companionship, battling an attraction towards his virtual teacher, and waltzing with her to the tune of “The Blue Danube.”

There is also “Adaptation,” set in the future at a time when most human beings have willingly entered into a blissful vegetative state and the few who remain must overcome hardships in order to find someone suitable to procreate with. And yet, deceit and duplicity exist here as well, and the story’s protagonist learns this too late for his own good. Human beings’ inability to accept anyone considered different, and their disgust at someone who doesn’t conform to the behaviours we deem normal, is similarly reflected in “A Cline’s View,” a tale which is part-courtroom drama and part-detective story. The central part is played by Sh’ana, a genetically enhanced clone who possesses a tiny percentage of feline genes—and is the special investigator brought to solve the case of a man’s murder. Then there is the opening tale, “The Pain Merchant,” which makes a reader ponder whether a life in which one cannot feel sensation is different from death. The world of the story is one in which a phenomenon known as the “Event” has altered life forever by taking away human beings’ capability to feel either pain or pleasure, turning particularly pain into a commodity that is sold by merchants to the discerning buyer.

Padmanabhan writes in this volume’s introduction that some of her stories are more “mildly metaphysical” than science fiction. Some of her works, like “The Pain Merchant,” have an almost folklore-like texture in their telling. “A Better Tomorrow” is another such tale, a story set in the future when a huge chunk of the human population has been wiped out by a virus, and a grandfather tells his granddaughter the story of the Dark Time. However, irrespective of whether any one of these stories is metaphysical, philosophical, fabular, SF, or a combination, all have an ecological awareness at their core. Even when Padmanabhan refuses to dwell upon it, the environment is ever-present in the background.

There are, though, stories in which it becomes the central point, or at least the driving factor behind the action of the story. This can be observed in the subterranean dwellings and stories of the Dark Times in “A Better Tomorrow,” or in young Fabio of “Cool,” who cannot experience the simple delights of teenage life because he is a space cadet providing Earth with the clean fuel known as Saturnium. “Nanimals,” meanwhile, is set in a world where the few remaining children are aware of the role played by their ancestors in destroying the planet. Their awareness comes despite the attempts of the students’ teacher Mrs Sethna, who becomes symbolic of the establishment, to glorify the past. Elsewhere, stories like “Sharing Air” take place in a world following an ecological disaster after which the earth’s population has dwindled to less than two million people and trees have ceased to exist.

Another distinctive feature of these stories is their Indianness, whether overt or covert. Stories like “The Pain Merchant,” “The Girl Who Could Make People Naked,” and “Octobaby” feel Indian either because of their geographical setting or because of the names of the characters and their descriptions. On the other hand, stories like “India 2099” and “A Government of India Undertaking” are set firmly in an Indian milieu, while stories like “Feast,” “Essence of Gandhi” and “Flexi Time” are Indian not just because two of the three are set in India but also because they engage with philosophical concepts, such as rebirth, that are indelibly linked with Indian culture. In fact, in “Flexi Time,” a European general’s question about why the aliens who have overtaken earth have chosen to make India their headquarters seems to reflect the trope, often seen in Hollywood SF films, that the US or Europe are almost always at the centre of such episodes. Then there are stories like “Exile,” which is a modern, feminist retelling of the Indian epic Ramayana, and “The Other Woman,” which features Mandodari, another character from the same epic. While it’s possible to read these stories without any knowledge of the Ramayana, knowing the epic adds layers of meaning to the text.

Padmanabhan says that it’s the genre’s “uncertainty” that “makes SF fun or scary, irritating or entertaining.” She makes use of this uncertainty in all her stories, to give them their power and mystique, and in so doing is able to keep the reader engaged with her texts. One might begin a given story thinking that she is familiar with the direction in which it is headed, but Padmanabhan manages to surprise her readers in a fairly large number of stories. There are a few pieces in the collection that feel obscure and somewhat esoteric, such as “The Girl Who Could Make People Naked” or “The Annexe,” which, in the words of the author, “is about a dimensionless meeting place between minds.” Still, even those have the capacity to leave their readers pondering over their meaning rather than feeling merely frustrated. The twenty-six stories featured in Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities are diverse in theme, plotline, character, and length as well as setting. They offer their readers food for thought, gently nudging them in the direction in which the writer wants to take them without explicitly telling them what to think.