Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

Published by Scribner on February 18, 2020

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has reinvented himself as Danny, a self-employed house cleaner in Sydney. For four years, he has been “a brown man in a white man’s city.” Danny is Tamil but he has added golden highlights to his hair. The weirdness of his appearance appeals to Australians, or so he believes. Danny was a minority in Sri Lanka but he prefers Australia, where being “not like everyone else” earns respect.

Danny came to Sydney on a student visa, dropped out, and stayed in the country illegally. He finds it easy to become “invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway.” Danny works as a shelf stocker for an angry Greek shopkeeper. In exchange, he sleeps in a storeroom and gives the Greek half his earnings from cleaning jobs. Danny faces competition from Chinese and Nepali cleaners who offer more people on a team for the same hourly rate, but he scores clients by furnishing his own equipment; “a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.”

Danny is dating Sonja, an Asian whose accepting liberalism makes him comfortable. He has not told Sonja the real reason he can’t return to school or get a driver’s license. Nor does she know that he can’t get healthcare.

Those problems are common to undocumented migrants across the world, but Amnesty highlights a particular problem that has an impact not just on migrants, but on the societies in which they live. Many of the apartments Danny cleans are in the same vicinity. While cleaning one of them, he becomes aware that a crime was committed in another. A former cleaning client named Radha Thomas was murdered. He happens to know (and might be the only person who knows) that another client, a man named Prakash Wadhwa, was having an affair with Radha and had behaved violently toward her. Should he tell the police and risk deportation, or should he protect his own interest by allowing a possible killer to escape justice?

A just society, or even a society motivated by self-interest rather than prejudice, would reward a migrant who reports a crime by granting some form of amnesty. Deporting people who act in a country’s interest discourages undocumented migrants from doing the right thing. Even citizens who hate immigrants, citizens who are motivated by self-interest in the perceived struggle of “us” versus “them,” should be able to understand the logic of rewarding migrants who act in society’s interest rather than their own.

While Danny marvels at the justice system in Australia — a system considerably more just than Sri Lanka’s, were Danny was tortured for being Tamil — he knows that he will not be rewarded for contacting the police. He also knows that if he doesn’t, Prakash might flee the country, perhaps after killing Danny if Danny gives him that chance. Whether Danny will do the right thing under difficult circumstances — contact the police and risk deportation, tell the truth to Sonja and risk the end of their relationship — is the moral question that drives the plot.

The plot, however, is simply a vehicle to explore broader issues of social division. Aravind Adiga accomplishes that purpose with an observant view of Australian society. Danny perceives Sydney as divided between the thick bum suburbs, “where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves,” and the thin bum suburbs, “where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.” The thick bums resent immigrants and the thin bums exploit them, exchanging cash for labor without asking questions that might compromise the arrangement.

In Danny’s unflattering opinion, “Australians aren’t particularly bright. They don’t work hard. They drink too much.  So you tell me. Why are they so rich?” The answer, of course, is that average Aussies are rich only in comparison to average citizens of less fortunate nations. Wealthy nations prosper, in part, by taking advantage of developing nations. The unequal distribution of wealth and how that bears on the issue of undocumented migration is one of Adiga’s underlying themes.

But even the brown men in the city are divided by status. The “Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys,” the Australian-born children who look at Danny with “I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances,” the Malaysian tourists shopping for cholesterol medication. Since they are Danny’s color, they all see him, and they all look down on him. Hence the golden highlights in Danny’s hair, the insolent indifference with which he returns their stares, the futile attempt to make them think his status might be similar to theirs.

Adiga addresses these urgent themes with his usual ability to find humor in serious issues, although his use of humor — including the social division between thick and thin bums — is less overt than in White Tiger and Selection Day. Adiga portrays Danny not as a stereotype or even an archetype of an illegal immigrant, but as a unique individual who, unlike the illegals he knows, does not experience shame as “an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside,” but as a force that “bubbled up from within.” His shame is connected to his past in Sri Lanka. He would feel it even if Australia made him a citizen. For that reason, Adiga is an uncommonly sympathetic character, one who deals not only with the external pressure of prejudice and the fear of deportation, but internalized anxiety about his self-worth. In the end, Danny must ask himself what kind of person he truly is.

Amnesty is not a thriller, despite some marketing that suggests it can be read as one. The plot is thin by thriller standards, the action is tepid, and the resolution is unsurprising. As a serious exploration of issues confronting immigrants who lose (or never acquire) their legal status, Amnesty delivers provocative questions rather than chase scenes.  Both in its dissection of pressing social problems and in its portrayal of a complex protagonist, Amnesty is another compelling work from Aravind Adiga.

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