Rejimon Kuttappan's novel exposes life inside Myanmar scam compounds
A review of Rejimon Kuttappan's novel, which draws on real rescue testimonies to depict Indian workers trapped in Southeast Asian scam centres.
Rejimon Kuttappan's novel The River of Grey Flowers opens on a still night on the Moei River, which traces part of the Myanmar-Thailand border. Five people are aboard a boat, clinging to survival and a thin hope of escape. They have fled a scam compound concealed in the jungle, where guards armed with guns and batons hold men of several nationalities — Indians, Africans and Chinese among them.
The captives' work is online fraud. Seated before computers, they follow prepared scripts to approach strangers, chat with lonely men behind fake profiles and persuade them to put money into bogus investments. Falling short of targets invites severe punishment.
The narrative centres on John Easow, a Dalit fisherman's son from the seaside town of Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu. He leaves Chennai for Dubai, carrying a small imitation suitcase, in the hope of clearing an interview for a graphic designer's job. The trip instead delivers him into the camp.
Kuttappan, an independent journalist who reports on labour migration, human trafficking and the abuse of migrant workers, builds the story from testimonies of people he helped rescue from scam centres in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The book records the fluorescent glare, the watchful guards, the rubbery dumpling meals and the friendships formed in cold, airless bunkers with slatted windows. Work blurs time and place; the men lose track of who they were at home, moving as if trapped in a loop.
Told in John's first-person voice, the novel keeps its focus on a young man who has recently married and who manages only sporadic, whispered calls across the ocean. Its action passages — punches, stabbings, scrambles in the dark and bullets passing close — are tightly written. The compound itself is described as grey and lifeless, smelling of sweat, metal, dust and something acidic that the narrator calls broken hope. Kuttappan also writes of water dungeons and torture on the 'tiger bench'.
Published by Speaking Tiger, the novel is a work of fiction rooted in documented abuse, and it turns a distant criminal industry into an intimate story of one man's attempt to survive it.