Critical Review on ‘Items that have gone missing inside the Lucy Temerlin institute for broken shapeshifters containment room’.

‘Items that have gone missing inside the Lucy Temerlin institute for broken shapeshifters containment room’ is a short story written by Kuzhali Manickavel in June 2021. The best way to describe Manickavel’s story is to claim that it is almost kaleidoscopic: every time it is read, a new interpretation can be construed. This review will include overall analyses to try and explain what story this piece is telling us, while also deconstructing it and looking at smaller details to compare this alternate reality Manickavel has created, to our own.

This story reads as a tour, with Manickavel as our guide, who takes us through the different sections of the Lucy Temerlin institute. We know broken shapeshifters are being held here, but why? What is a shapeshifter in this universe? Who is Lucy Temerlin? These are the questions we immediately asks ourselves, but they are never answered.  More questions rise as this tours goes on, as we move on from stars to mattresses capable of mesmerising tourists, if that’s what happened, to human beings.

The genre of this story could be described as ‘magical realism’. it takes a somewhat common place, such as a containment room within an institute, but places is it in a reality that mirrors our own. The objects that are contained here, for example the Bakelite stars and mattresses, are ‘normal’ objects,  but they are placed in a context that would be unusual in our world, such as the stars’ colour being known as ‘fuckboy pink’, a true juxtaposition as in our contemporary society, pink is stereotypically a ‘girl’ colour. We can see links to Manickavel’s other works, such as when it is mentioned that the stars have been found with large insect genitalia, perhaps a nod to her collection of short stories ‘insects are just like you and me except some of them have wings’. The stars are the first items that Manickavel shows us, and thus they are the most ‘straightforward’ shapeshifters that are being kept here. A bit strange, but not incomprehensible.

 It is the ‘rectangular portions of mattresses’ where this piece starts to truly become strange. It is a patchwork of metaphors, and in order to try and understand even some of it, we must dissect it. We start off with being shown rectangular portions of mattresses, not the whole mattresses themselves, and being told their origins, how they were crafted by local artisans, but installed by a nameless global corporation. It is unknown that global corporations will sell products made by smaller companies, e.g.: amazon, but it is odd that this huge corporation is allegedly nameless. We are then told that the mattresses were crated to encourage the idea of ‘beach’ and were so successful that they disoriented tourists during their daily walks. It is the blue gel that is sued to represent the sea that especially mesmerised the tourists, or at least this is what Manickavel wants us to believe. There’s allusions to the dystopian genre within this specific section, of a world where tourists are given mattresses to replace the beach, that are apparently so hypnotic that the tourists become attached to them and have to be physically removed from the premises. But to someone from our world, this section could be read as an excuse. The tourists weren’t enthralled by some mattresses, but rather enraged that they got those instead of a beach holiday they were promised, and then had to be removed when they became too aggressive, which is highlighted by our guide angrily claiming that the now incarcerated tourists, or rather ‘incarcerated motherfuckers’ , don’t deserve a beach anyways. The incarcerated tourist are either still spellbound by the mattresses, or still enraged by how they were tricked, that have decided to cut pieces of them, and replace them with mangos.

But how are these mattresses shapeshifters? What is their true purpose? We don’t know, and our guide quickly moves on to the next shapeshifter after remarking that the mattresses are ‘confusing’, and for once, we agree.

With the ‘S. Gayathri’ section we can notice hints of speculative fiction within this story. It is unknown where the Lucy Temerlin institute is found, but we can assume it is in some kind of alternate reality of the western world, probably in the Unites States, as the national anthem being played during a morning assembly is mentioned, something that doesn’t happen in most countries, such as England. This section is almost satire, as a girl turning into an angel, during the playing of an anthem that mentions their country’s trust in God, is considered unpatriotic, but it does highlight the subjectiveness of religion in our world, especially nowadays, as most religious texts are up to interpretation, and mostly sued to back up personal beliefs, even when those beliefs were never mentioned in the texts themselves. It is likely that if someone like S. Gayathri could exist in this universe, our society would have the same response as our guide’s society. This subjectivity is acknowledged by Manickavel as the girl is defined as ‘dark’, an unusual word to describe an angel. We also assume that she took the form of a biblically accurate angel, as two blue eyes appeared on the palm of her hands and immediately started crying, which could explain why she was immediately locked up, as she defied the ‘normal’ idea of angels, bringing us back to the subjectiveness of religion we previously discussed. The section ends with the guide explaining that nobody remembers the girl at all, which could be a nod towards censorship, and how whenever there’s something that goes against mainstream values, it is immediately wiped from existence, or at least from our memories, if the former isn’t possible.

Overall, with this piece Manickavel creates a world that at first glance is absurd, but as we further analyse it, we realise she is merely showing us our reality but from an outsider’s perspective. It requires a few re-reads and sometimes half an hour of discussing whether the ‘incarcerated motherfuckers’ are the tourists or some other entity, and even then, you won’t be able to dissect every metaphor and understand fully what the author wants us to think, but it is this subjectivity that makes it stand out from other similar pieces.