‘Girl With the Seven Lives’: Vikas Swarup’s new novel is entertaining, despite a clichéd plot

Anyone who knows me will attest to my lack of memory for names, so it should not come as a surprise that I didn’t immediately understand the significance of this book when I was asked to review it.

“It’s Vikas Swarup.”

“Oh.”

“The Slumdog Millionaire guy, Sahana.”

“Oh.”

Having finished Girl With the Seven Lives, though, I maintain that I would have figured out what Vikas Swarup’s last book was whether I’d been told or not, not only because it’s printed on the front cover (leave me alone, I approach every book blurb-first) but also because both novels have nearly identical structures, only slightly inverted.

In Q&A every question on a game show acts as the lead-in to a (usually traumatic) story from the narrator’s life. In Seven Lives, our narrator comes into a hostage situation and tells seven traumatic stories from her life, each closing with the name of another person who is bidding for her blood (her captor plays auctioneer). Where Ram Mohammed Thomas was playing to level up in life, Devi is trying to out-talk the jaws of death. Also, Ram is a man and Devi is a woman, which may seem like an inane and superficial observation, but consider: I wanted a list of three things.

Eat or be eaten

Seven Lives reads like A Thousand and One Nights and Snakes and Ladders had a baby. In order to buy enough time for her to untie her hands, and also to avoid getting shot, Devi unravels her life story by story, each one beginning with her at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of safety, quality of life, socio-economic status, everything. Each one features her clawing her way up through a combination of plotting and scheming, the occasional dash of luck, and sheer guts. And each one ends with her losing everything and having to start over in the next chapter from square one. Swarup shows us that though she has the adaptability of a weed and shrugs identities on and off like sweaters, two traits of Devi’s that stay constant are:

• Her zeal for a better, more comfortable life – in other words, for money.

• Her total lack of moral scruples about the finer details of how she gets that money.

Once or twice she does vow to turn over a new leaf, not because she feels bad – neither did I, all her victims have it coming – but because the strait and narrow offers her a peace of mind that she’s never really had. But like the attempts of my ex-flatmate to quit smoking, these reforms never end up taking. Although to be fair, unlike the flatmate, Devi rarely has much choice; whether it’s the latest big bad (corrupt police officers, corrupt godmen, corrupt rapists of various occupations, and, on one occasion an actual mafia boss), demonetisation, or the pandemic, she is frequently put into situations where it is eat or be eaten. She’s a likeable character, I would have liked to see more of her personality.

Willing suspension of disbelief

It is, in other words, a plot-driven novel. This is not a problem in and of itself, but the issue is that Swarup relies on number of clichéd plot points. As a general rule, I am not anti-cliché – it’s entirely possible to tell a moving, effective story that’s also packed with archetypes, but Seven Lives is not that story. Perhaps if it was less plot-dominated it would be less of a problem.

The way things stand, though, most of the plot twists make themselves heard from a mile away. The dog dies (a death worthy of a ’90s Dharma Productions movie martyr), a mysterious magnetic lover turns out to have been a traitor all along, and our heroine, in spite of her usual (justified) paranoia and distrustful nature, falls for said lover and also assumes a villain dead without having laid eyes on the body. To her detriment.

Swarup’s lack of subtlety in writing these tired yarns has the effect of anklets on an elephant; as foreshadowing techniques go, telling the reader that [insert character / event / throwaway line] is surely of no significance and will surely not come back to bite Devi’s backside at an inopportune moment – in other words, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – is not my favourite. Things like these, along with the frequently stilted dialogue, tended to break the fourth wall for me, but it’s not like smooth writing or lyricism are what this book is going for anyway. It’s a thriller, and anyway, my taste for snooty Pulitzer-bait books is not Swarup’s fault. I wouldn’t call this hugely detrimental.

In the process of being thrilled, though, you will be asked to suspend disbelief several times, not so much in the storylines – most of which have parallels that can be easily located in India’s current events, with the exception of Devika Oberoi, who was my favourite of all the supporting characters because she was such a whack job. I was braced for her to be a drug-dealing pimp or something a la Seema Pahwa in Gangubai Kathiawadi, and that is the gritty tone that most of the book takes, but Oberoi turns out to be that most insufferable of creatures: a blocked writer. It was unexpected and fun, although I did feel at times that Swarup’s own scenes set in the slums had a lot of the traits he mocks via Oberoi’s character.

But I digress. Implausible plotlines wouldn’t have been a problem anyway; if I wanted absolute realism I’d read a newspaper and not a novel (not like I’m getting a true story either way). No, the parts that raised my eyebrows were mostly finer details, like the mechanisms of some of these storylines—for example, a hacker who can alter the databases of reputed universities to add names to alumni lists. Still, it was mostly willing suspension of disbelief. It’s a thriller!

I will say I did have fun, all things considered. Devi, like I said, is easy to root for, and her story has that outlandish quality that made Q&A work as well, and that ultimately does hold your attention, dead dog and all. I don’t see The Girl With the Seven Lives winning highbrow literary awards, but again, that’s not the kind of story it wants to be (and it is not a fair standard to hold a book to). It’s a thriller!

The Girl With the Seven Lives, Vikas Swarup, Simon and Schuster India.