‘Do you think pity absolves you? No, pity is something to be offered to a dog lamed by a car, a bird with broken wings, a worm cleft in half. It is better to kill a human being than to pity him.’
At a literary event, when the narrator screams, ‘Drown all the refugees,’ he means every word. After all, he has had close encounters with displaced people—his boyfriend Abdul is Palestinian; and his childhood best friend Pedro crossed India’s border illegally to live the phantasmagoric American dream.
Neither Abdul nor Pedro can return—for Abdul is dead; and Pedro’s whereabouts remain mysterious. That is, until Maria, the narrator’s childhood nurse and Pedro’s mother, turns to the occult to bring back her son. What she recovers is not her exuberant young boy, but someone who is a husk of himself. What happened to Pedro during his journey west, or his passage back?
As the narrator tries getting to the bottom of the mystery, he sees that every revelation holds both violence and terror; and that there’s more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in his philosophy. A work of Gothic horror, Drown All the Refugees is Khair at his finest—assured and outraged—rejecting the reader’s pity, the onlooker’s distress, and asking instead for something more substantial, perhaps a reordering of a world in disarray.
Illustration by Vikram Nayak
