Tooth and Nail

Review of Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (USA: Scribner, 2020)
By Joanelle Toh

What does it mean for one to be free? And how, exactly, does one get there? Aravind Adiga’s oeuvre has striven to answer this question in a number of ways. In his sardonic Man Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, you kill your way to personal liberation. In Adiga’s latest Amnesty, freedom is examined under the lens of immigration. The title itself Amnesty questions the concept of legal mercies, asking readers if one should have to beg to be seen as human, and what kinds of basic rights should be accorded to all. Placing the state and its laws squarely in a position of power, Adiga highlights how policies and systems shape and decide societal freedoms, and how one’s fate is ultimately at the mercy of these arbitrary forces.

Taking place over the course of a single night, Amnesty centers around the dilemma of its protagonist, Danny, as he struggles to decide whether to come forward with information about a murder. While a natural citizen would do so without hesitation, Danny’s status as an undocumented immigrant renders him at risk of deportation. Adiga paints a version of Australia where the laws that govern the land are described as a “magic circle.” Inside this unassailable circle of the law, “Australians surfed and swam and slept like children.” It is an “object of wonder,” an incorruptible paradise and sanctuary—at least for those within it. Those outside of it, like the protagonist Danny, are simply left to fend for themselves. Through Danny, the novel asks a bleak question—does one owe civic obligations to a state that does not even see one as human? This is the fulcrum upon which the narrative turns, as Danny deliberates about whether he should report to the authorities what he knows.

An undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka, Danny makes a living as a cleaner. He lives a solitary existence, although he seems to have a partner called Sonja. Through Danny, Adiga highlights the precarity of those who have no legal right to reside in the country. There are the actions that Danny takes to blend in: he dyes golden highlights into his hair and adopts daily Australian parlance. He also surveils both native Australians and legal immigrants in a constant attempt to codify and detect threats of discovery. The former group is described through a series of taxonomies, such as “thin bum” and “thick bum,” demonstrating Danny’s attempts to simplify and navigate society as best as he could:

Observe, understand, and make a chart. Danny’s way.

Us and Them

1. 1st & 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).

More interestingly, Danny is also wary of documented immigrants, claiming that “the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what.” It is due to this that Danny doubles down on carrying himself as a native born, a “man with those golden highlights,” with “insolent indifference in every cell of his body.” Though he performs this act admirably, clinically checking off every requirement on this list, the hypervigilance wears on him. It is a role that he can never stop portraying, out of the sheer need to survive. This challenge stands in stark contrast with the ease with which native Australians live in the “magic circle.” Danny understandably holds a bitterness towards this fact, noting that while Australians “aren’t particularly bright,” they are at least able to live well, simply by virtue of holding citizenship status.

Adiga paints Danny as a man of complex emotions, seeking to be unseen, yet yearning to belong. His memories of his life in Sri Lanka—living on a beautiful coastline, where fish sing, mermaids emerge from a lagoon, and colorful birds fly overhead—suggests that he dreams of experiencing Australia in the same manner. Yet, in Australia, he encounters a warped landscape. The flora is almost garish, with undersides “red as the tongue of a man chewing betel juice,” and fallen petals melding with a loud hodgepodge of signs (“ABSOLUTELY NO FREE PARKING HERE,” “PLEASE ELIMINATE CHILDHOOD CANCER”). The fauna is equally unpleasant, with blackbirds constantly cawing gratingly with a “low parched note that was almost a gloating croak.” The perceived hostility of his immediate environment reflects Danny’s fear—he is waiting for something terrible to happen to him. Caught in a tragic narrative, Danny is constantly on edge, fearful of being caught, even as he desires to recapture the freedom and joy he felt in Sri Lanka.

The novel makes for intense, if slightly tedious at times, reading. This is due to its structure, which tracks Danny’s thoughts and movements along the course of a single life-altering day. He finds out about the murder and then traverses the city, all the while rationalizing with himself how to proceed. In between these moments in the present, Adiga weaves in flashbacks from Danny’s life in Sri Lanka and his first four years in Australia. Populated by a cast of characters who show Danny both kindness and cruelty, these interactions add more color to the straitjacket of Adiga’s narrative structure. If some of these characters seem like caricatures, it is because Danny’s interactions with them are fleeting. He leaves them just as quickly as he meets them, thus illustrating another facet of the undocumented immigrant’s plight—that they are ultimately itinerants at the end of the day, who are unable to truly and deeply engage with those around them for fear of being discovered and deported.

This is a shame, because Danny does meet individuals who would be sympathetic towards his plight. In one instance, Danny cuts down cactuses for a white woman named Sam, and injures himself in the process. While dressing his wounds, Sam reveals she was from Zimbabwe, and had once travelled to America to try and find a new life: 

Sam talked. She had tried for seven years to settle in America. Had Danny been there? Sam had lived in Colorado, in Texas, in Las Vegas, everywhere, always trying to get a green card. It never came. She kept extending her visa for years, but then one day it wasn’t renewed. And so she stayed illegally in America, running from one immigration lawyer to another, for eighteen months.

Sam’s experiences in America have given nuance to her understanding of immigration, albeit in a way that is unaware of race. However, when Sam asks Danny about the difficulties about living in Australia as an undocumented immigrant, he categorically denies his status and keeps their conversation focused on the payment for services rendered. Governed by fear, Danny has to watch out not only for the police, but also for unscrupulous employers.

Incidental encounters aside, there are moments when Danny does make a more extended connection, as is the case with Radha Thomas and Dr Prakash, the couple involved in the murder that opens the book. Repeatedly described as the “King and Queen of the Nile,” the couple promises Danny a never-ending stream of abundance, an illusion that blinds Danny to the volatile and explosive nature of their relationship and other signs of danger that he himself only casually registers. One particular idyllic episode, with the trio lying in a forest with burbling brooks and under white clouds as big and bright as lagoons, is immediately soured in the blink of an eye: 

[Dr Prakash] showed Danny something that he’d concealed in his sleeve the whole time. Dark with meat grease and gravy, but its serrated edge still shone in the moonlight.

Dr Prakash and Radha Thomas are described throughout the novel with jungle imagery. In one memory of a pub they went to, Danny recalls “dead animals” and a “zebra’s trophy head” in the pub’s décor, and the flashing red jacket that ties Dr Prakash to the crime. Although the jungle is a place of danger (and also a metaphor for lawlessness), it also reminds Danny of the verdant and lush environment that he remembers from back home. Unfortunately, when the illusion of normalcy of Prakash and Radha’s relationship evaporates, Danny is left without the any protection afforded by the state: “if I tell the law about him, I also tell the law about myself.”

A cautionary tale of how little mercy there is to be found in the arbitrary and unfeeling nature of the law, Adiga’s novel does a fine job in highlighting the tragic ironies of undocumented immigration.  Although such immigrants fight tooth and nail to stay in a foreign land in the hopes of a better life, one cannot honestly call what they experience “living.” Adiga’s novel provides a compelling voice for those marginalized by social policy and law, a voice that calls on all of us to listen and recognize.


Joanelle Toh is a trainee lawyer currently based in Singapore. Outside of the legal world, she edits and writes for various cryptocurrency and FinTech projects. In her spare time, she enjoys running and fermenting assorted foods