At a literary event, when the narrator screams, 'Drown all the refugees,' he means every word. After all, he is all too familiar with displacement - his boyfriend Abdul was Palestinian; and his childhood best friend Pedro crossed India's borders illegally in search of a better life.
Neither Abdul nor Pedro can return - for Abdul is dead and Pedro's whereabouts are now a mystery. That is, until Maria, the narrator's childhood nurse and Pedro's mother, turns to the occult to bring back her son. The person she recovers is not her exuberant young boy, but someone who is a husk of himself. What happened to Pedro during his journey to a distant land, or his passage back?
As the narrator tries to answer this question, he sees that every revelation holds both violence and terror. A work of Gothic horror, with exquisite illustrations by Vikram Nayak, Drown All the Refugees is Khair at his finest - assured and outraged. He rejects the reader's pity, the onlooker's distress, and asks instead for something more substantial, perhaps a reordering of a world in disarray.
About the Author
Tabish Khair (www.tabishkhair.co.uk) is a poet, novelist, journalist and scholar, born in Ranchi and educated in Gaya, Bihar. He worked for the Times of India (Patna, and then the Delhi office) and later completed a PhD from Copenhagen University and a DPhil from Aarhus University, Denmark, where he teaches now. Khair's novels include The Bus Stopped (2004), The Thing About Thugs (2010) How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2014), Jihadi Jane (2016) and The Body by the Shore (2022). He is also the author of the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000) and Man of Glass (2010), and various academic studies. Oxford University Press brought out his latest study, Literature Against Fundamentalism (2024). Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, Khair's fiction has been shortlisted for major prizes in India and abroad, such as the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award, the Encore Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, etc.
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