Temporary People

Gulf Nightmares

At the height of the Gulf boom, Kerala witnessed unprecedented prosperity, to which stories of broken homes and loneliness of the Gulf widows were attached. But hardly anyone saw the problems of the Malayalee (they led the migration to the Gulf countries for work) in a strange land. People envied the money they earned, so brushed the rampant exploitation and racism under the carpet.

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s book Temporary People looks at grime beneath the fabled gold-lined streets of the UAE. He says of writing the book that won him the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, “Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave.”

The book comprises short stories, poems and one bitter rant-like listing of all the work the Malayalees do in the Gulf, that ends with, “Cog. Cog? Cog.”  

The stories use a lot of magic realism with a playful use of language, but the tone is angry, disappointed, often helpless. Like the allegorical story, Birds, in which a Malayalee nurse goes around fixing the men who have fallen off buildings they have been working on—clearly, they are looked upon as subhuman and no safety or medical facilities provided for them.

In  the darkly humorous Mussafah Grew People, workers grown from pods and given a 12-year shelf life. Two stories are about cockroaches that develop human characteristics and learn to survive insecticide attacks. The Indians working there are quite aware of their second-class citizen status and learn to avoid rubbing the ‘Arabees’ the wrong way—when an Indian boy is brutally beaten and left in a coma, the perpetrators, who are locals, are let off.

The most disturbing is Mushtibushi about child molestations happening regularly and with impunity in a building inhabited by Indians. A 12-year-old girl, too worldly wise for her age, is convinced that the lift in which the incidents take place is the culprit, perhaps because the truth is too awful to contemplate.

Joseph O’Neill’s 2014 novel The Dog revealed that Dubai was not the gold-tinted paradise that it was made out to be, but it was a white man’s perspective—a man who did not emotionally invest in the land and always saw himself as a somewhat superior outsider. But the ‘temporary’ people in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s book look up at the rapidly growing cities they build from the very bottom rung, and know that after many years of living in the UAE but not quite belonging, they might not even belong to their own towns and villages when they return.  Not an easy read, but totally worthwhile.

Temporary People

By Deepak Unnikrishnan

Publisher: Restless Books/Simon & Schuster

Pages: 255

Behind Her Eyes

What An Ending!

Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes is slightly reminiscent of Paula Hawkins’s Girl On TheTrain, in that a woman starts taking an inordinate interest in the lives of a couple. The similarity ends there, however, as Louise, the protagonist of Pinborough’s book is not a total loser, and she actually knows the couple in question.

Louise is an attractive blonde, with an alcohol problem, who has let herself go after her divorce. She has custody of her son Adam, but is a bit envious of her husband Ian’s life with his second wife-- the news of her pregnancy causes Louise a great deal of heartburn.

She works at a dead end job at a doctor’s clinic; after a bit of a drunken romp with the very attractive David, she discovers to her acute discomfort, that he is her new boss and he is married.

 The other woman in the story is the beautiful and fragile Adele, David’s wife.  They have just moved to London after some trouble in their marriage, to make a fresh start.  There is something strange about Adele, who seems to have extra-sensory perception when it comes to her husband.

When Louise is left alone after Adam goes on a holiday with his father, she starts an affair with David, in spite of making all efforts to resist him. To complicate her life further, the lonely Adele befriends her, and begs her not to tell David, because he is too possessive and controlling.

The book flashbacks to Adele’s past, the death of her parents, her time in a mental institution and her friendship with the junkie, Rob. What Adele and Louise have in common, are bizarre night terrors. Adele tells Louise of a way to overcome them, and this opens up a channel that hurtles her friend into an area of darkness, a descent she cannot control. David appears to be afraid of Adele’s power, but unable to escape her clutches.

Louise does not tell David about her growing friendship with his wife, nor does she reveal to Adele that she works for her husband. She gets entangled in their lives. As she muses, “Questions, questions, questions. It seems that ever since David and Adele came into my life I’ve been filled with questions. They’re like weeds in water. Every time I think I can swim away another one tangles around my legs to drag me back down.”

Behind Her Eyes is a psychological horror thriller, with ingenious twists and turns, and a truly creepy ending the reader cannot guess. This one deserves its bestseller status.

Behind Her Eyes

By Sarah Pinborough

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 306

Daughter of Empire

View From The Front Row

Pamela Hicks, daughter of Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, has written a fascinating memoir about her family’s eventful life during wartime Britain, and the tumultuous period that led up to the independence of India and the formation of Pakistan.

In Daughter Of Empire: My Life As A Mountbatten, Hicks makes no apology for the fact that she lived a very privileged life as one whose father was related to the British royal family; but she and her sister Patricia were also routinely uprooted from their home, or wherever they had settled in, and sent to live with relatives and friends to protect them from the ravages of World War II.  The young girls come out of it all rather unaffected by the upheaval in their lives.

She writes rather candidly of her parents’ open marriage, where both took on lovers. There was no furtiveness about their affairs—the lovers visited their home—and an astounding lack of jealousy.  Hicks writes with amusement how her mother juggled her various lovers; “When my mother returned from shopping one day she was met with, 'Mr Larry Gray is in the drawing room, Mr Sandford is in the library, Mr Ted Philips is in the boudoir, Señor Portago [is] in the anteroom and I don’t know what to do with Mr Molyneux’.”

 But under the glitter of the royalty and aristocratic privilege is strength and an unwavering sense of duty. Edwina travelled to trouble spots and jumped right in to help whenever there was a crisis.

There is a great deal of charm in how she describes royal protocol, the time it takes to plan every event, and how everything is meticulously laid out.  As Princess Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, Hicks travelled all over the Commonwealth—she describes these trips in detail, and with great affection for the Princess who was holidaying in Kenya with her new husband Prince Philip when news of her father’s death broke, and overnight she was Queen, with a whole new set of responsibilities. Not once does she break down in public.

She writes an entertaining chapter about the time the girls spent at the lavish home of the American billionaire Mrs Vanderbilt, poking gentle fun at her flashiness and ignorance (she hadn’t heard of Hamlet, and when told about the Prince of Denmark, she sent regards to his father!).

The book is written in a breezy tone that make light of the trauma the young Pamela may have suffered—she does admit that her experiences made her “self sufficient.”  The family’s pet mongoose has an extended cameo.

To Indian readers, there is interest in the gossip linking Edwina Mountbatten with Pandit Nehru—Hicks believes their friendship was deep and sincere, but there was no affair. The Mountbattens were in India at a very difficult time, as Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten had to deal with the transfer of power and the horrors of Partition, which the lived through unflinchingly. Hicks makes her fondness for Nehru and love for India very clear—in fact when she returned to England, she had some trouble adjusting to life in her own country.

It’s a very readable memoir that is honest, but makes no claims to depth—she writes it more or less like it were her personal diary through which she gives the fortunate reader a glimpse of a lifestyle of pomp, ceremony and noblesse oblige, that they can only imagine.  The book is said to have inspired Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, which is why a still from the film is on the cover.

Daughter of Empire: My Life As A Mountbatten

By Pamela Hicks

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 272