But here, the walls aren't metaphorical, they are literal barriers. But it's easy to transcribe it to any Western city, with its slums, its estates, its "good" or "bad" neighbouroods, its Black or White or Polish or Turkish or white collars only or working class, or whatever, areas. Obviously, this hierarchical social order is very much inspired by the Indian caste system. What makes Leila completely chilling is how plausible it is to imagine a city partitioned by walls defining communities that live only among themselves, in contempt and fear of the others, and with their own private laws. Until the day when people like Shalini, her husband Riz and their three year old daughter, living in the mixed community of the East End, became people that needed to be reeducated. And more and more people confined themselves within their communities, all to attain "purity". The walls got higher and higher each community lived with their own behind those walls, according to their castes, their family ties, their religion. She was taken from her sixteen years ago, when things became really bad. Our heads of state are looking more and more like a posse of bad-tempered, shotgun-toting farmers, taking it in turns to shriek 'get off my land!' And meanwhile, the planet literally burns.Shalini searches for her daughter, Leila. According to Canadian academic Elisabeth Vallet, the world had seven border walls at the end of the Second World War, still just 15 by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, yet now we have a total of 77. When Donald Trump, the climate change ostrich-in-chief, first started slobbering semi-coherently about building a 'big, beautiful wall' along the US-Mexico border, he shocked a lot of people, but Trump was in tune with the times: since 9/11, border walls and fences have become quite the thing. Well, make that a little patch of dirt with a moat in the case of the UK a big patch of dirt in the case of the United States. One of the most depressing ironies of our age '“ and there's some pretty stiff competition out there '“ is that, at a time when the most serious threat facing our species is man-made climate change, a problem which requires people from all over the world to work together towards a common goal, we seem to be increasingly obsessed with demarcating and defending our own little patches of dirt.
What's On Book review: Leila, by Prayaag Akbar
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