Drown All the Refugees

by Tabish Khair

English 248 pages 1 edition

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.