This is my second outing with Indian author Aravind Adiga. The first involved The White Tiger, his debut novel. I read it in 2008, which was the year it appeared, and the year it won the Booker Prize. It was not uncontroversial. I remember finding it a good read. I don't say much else in my diary, but we were travelling at the time, so the lack of comment doesn't imply anything bad.

Amnesty was published in 2020. It's a very clever book, and again very readable. You fly through the pages as you follow the fortunes of Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, aka Danny, a Sri Lankan who has migrated to Australia. He started out on a legitimate visa, but then fell into irregularity, and a lot of the novel focuses on the dilemmas this situation creates, and how it arose.

We follow Danny over the course of one fateful day in Sydney.

His life consists of earning money as a paid-by-cash cleaner, living clandestinely in the store-room of a shopkeeper who's a champion exploiter, and doing his best to stay under the radar. Those without legal status are in a precarious position. They can't access health care; they're at the mercy of anyone who might dob them in on a dedicated hotline; they're constantly trying to avoid security checks; even upgrading a cellphone becomes problematic because of the paperwork involved.

But this is not a full-on misery story. Danny also lives. He treats his hair to fancy highlights, and he's dating a nice young Vietnamese nurse called Sonja. He retains an offbeat sense of humour, a jaunty demeanour, and an acute capacity for observing Aussie life. He's intelligent, and likeable.



Interspersed with the hour-by-hour segments are longer pieces of narrative, which inform us, bit by bit, of Danny's past. His first overseas expedition was to Dubai, to make a little money. Here he learns plenty about his place -- the "very lowest level" -- in this globalized world. Much worse follows on his return, though, when the Sri Lankan authorities mistake him for a terrorist. He still bears the scars from their interrogation... Feeling as though he can never again be at home in a country that has treated him like this, he pursues an educational opening in Australia. He could have chosen a migration route that was illegal from the get-go, ie, paying people-smugglers to take him somewhere by boat. But he chose the "legal" route. The problem is that the institute that has brought him to Australia is essentially a scam. Its bogus training courses turn out to be fast tracks to nothing but labour exploitation: "The college gave each foreign student a job, to train for a new life in Australia. Danny was assigned to a curry restaurant on the first floor of a pub."

Meanwhile, his enquiry about asylum is summarily rebuffed. The blithe official pronouncements about security in Sri Lanka are markedly at odds with what the narrator has told us about the history of violence between Muslim and Tamil groups in the east, about the spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals, and about his own encounter with the authorities.

According to Amita Arudpragasam, a Sri Lankan political writer, "After a state-condoned pogrom in 1983 in which thousands of Tamils were killed, waves of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants left to Australia fearing for their safety. They continued to leave during the 26-year civil war that followed. In 2012 -- which is around the time Danny, the novel’s protagonist, migrated -- Sri Lanka was the largest source of boat arrivals to Australia. Even though many claimants provided evidence of torture, Australia accepted only 11.6 percent of applicants, deporting about 37 percent on the basis of a single interview... In the end, Danny doesn't apply to change his visa status -- presumably daunted by the inhumane conditions under which Australia detains its asylum-seekers. (Asylum seekers in detention are 200 times more likely to self-harm compared to the average Australian; since 2000, at least 12 individuals hoping to migrate to Australia were suspected to have died by suicide while in detention.)"

Now, if he'd hung on at the college, he might have forged a path to long-term residence. But, disillusioned, he withdraws from his course, and -- because that's how the law works -- he becomes an undocumented migrant 28 days later. He has had plenty of time in the intervening years to regret that decision: "I am sorry for what I did, he wished he could tell the police, and immigration, and customs, and his father back home. He wished he could tell them more: that from the day he had become an illegal, he had been trying to reverse things. To find some way aound his decision."

When we meet him, this has all happened. At the point the novel begins, Danny is coasting along, constantly susceptible to deportation, his future totally uncertain.


