Minefield of ideas | Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the dashing Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is ‘frozen’ in solid carbonite casing by the film’s villain, Darth Vader. He isn’t dead (yet) but he is in a state of reversible hibernation. A similar punishment lies at the heart of Gautam Bhatia’s work of speculative fiction, The Sentence. The narrative is set in the mining-led city-state of Peruma, which has always faced tense relations between capital and labour, dwelling in the ‘Council’ and the ‘Commune’, respectively. A hundred years before the events of the novel, a man named Jagat allegedly murdered a high-ranking Council official, because of which he was sentenced to ‘cryo-sleep’, a state of cryogenic hibernation not entirely unlike Han Solo’s. And now, almost a century later, the novel’s protagonist, a Guardian (think of it as a lawyer, but with extra steps and soothing noises about honour and duty) named Nila is approached to fight Jagat’s case and prove his innocence—even if that innocence proves to be a powder keg for Peruma’s hard-fought peace.