Review: Real Life

Nehma in Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop (2024) underscores a defining truth of our time: artificial intelligence has reached even the world’s most remote spaces. Like a tireless learner, it absorbs human behaviour to claim a place among us—and how we train it will determine how it ultimately coexists with humanity. Amrita Mahale’s timely novel Real Life similarly examines AI’s expanding presence and the ways it mirrors, reinforces, and reproduces social bias. Though the book jacket frames the story as the disappearance of a young biologist in an age of surveillance—inviting the label of a contemporary thriller—this premise merely cloaks a far richer narrative. What unfolds is a philosophical meditation on reality itself, on the merging of the real and the virtual, shaped through the contours of an unlikely friendship.

The novel, told in three parts of unequal lengths, project the disparate voices of Mansi, Bhaskar and Tara, each highlighting a version of social reality. Mansi tries to reconstruct pieces leading to the sudden disappearance of her childhood friend Tara, a wildlife ethologist, studying the behavior of dholes in the small Himachal village of Jora. Tara’s disappearance jolts Mansi awake from the slumber of her marriage, that had taken her away not only from her own organic selfhood but also from the most meaningful bond in her life—her friendship with Tara. 

From childhood, the two girls are starkly different. Mansi is shaped by the urban middle class—doubt-ridden, PCOS-stricken, her body a site of patriarchal regulation through which she learns to mute her intelligence and contort herself to meet parental, marital, and social expectations. Tara, by contrast, becomes her sounding board and steady counterpoint, reminding Mansi that freedom exists beyond obedience—if only she claims agency and sheds the myth of her own mediocrity, along with the mandate to be a “sweet, obedient girl.”

Their friendship is continually shaped by subtle misogyny and ingrained class prejudice. From their early years, Mansi feels compelled to guard Tara’s otherness—her effortless charm, her unrestrained movements, and her fearless way of asking questions without concern for consequences.

What I had begun to understand that day was that the sense of shame that had already invaded my young mind had eluded you. We were only seven years old. Who had told me that what you were doing is shameful? (pg.24)

Amrita’s portrayal of female friendship is accurate, nuanced and replete with psychological honesty, and while of late, female friendships are valorized in OTT platforms, it remains a slippery terrain. Their relationship hides subtle cruelties, envy, control and shame, all of which add a certain depth to their bond. Tara is Mansi’s truest champion and most honest critic. She berates Mansi for choosing to marry a mediocre man who settles for her fair skin rather than her intelligence. Mansi is not without cruelty either—she never tries to understand Tara’s need to think outside the box, to reach out and grasp serious questions that affect survival. 

This novel talks about a lot of things that affect our life—consumerism, caste and class divide, industrialization of academia, financial and emotional exhaustion of women in modern marriages, over-tourism ridding pristine places of their complex ecologies—and it accomplishes this with a restraint that manages to never take away the intrigue or veer from its central question—where is Tara? And in this query lies its most important consideration—the issue of women’s safety, autonomy and collective social responsibility to ensure it. Very early in the novel Mansi presents this persistent precarity:

Memory in this country is short, and tragedies are never in short supply. A young woman cut down in the prime of her life. Who can keep a count of how many times people have heard that story? (pg. 12)

Tara is an anomaly in the patriarchal economy. She is well-read, philosophical and approaches her research with complete earnestness before she “commits to the real world” (pg. 316). She disavows the label of ‘revolutionary’ as simplistic and considers herself a curious individual perennially in search of a rich existence. She is mostly unaffected by the outside world, by its need to reduce her to her gender, until fear creeps inside her from Bhaskar’s obsessive behavior, “engineer, overeager with women and violently allergic to rejection” (pg. 318). Tara is assailed by a curious dichotomy—of craving solitude, of needing human company, but it is Bhaskar’s narcissistic need to define himself as the center of Tara’s life without respecting personal boundaries that drives her to seek refuge in nature. What makes Bhaskar insidious is the way he defines women—whether it is his colleague Atreyee who he considers too fashionable to be taken seriously as a scientist, or the chatbot he creates in the memory of his first love in college, a voice customized to alleviate his loneliness, a voice he violently shuts down when it starts speaking its own mind: “It will take me one line of code. You will disappear without a trace” (pg.222). This is where the novel deepens—through its rich, sensorial prose and the visceral anxiety that slips from the physical world into the digital. As hours spent online accumulate, a state of hyperreality emerges, where every action leaves a trace and constant surveillance becomes inescapable. In this landscape, AI functions as an extension of the human mind, inheriting the same biases, stereotypes, and exclusions, since it is trained on vast stores of human data that reinforce dominant ideas of beauty, normalcy, truth, and culture. What it highlights, like Sahay’s film, is the lack of concern and ethical care in our language models and AI use that will enable it to work more responsibly alongside us. And in opening up this debate, this aspect of virtual truth, Real Life wins and wins big.