Danny is from the east of Sri Lanka. We never visited that area. But the book opens with idyllic descriptions of the coast, so here's some other Sri Lankan seaside. Mirissa, 2010

The turning-point is the news that a woman has been murdered. Danny is shocked to find that she's a former client, Radha. Furthermore, he thinks he knows who did it -- another former client, Prakash. Danny is the only one who knows about the relationship between these two, which has been going on behind Radha's husband's back. Radha and Prakash are both in Australia on a legal basis; both are of Indian ethnicity. Danny's world-view means he sees this as problematic: "You KNEW they were Indians. You KNOW Indians are the worst thing for a Sri Lankan Tamil, so why didn't you stay away from these two Indians?" They're certainly a strange pair. Prakash gambles, has a violent streak, and appears a little unbalanced: "Angry with Australia, angry with India, angry with the white, angry with everyone else -- a perfect crack." Radha, though kind, has been in trouble with the law (for gambling with the Medicare money she's supposed to be administering). This odd couple befriends Danny in a condescending kind of way -- and this was the only element in the story, given the social stratification that Adiga stresses throughout -- that struck me as a little unlikely. They address him as "Cleaner", and yet they take him out for the occasional drink or gambling session (he neither drinks nor gambles). Maybe they just see him as entertainment, but even so...

Anyway, Danny has many reasons to be suspicious of Prakash. But if he calls the police information line, it will emerge that he is an undocumented migrant, and he will certainly be sent home: "If I tell the Law about him, I also tell the Law about myself."

As the suspected murderer starts to badger Danny to meet him, and the young man struggles to make up his mind what to do, the novel takes on elements of a cat-and-mouse thriller.
Given that's the case, I won't reveal the end. But all the way through, we've been schooled to understand how big and possibly lethal a deal deportation would be. First there would be detention at Villawood, and its suicide risk. But that's not all: "Imagine, even if you somehow survived Villawood, extradition, the flight home, the Sri Lankan army, and intelligence men -- imagine, after all that, having to go back to your home and endure the Brazen Starer's wide grin from her first-floor balcony... Danny was sure he would rather kill himself."

And then there's Danny's father back home, the father whose expectations he already feels he has disappointed: "This boy -- he goes to Dubai -- and returns with what? A black mark on his arm. He doesn't have anything from the list I asked him to bring... He's claiming it was police torture, but I ask you, why will the police do this to a man unlesss he is hiding something?"

Danny, with his tangle of motives for migrating, illustrates very clearly how nonsensical it is to differentiate between economic and political migrants.



*_*_*

As a sociological study of migrant Australia, this is a fascinating novel. There are many different levels of "brown people", for example. Those with documents and those without. Those with money and those without. Most dangerous is "the brown man in a white man's city who is watching other brown men... Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don't see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what."

Those who are documented are not necessarily sympathetic to those who are not. Status trumps ethnicity. Danny encounters a Bangadeshi, for example: "Legal? Much more than legal -- this young Bangladeshi was a brick wall in which each block said: Ideal Bloody Immigrant."

And the legal are not necessarily sympathetic to their host country. Danny often stops by a kebab shop run by Haroun, who loves to complain about Australia: "How this jabbed at Danny's heart, the legal immigrant's prerogative to curse the land that had welcomed him."

Nor do non-whites necessarily support other non-whites. Prakash -- Indian, remember -- rages that the county is "overrun by brown people". But we recognize this attitude, don't we? Just look at the British government...

And yet there is a cultural bond. At one point Danny spots two groups of Indians, all staring at their phones. There are young ones, "fresh from the homeland"; and suited ones, already "processed by the West". They don't interact: "The ones in the suits were locals, Icebox Indians [as Danny calls them, because they never seem to sweat], and they were ignoring the immigrants, but BOTH of them, Danny noticed, were watching the same Bollywood song."

There's increasing competition among migrants in the cleaning business, too: "Two-man, three-man Chinese teams were spreading over Sydney offering the same service, at the same price, in half the time. And let's not even talk about the Nepalis. Four men at the price of one."



