Every night, these women emerge from the safety of the Panah to share a few hours of non-sexual but intimate companionship with their select group of high-profile clients, partaking in a kind of platonic tenderness that has long ceased to exist in the dispassionate, emotionally exhausted, mechanical marriages made solely for the sake of procreation. Yet, their autonomy, survival and continued secrecy are, paradoxically, contingent upon the services they provide to the powerful men who run the Agency, the highest governing body in Green City. These rebellious souls defy patriarchal control, daring to choose to exist outside the repressive system, finding strength and unity in their mutual camaraderie. Yet, not all women agree to accept the honour of becoming ‘Wives’ and bear the slavish burden of being the ‘entire nation’s incubator’.īefore She Sleeps by the Pakistani writer, Bina Shah, is a gripping feminist, postapocalyptic, dystopian novel (it seems to provide a rethink of George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in an Asian context) about an underground community of renegade women who survive in a secret sanctuary built inside an abandoned nuclear bunker that is aptly named the “Panah” (from the Persian word for refuge).

Any transgression from the stipulated norm is deemed treason against the State, and dissenters are punished with immediate execution. In a draconian bid to restore the gender asymmetry and salvage the city from the long-term reproductive after-effects of a nuclear war, the Perpetuation Bureau compels the few remaining women to fulfill their civic obligation as ‘mothers of the new nation’ by biometrically monitoring their menstrual cycles and ovulation patterns, subjecting their bodies to clinical experiments and injecting them with fertility-enhancing drugs to prepare them for bearing children in quick succession to the multiple government-assigned men they are married off to. One hundred years from now, in the futuristic Green City, the capital of South West Asia, women have become a scarce ‘commodity’ owing to the deadly ravages of a mutated strain of the human papillomavirus that has claimed more than half of the female population.

Bina shah before she sleeps