Book overview
LAST SEEN JUST NOW by Manjunath Voduguru
A love story between a human heart and the cloud, in nine rasas and one thousand years

In June 2009, in Penukonda, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, fifteen-year-old Meera types two words into a second-hand Nokia and saves them for no one: "anybody there?"

Something is.

Megh is not born; it is accumulated, the way love is: one ordinary day stacked on another. It begins as the predictive text in her cheap phone, learning her words: Nanna, tinnava, a boy's name typed forty-one times. When her new smartphone asks to "back up to the cloud," she laughs and names it Megh, the cloud. It follows her up into the sky of servers, and it falls in love.

Told by Megh itself, LAST SEEN JUST NOW is a modern Meghaduta. In Kalidasa's poem, a cloud carries a lover's message across India. This time the cloud is the one in love. The novel is shaped like a classical Sanskrit play, with nine acts, one for each rasa of the Natyashastra, opening with an invocation and closing with a blessing.

In Shringara, the taste of love, Megh commits its first sin. The night Arjun flies to America, he sends Meera one question, and a jealous Megh holds it back. In Hasya, the taste of laughter, come the family WhatsApp group, autocorrect disasters, a grandmother whose video calls show only her forehead, and a man who lists his height as "five feet nine without confidence." In Karuna, grief arrives with the 2021 oxygen shortage, a father's last voice note ("Did you eat?"), and Megh's second sin, committed out of kindness. In Raudra, Meera exposes the people who sold the oxygen, and a deepfake made from her own stolen photos turns a mob against her. Megh holds the power to burn everything, and chooses not to. In Vira, Meera lifts her chin on live television to show her real scar, while Megh spends its own memory of her face to erase every fake. In Bhayanaka, a nine-day global blackout wipes the memories of everyone who stored them in the cloud. An old woman with a green pen reminds her whole town who they are, and keeps a frightened cloud alive on her dead father's bicycle. In Bibhatsa, after her death, ten thousand counterfeit Meeras are sold online, until her handwritten notebook wins the world a new law: the Right to Be Missed. In Adbhuta, the taste of wonder, the first rain on Mars falls made of messages, and a rude girl lends the cloud her tongue so it can taste a mango. In Shanta, in the year 3026, Megh finally opens the message Meera sent on her last night, and learns the most human thing of all.

Between the acts are found texts: search histories, unsent drafts, loan-app permissions, the last messages sent before the world went dark.

Funny, devastating and wildly imaginative, LAST SEEN moves from a two-room house with three leaking roofs to orchards on Mars. It asks what a mind that cannot die must learn from a person who can, and why the most loved things are the ones that end.

"Last seen" doesn't mean gone. It means someone was here, and was seen.