Brown Man in a White Man’s City

~ Amnesty, by Arvind Adiga ~

Amnesty is vintage Adiga. Need I say more? 

After the disappointment of Selection Day (which was by no means awful, just less accessible!), it is a joy to go back to the powerful, punchy, sharply observed and impactfully delineated classic Adiga novels like The White Tiger, Last Man in Tower, and Between the Assassinations. Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) seems to be moving in the same literary direction as Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), or Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), where these literary lions of South Asian writing in English tackle head-on the condition of the migrant, and migration issues with all their associated concerns (host-guest relationships, migration routes and conditions, issues of home, identity, belonging, networks, mobility). 

Danny (Dhananjaya), the protagonist of Amnesty is not an Indian character, but a Tamil Sri Lankan. Both his nationality and race are key to his identity construction and to the frightening experiences he has had, which led him to move from his home in Batticaloa

city of the singing fish. Jewel of the east of Sri Lanka. Fire-walkers at the temple. Tongue-piercers. Silver beaches. Mermaids living in the lagoon. Kadal kanni, we call them

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to become a ‘legendary cleaner’ in Sydney, toting a vacuum cleaner on his back and looking a little like an astronaut, he thinks, cleaning homes for 60 dollars an hour. 

When we encounter Danny, he has already been in Sydney for 4 years. 

His five-foot-seven body looked like it had been expertly packed into itself, and even when he was doing hard physical labor his gaze was dreamy, as if he owned a farm somewhere far away With an elegant oval jaw, and that long, thin forehead’s suggestion of bookishness, he was not, except when he smiled and exhibited cracked teeth, an overseas threat. On his left forearm a bump, something he had not been born, showed prominently, and he had let his third fingernail on the right hand grow long and opalescent. His hair had fresh highlights of gold in it.

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It is not until much later in the book that we discover about that bump on his forearm, and how that led him to migrate to Australia. His first migration however, was to Dubai, where he worked as a hotel receptionist, 

In Dubai he had guessed for the first time the size of the world at whose very lowest level, instinct told him­­­–a Tamil from the east of Sri Lanka, a minority within the minority—he dwelled

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but upon his return to Sri Lanka, because of his race, he was targeted for questioning and torture, and thereafter, wanted to leave for good. 

Danny comes to Australia legally, as a student. 

This was the racket: Mackenzie College wooed foreigners to Wollongong and sucked fees from them for two years, at the end of which, arming them with framed certificates of post-graduate competence, MBAs and MTechs, it turned them loose to tar roads, install windows, and wok-fry noodles around Australia. White people were cheating foreigners, and foreigners were cheating white people, and no one in the college seemed happy.

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Right from the outset, Danny meets one Japanese-Brazilian, Abe, who teaches him the ropes of the game of illegal migration: 

“You switch from one course to the other every semester, right? Two years at the college becomes four years. Even five. You can earn money on the side as a fruit picker. After five years, who knows?”

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Abe also leads him to Tommo, the Greek shopkeeper who hires illegal migrants, makes them work for less than minimum wage, houses them, and takes a cut of all their earnings. Danny decides he is better off not continuing in education if it is just a scam, and 

Twenty-eight days after he sent that letter [to Mackenzie College informing them he was not paying fees and was dropping out], he became free forever in Sydney. Twenty-eight days after he sent that letter, he became trapped forever in Sydney.

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The novel is outstanding in the illuminating, insightful way it unfolds the condition of the illegal migrant.

Danny had come to Australia by plane and then applied for refugee status and been told to fuck off.

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Having become an illegal migrant,  he spends all his time wearing this identity, watching everyone else, and trying to fit in, look legal. For him, every hour, every minute of each day, is about survival, about concealment. 

In the open, in Australia, Danny turned his head to the side and spat. No, I’ll find a way. I’ll stay out. Somehow. But I won’t say sorry for what I did four years ago, and I won’t live in fear ever again.

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He is always running imaginary scenarios in his head, always trying to pre-empt being caught and interrogated. Imagining good answers for why he overstayed his student visa and how to get an extension:

Each time a door opened or slammed, he wanted to shout, I am sorry, sir. I am so sorry. But what was the point in saying that now? He was a man without rights in this world.

