Harare Review of Books

396 pages. Published October 28 by Westland IF. Fiction.

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Nila M. is a Guardian-in-training, preparing to litigate cases between the capitalist Council and the anarchist Commune of Peruma City. The two are in a period of negotiated peace after bloody conflict; the Commune, on one side of the river, rebelled against wealth inequity, labour issues, and the rule (the hegemony, really) of the Council, after four hundred years. The triggering event for the revolution was the murder of the ruling Director by a young man, Jagat R., which was witnessed by the only other survivor of the incident, Director Purul’s secretary, Milana Maran. Jagat R. was sentenced to death, which in this society means cryostasis, a death sentence that’s legally and medically reversible for up to one hundred years after it’s carried out; after that, there is too much physiological damage to revive the person. The anniversary of the murder (and sentence) is coming up, and Nila is engaged by Jagat R.’s family to prove his innocence, and therefore free him. But that will shake the foundations of the revolution, and threaten the very idea of the Commune: if Jagat is innocent, then he is not the martyr that sparked the revolution.

The Sentence explores the idea of ‘peace’ after a class war, and the conflict between justice and ideals. It sets forth arguments for readers about what really matters. Nila’s belief in justice is absolute: her personal motto is “Let justice be done, though the world burns.” Guardians, who keep the peace between the two sides, are trained to be completely impartial, and to forget where they came from. But Nila was born in the Commune, and the possibility that she may destroy its foundation if she wins is a source of narrative tension. In addition, there are the shadowy interested parties that are tracking her: are they working for good, or evil?

And then there’s the exploration by the author of the death sentence itself: is a reversible sentence better in some way that capital punishment? What happens when someone is revived into a time and place they don’t recognise? And if they were innocent all along, does their eventual revival then deliver justice?

Other questions: how important is forgetting and memory in nation-building, in negotiating peace? I found the exploration of this in this novel moving, as this is a question that is still being argued in my own country, forty years after a democide. In The Sentence, the two sides have signed a pact ‘of forgetting’ so as to move forward—but is a peace based on this sustainable? What is the cost of silence? What price must be paid, and by whom?

There’s an interesting bit in the novel where Bhatia shows us what the Commune looks like in practice: radical transparency, with meetings held in public always; the concept of a leaderless revolution permeating the society everywhere, including requiring consensus for every decision, and a city without a real centre; and the only public statue in the Commune is that of the Everyman, Jagat the martyr.

The Sentence is well-written, and Bhatia has used his knowledge of the law (and his passion for legal questions) to make readers think about the ethics of what we call justice, and to show how justice and ideals are not always on the same side. So much hinges on Nila’s argument about Jagat’s innocence or guilt—the fate of the nation or city state and its peace, in fact. One hundred years after the assasination of Director Purul is a historical point of inflection, a pivotal time for reassessing and revisioning; and young Nila must either rise to the occasion and live up to her ideals, or make a decision to preserve the fragile and possibly false peace. That’s the conflict at the heart of this engrossing read.

Many thanks to Gautam Bhatia for an advance copy of the novel.