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[Edited 10/9/23]

A good story, a psychological thriller, that gets us inside the skin of a brown-skinned young man who is an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka living in Australia. I know I should call him ‘undocumented,' but Danny (that’s the name he goes by) makes a point of emphasizing the ‘illegal� even joking at times about ‘ill legals.�



I’ll give you the background to the story but I’ll avoid any spoilers in the plot when I get to that, although I should say CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Danny came legally to Australia on a student visa but dropped out of the scam college. Now he works as a housecleaner, traveling on the Sydney subway with his Ghostbuster vacuum strapped to his back. He’s on the run now as an illegal in a country that he portrays as having Trumpesque laws requiring citizens to report illegals and teams of immigration officials tracking them down and checking IDs. He’s consumed by worry at the moment about how he’s going to get a new cell phone without a tax ID number.

Danny sleeps on the floor of an attic storage room over a grocery store run by a legal Greek immigrant. He stocks shelves occasionally but mostly he cleans apartments. He has to give his landlord a cut of all his earnings, under threat that his landlord will turn him in.

Danny has a very loving (legal) Vietnamese young woman friend. He told her just a few lies � he’s legal, he’s vegan like her, he doesn’t smoke - but so far it’s working out. (On the scale of men lying to women, we'll give Danny a C+.)

Danny is used to being a minority person. In Sri Lanka he was of the Tamil Hindu minority in a mainly Sinhalese Buddhist country torn by ethnic violence. His reference group in Australia is other brown-skinned Asians. He tells us that when he is in the subway surrounded by brown-skinned people, he can tell who is Sri Lankan, who is Indian, who is Nepali, who is Pakistani, who is Bangladeshi. He also tells us he can tell who is illegal and who is not � by the way they walk, by the way they stand, by where they stand, by the way they look around.

He tells us about what he calls ‘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.�

Here's the setup to the story. Two of the people Danny cleans apartments for, a man and a woman, are well-off legal Indian immigrants who are having an affair. The woman is married but her husband is clueless. The couple spends their time going to bars and playing slot machines. They like Danny and they often take him with them to bars, paying him for his time. He is their audience. They don’t call him Danny, they call him ‘Cleaner.� “Come on, have a drink Cleaner!" (Danny doesn’t drink.) “Tell us a joke, Cleaner!�

Now the plot. The Indian woman has been found murdered. (view spoiler)[ Danny knows her lover has bought plane tickets to fly to South Africa. He suspects the Indian man is the killer and he also suspects that the Indian man suspects Danny knows. Danny thinks the Indian man is also going to try to kill his lover’s husband and maybe Danny as well. (hide spoiler)]

But how can Danny go to the police without turning himself in as an illegal immigrant? (view spoiler)[ The Indian man has already found out where Danny lives and he visited his landlord. Maybe he'll bribe his landlord to turn Danny in. But if he does turn Danny in, wouldn't Danny simply report what he knows to the police? (hide spoiler)]

Pretty much all of the action takes place over a couple of days through cat-and-mouse phone calls between the Indian man and Danny. The Indian man tries to track Danny down and get him to ‘come clean his apartment one last time.� To be honest, these 20 or so phone calls get a bit repetitive. Could we have got by with a dozen? Maybe the Indian man will simply try to bribe Danny - he only needs to keep Danny quiet for a day until he flies out of the country.

That’s Danny’s dilemma. Will he have the moral fortitude to do the right thing?

There’s more to the story too, told in flashbacks about Danny’s life before Australia and his relations with his girlfriend. But the beauty of this book is in the author’s ability to make the reader feel what it’s like to be inside the brown skin of a man on the run in a white-dominated society.

I liked the story too for having a lot of local color of Sydney, especially of its multi-ethnic downtown Glebe neighborhood. After all that is said, I also have to point out that I am in the minority in giving this book a �4.� It’s relatively low-rated on GR � only a 3.3.



Aravind Adiga was born (1974) in Madras (now Chennai), India. His family emigrated to Australia (legally? lol) where he attended school, followed by college in the US and the UK. He has written five novels and is best known for The White Tiger which won the 2008 Booker Prize and was made into a Netflix movie.

Top photo of the Glebe district by Vaida Savickaite on domain.com.au
The author from npr.org