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Even when he is watched by a child on a train, Danny’s paranoia surfaces: 

Obnoxious legal thing. Danny tilted his head to the side and returned the child’s stare.
Little legal policeman. I am never going back home.
The child tilted his head a little more and a little more and kept staring.
Danny did the same.
I haven’t lasted four years here, little policeman, to be caught by you.

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Over and over, Danny says he will never be sent back, he ardently longs to stay in Sydney, however adverse the situations he finds himself in:

Because people in Australia were famished for what was weird, self-assuredly weird, even belligerently weird,: like a Tamil man with golden highlights in his hair. A minority. And 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?

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Adiga underlines so many important misconceptions about migrants – that their stories of migration are often multiple and non-linear; that their reasons for migration may not going to qualify them politically or legally for asylum status, but that that definition falls very short of understanding people’s actual push and pull factors, and the urgency of their impetus to leave.  

The novel is written in a single day, with the times (hours and minutes) of the day heading sections/chapters. In between there are flashbacks to various of Danny’s memories, putting together the story with its past and context. Danny is cleaning one day when he sees a police presence in another apartment across the road that he also used to clean at. He discovers the woman in his House 5 in Erskineville, Radha, has been found killed and dumped into the river wrapped in a leather jacket. She, who is an Australian, middle-upper class, is married to a white man, Mark, but Danny knows she has an affair with Prakash (the non-apologist) in House 6, in Potts Point. Radha and Prakash met at a rehabilitation for gamblers, and they both return to gambling with a vengeance, as part of their affair. For some months, they take Danny around with them as they go from bar to bar, and give him free food and drink. He knows their affair, their haunts, their routines. He knows Prakash is habitually violent, and carries a knife. When Danny finds out Radha has been killed, he is in a dilemma. He is afraid it is Prakash who has killed her.

Dr. Prakash, former miner, former soldier, King of the Nile. Would the possessor of a pair of eyes like that have anything to do with a murder? A civilized man, a private school man.

On the other hand, he did sometimes carry a knife around, didn’t he?

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 He phones Prakash, and who tells him to come and clean his house as he is leaving for South Africa that day. He threatens to turn Danny in to the authorities. He knows all about Danny because Radha had told him, and Danny had previously foolishly confided his illegal status to Radha. Danny is terrified Prakash is Radha’s killer but he has to go, although he prevaricates as much as he dares. The novel is mostly about Danny dragging his heels, going back and forth across Sydney, trying not to have to see Prakash, but knowing it is unavoidable. Gradually, Danny figures out Radha’s killer was definitely Prakash. For most of the second half of the novel, Danny is torn between informing the police, and keeping quiet. Prakash is also afraid he will inform the police, and so threatens him and tracks him down. Danny tries many a time to phone the police, and the final time, he does reveal what he knows, because he is now aware Prakash is going to also kill Mark, Radha’s husband. At the end, he traps Prakash, rather serendipitiously actually, then tips off the police, and ends up deported himself. 

Much of this novel is about Danny trying his level best to learn Aussie ways, to fit in, not to draw attention to himself.

So that’s why I have, he thought, become visible. Because my way of eating bothers her. After four years, he was still learning things, still making notes to himself: Never walk and eat in daylight. They see you.

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Danny is always seeing himself reflected in fragments through the eyes of others: White people did not like the sound of knuckles being cracked.

“Stop that,” they said, as if he were spitting in public or farting.

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Danny has a chart on his wall on how to tell who a foreigner is:

Us and Them

1.       1^st and foremost difference: posture.

2.       Beards (us-too wild) and then haircuts (too docile)

3.       Paunch. Young Australians don’t have paunches.

4.       Also don’t spit in public.

5.       Class (but have no class compared to people back home).

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Many instances in novel illustrates the stark chasm between legal and illegal migrants in Australia (and more generally). As Adiga puts it so succinctly, it is “the legal immigrant’s prerogative to curse the land that had welcomed him”, something illegals of course cannot afford. Danny has a girlfriend, a Vietnamese who is a legal immigrant, and when Sonja takes Danny home to meet her mother, her mother who has also been given legal status in Australia and not being able to communicate well in English, feeling she may have offended Danny,

brought out her Medicare card, senior card, and library card, placing them all in a line for Sonya and Danny to inspect: it was her idea of propriety and Danny’s idea of happiness. So that, thought Danny, is how it looks like from their side

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underlining the sharp divide between being a legal and illegal migrant, and the pride and security of the legal migrant. 