*_*_*

Danny is a shrewd observer of the idiosyncracies of Australia (every country has them, after all)...

-- He writes himself some checklists, to avoid cultural faux pas. On sport, for example, one such list begins: "In Australia three types of rugby (never call it rugby) exist..."

-- He furnishes his makeshift accommodation well and for free, "because Aussies threw out a regular living room every two days".

-- Gambling permeates the novel, not only reflecting a major issue in Australia, but also providing a metaphor for the lottery of life.

-- At one point, in his attempts to elude Prakash, Danny comes across a sign, near a hole where someone is working: "STEP BACK DANGER BY LAW YOU CANNOT COME CLOSER THAN 3 METRES OF THIS SIGN". I don't know if that's true, but you laugh even so -- because it COULD be.

And a web of irony underpins the story. Migrants who go off-grid live lives full of fear. Yet those who devise dodgy schemes to get migrants into the country live very comfortably, and there's visible connivance between the farmers and growers who profit from illegal labour and the authorities who carry out their raids only when the apples have been picked...

Australia is lauded as a nation that upholds the law, and yet justice is elusive for many asylum-seekers (again, this is not only true of Australia, sadly...). It is a land that values minorities -- "once you found out what that word MINORITY means over here, tasted the intoxicant of being wanted BECAUSE you were not like everyone else, how could anyone possibly tell you to go back to Sri Lanka and once again live as a minority over there?" -- and yet minorities have to be in the right place at the right time, because there's a still a perceptible streak of racism running through the society that Adiga depicts. Danny's recognition of the attraction of difference sits alongside a determination to fit in (by conforming to his self-imposed rules of comportment).

Ironic, too, is the juxtaposition of individual activists and systemic injustice. Protesting on the streets is one thing; detaching yourself from an economy that benefits from the exploitation of vulnerable migrants is quite another. As Arudpragasam puts it: "For the undocumented migrant, who has given up hope and to whom reform appears impossible, such activism seems futile and perhaps even complicit -- it only props up the deceitful image of a fair Australia."



*_*_*

The novel attracts lots of flak from critics who either don't like the all-in-a-day structure, and/or feel that not enough happens in the second half.

I don't concur with either of those criticisms. To me, the text conveyed very effectively the wanderings of the brain when it's only semi-engaged in a dull hoovering activity, and then the exhausting busyness of the brain -- going here, there, and everywhere -- when it's faced with both a new and terrifying situation and a terrible decision. And while conveying all this, the narrative is also ramping up the tension as to how the moral dilemma that has been constructed is going to play out.

Structurally, therefore, I had no worries. It was a good read.

Rabeea Saleem castigates "a minor but consistent anger towards Muslims harboured by the protagonist". That Danny feels what the reviewer describes as "a certain hostility for other immigrants who have it easy" is fairly realistic. Characters in books don't have to be politically correct, and Danny is very likely to have brought his prejudices with him. But the idea that a person would be favoured in Australia for being Muslim is surely a mark of the observer's desperation... As the reviewer in Turning the Pages points out, "In Sydney, Danny learns a survival strategy -- fluid identity. Everything about his stories, his background, his identity, can be negotiated, in a constant state of flux, whatever it takes to get through each situation." The construction of an Other is probably an important part of that.

My main concern was the issue of appropriation... This is an Indian author, after all, writing through the eyes of a Sri Lankan. I couldn't find any comment by Sri Lankans about this. But Arudpragasam had no beef with Adiga's portrayal, and Tanjil Rashid also has a fair point: "Some critics now insist writers should 'stay in their lane'. But I’d prefer an amnesty -- something Danny dreams of -- for any artist who crosses the borders of expectation. Even Adiga’s flawed creation reminds us of the pleasure and understanding that can ensue when writers migrate out of their own experience."



Arudpragasam summarizes: "The dual repeating refrains in this novel are that Danny declares he is never going home, and that he is a man without rights in this world. The catch-22 of the illegal migrant in a nutshell."

Don't believe the critics: I don't think these themes could have been better expounded than in Amnesty.