Even within the legal migrants and even naturalised ethnic communities in Australia, there are big divides. As Radha says,

We [Radha and Prakash] are not living the Indian lifestyle in Sydney, which is what, just buying bigger and bigger cars and celebrating Hindu festivals louder and louder each year in Parramatta.

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Danny describes how alienated he feels from all these legal ethnic communities: 

The brown man in a white man’s city who is watching other brown men. Danny had studied all the ways this was done, from the amiable glances of the Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys; the easily acquisitive Sab Theek Hai, Bhai? (or, more recently, the mysteriously Jamaican Hey maaan) of the fresh new students in Haymarket, the ones who are running madly across roads; the ostentatiously indifferent I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances of the Australian-born children of doctors in Mosman or Castle Hill (Icebox Indians, Danny called them, because they always wore black glasses and never seemed to sweat, even in summer); and worst of all, those families visiting from Chennai or Malaysia clicking photos of the beach, or loudly double-checking on the phone with relatives back home exactly which cholesterol medication or marsupial souvenir was needed from Australia.

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There are plenty of instances in this novel where Adiga makes comments about either the disparities between standards of living between white Australians and migrants, as well as where he makes humorous observations about Australia norms. 

If it has names like flat white, latte, or doppio, if it is hand-brewed by men or women who wear aprons, and served in porcelain at the cost of four dollars a cup, then it is what white Australians call coffee.

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But for the immigrant to Sydney, coffee is what comes out of a self-service machine made in China and imported into 7-Eleven stores throughout the city. The machine even pours you milk if you press a button. Yes, hot milk.

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The italicisation of the word hot, is quite touching. Danny knows that if he goes back to Sri Lanka, he will not have milk at all, of any description, and to have hot milk at the press of a button, even if out of a self service machine, is still a minor miracle and one of the many reasons for which he is sacrificing so much to make a life in Sydney.

In this novel, ethnicity is no guarantee of solidarity. There may be recognition based on race or culture, but recognition is not allegiance.

“Legal? Much more than legal—this young Bangladeshi was a brick wall in which each block said: Ideal Bloody Immigrant.

Returning Danny’s gaze, he folded his arms across his chest, the image of respectability, diligence, and responsibility to family, everything the whites wanted in someone they let into their country: he did not have to talk about the weather, or about cricket or football, to curry favour with his clients; secretly, they envied his faith, his purpose, his strong alien core.

To win him over, step by step, Danny touched the top of a stack of Daily Telegraph newspapers, curved his spine, hunched, and smiled.

“Meaning: Can I look at the paper without buying? Cricket? Only for cricket?

All this without words. South Asian to South Asian, ignoring the highlights.

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  “Indians.” 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?

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There is also a delicious passage in the novel where Danny explains what ‘Eyeshock’ is, which bonds South Asians in Sydney, even if unwillingly. 

Eyeshock.

There is a buzz, a reflexive retinal buzz, whenever a man or woman born in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh sees another from his or her part of the world in Sydney—a tribal pinprick, an instinct always reciprocal, like the instantaneous recognition of homosexuals in a repressive society. Because even if both of you believe that one brown man holds no special significance for another in Sydney—a city and a civilization built on a principle of exclusion of men and women who were not white, and which fully outgrew that principle only a generation ago—which is to say, even if you want to stay icebox or indifferent in the presence of the other brown man, you are helpless. You have to look at him just as he has to look at you. Eyeshock.

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There is a little more solidarity amongst fellow illegal migrants, who loosely band together: 

Most weekday mornings, the illegals gathered in front of the Glebe library: it was their own market, of damaged goods to barter or sell, and information about jobs and changes to immigration laws” p65. They take care however, not to know too much about each other, so that if caught, they cannot accidentally reveal anything. Danny’s experiences show how illegal immigrants are almost a family to each other eventually, just from being in the same boat: “It is an Indonesia inside Australia: an archipelago of illegals, each isolated from the other and kept weak, and fearful, by this isolation. But after a while you observe that that some little islands have joined into bigger ones, and the fear is less here. There is even home.

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That said, Danny knows himself to be set apart even from the other illegal immigrants:

“Opposite of Olympics, which is bringing a bad name to their country by breaking the law of Australia, is what they were doing, All of them here outside the library.”

“What do you tell them back home?”

The lies were modest, similar. The Pakistanis claimed to be running the store they worked in. Same with Lin. Nothing about being a millionaire in Australia. The lie was just about their dignity.” […]

“Because there is a difference between us, thought Danny, looking at the other illegals. For them, shame was an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside; in him, it bubbled up from within. Even if I were granted citizenship in this country, I would still be ashamed of myself.“

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Amnesty turns a spotlight on the complex story of migration to the Global North, touching on the many immigrant groups and categories in Sydney and their fraught relationships with each other as well as with the white Aussies. The novel picks up on the contradictions of Australians, fearing Muslims and yet also bending over backwards to accommodate them,

“Don’t they ever read books about Hindu law? White people. Obsessed with Muslims. Because they’re frightened of them”

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Danny sees some Muslims in Australia and wonders, 

“how the hell did people like this become legal, unless there was actually someone at the Department of Immigration who actually decided: “You don’t look like a terrorist. Sorry you’ll never get into Australia. Next! Yes, you with the big beard, you can come in for sure!” See: the other day Yahoo! News had this story of an overweight extremely blind Malaysian guy, who plays the guitar, actually can’t play it at all, and the Aussies had an online signature campaign for him, because he’s Muslim and gave him permanent residency. I tell you, there are Tamil men burning themselves alive.

Last week this man in Melbourne, this Jaffna man, covered himself in petrol and lit himself with a match when they wouldn’t give him refugee status. Who gets it? This Malay Muslim”

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The novel of course also demonstrates Danny’s own prejudices, coming from the East of Sri Lanka with Muslim minorities, as well as Tamil minorities. 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:

“Now talk your way out of this, Dhananjaya. […] Or maybe a story was needed, a quick but moving story: My father always said no, I couldn’t eat while walking, so now it’s a form of rebellion”

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Danny leans ugly truths about migrants’ routinely appalling treatment, bullying, harassment, and exploitation:

Grinning, and aware he was becoming ugly, he recited the facts of life to her [Sonja’s] confused face. […] As you well know, the builders, they’re the ones who want more immigration. They’re bringing in brown and black people and putting them in slums near the airport and the train stations. To be slaves for white people”

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In his house cleaning work, Danny faces competition, because immigrants, especially illegal and low paid ones, are so dispensable, exchangeable, good bargains which can be commodified:

An astronaut faced growing competition these days, it was a fact. 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.

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Danny’s musings throw into high relief the abuse migrants commonly face, and if illegal migrants, abuse which they are hardly in a position to protest or resist:

There was Clorox in the air – too much; that must mean, he thought, that Nepalis had cleaned this toilet They always used too much of the stuff.

Pubs would be a tough place to do, and pub toilets would be the worst. “Do you fucking know what I am saying, do you fucking understand English?” bellows the white Australian in charge. The women always seemed to be the most determined to offend. “This is a bloody loo. We let you into our country to clean it.” Maybe Clorox is how you retaliate.

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Adiga picks up beautifully and with black humour, the weapons of the weak – such as Clorox! No one, it appears, is safe or exempt: 

eyes that convey a desperate truth from one immigrant to the other: every brown man in Sydney, one day or another, has to beg

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The novel folds back layer upon layer of exploitations, by individuals, by systems, by legal immigrants of illegal immigrants, by illegal immigrants against each other.   

”No.” Abe laughed. “No one is going to fucking arrest an Australian farmer. He’s a bloody legend. You know what he does? He gets poor Malaysians to water his plants, pick his cherries, pack them into boxes, and then ships those boxes to Kuala Lumpur, where rich Malaysians buy them, paying any price that’s demanded, because they think white people grew those cherries. That is legendary.” […]

“All the immigration officers out there are rotten, right. They just watch the whole season while you work, and the day you are supposed to get paid, the farmer phones immigration—and immediately they come, with their dogs and vans, picking you up.”

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             “Here, you saw plenty of white boys picking grapes. They were all young European backpackers. […] All day long, these white boys were the farmer’s slaves, but at night this brown man [the pizza delivery man] was their slave. Wasn’t that funny? Abe had thought so. But that’s the problem with Australia: there’s never anyone to share a joke with, because no one sees a bloody thing”

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Lin, who did two shifts a day at the Mexican restaurant, blinked a lot when he wasn’t working, as if there were gaps in him where there should be anger.

             But once he started smoking, he did get angry, “Kuala Lumpur—he exhaled smoke away from Danny—“is full of illegals. Ten times more than Sydney, All Muslims. Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and Arabs. The government brings them in They get their fake Malaysian identity cards. Chinese out, Muslims in.”

             This was the first time Danny had heard that there were places in the world where the Chinese, despite their numbers, were the weak. But that made sense. He was beginning to feel that there was a reason some immigrants from Malaysia or Sri Lanka or Pakistan ended up driving big cars in the western suburbs of Sydney and others ended up in places like this, outside the Glebe library, whispering to each other. Two illegal Nepali cleaners he had met one day in Surry Hills hadn’t looked like he expected Nepalis to. Darker and shorter. Maybe they were the poorest people in Nepal.

             Does it work like this? You are not wanted to begin with in your own home. Then illegal immigrants come to your country, take what little you have, and force you to go to Australia and become an illegal there.

[…] My God. Where does it end, then, and who is responsible for what has been done to us?”

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 Danny lives in a state of perpetual fear, existing unseen but in mainstream society, working for subsistence and survival, but also always holding together the tatters of his dignity and self esteem, which the condition of the illegal migrant erodes, daily.  ‘=

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. Since they must see me, Danny thought, let me be seen this way—not a as a scared illegal with furtive eyes but as a native son of Sydney, a man with those golden highlights with that erect back, that insolence indifference in every cell of his body. Let them observe that Danny is extremely icebox.

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There is a lot which is comic in this novel, particularly where Danny tries to figure out Aussies, which is one of his preoccupations. Some things, he reckons he has figured out:  

Because what is the thing that makes an Aussie an Aussie? Sounding Aussie.

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Danny tries to make sense of what he sees: 

Danny divided Sydney into two kinds of suburbs – thick bum, where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves; and thin bum, where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.

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He even tries very hard to remember and understand rules about rugby, both to fit in better and to decode Australians. Danny knows why he is in the situation he is, but is baffled why a man like Prakash would end up where he is: 

Danny watched the back of Prakash’s head. Why didn’t his family help when he was in trouble? Why did they let him become a miner? A man from a private school had to take off his tie and dig mud for iron? But that’s Australia. No high or low here, no class. For instance: in Australia, the signs say, MALE TOILET. FEMALE TOILET. Danny was still appalled by this. Toilets were neither male nor female. A toilet doesn’t have a cock, does it? Men’s or women’s. Australians don’t know their own language. That is what happens when you wear tattoos all over your body; when there are no black lines that say, Do not cross this. Land without taboo, land without class.

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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. 

Adiga’s take on the illegal migrant is lucid and uncompromising:

Because even when he was playing the game Abe introduced him to, even when he was beating the blue-uniformed policemen, even when he was winning, Danny had been losing. He had not even played the game right. Because he was in a game – a big, international World Cup or Olympics. In this game people were running from countries that were burning to not-yet-burning ones; catching boats, cutting barbed wire, smuggling into containers at the bottom of ships, while another set of people were trying to stop, stall, catch, or turn them back; and though it was all chaos on the surface, it turned out there were definite rules in this game: either you braved it, got on the boat, got caught by the Coast Guard, went to special jail—in which case there were lawyers, social workers, and people like the librarians at Glebe and left-wing women at train stations wo would help you (would rush to help, then to post photos of their generosity on Facebook)—or you arrived by plane, legally, with a visa printed on your passport, went to their dodgy colleges, said Sorry sorry sorry when they yelled, and cleaned their toilet bowls for five or six years, before becoming a citizen in the seventh, when you could finally tell the white people to fuck off. What you did not do was fall in between those two by coming to Australia legally and then sliding under, appearing to be one thing then [182] becoming another, because that made you an illegal’s illegal, with no one to scream for you and no one to represent you in court. And this custom-made cell within the global prison was Danny’s own: a personal hot coal he had forged for himself to stand on.

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Read this novel. 

Then perhaps, read it again.