Contemporary Authors

• Temporary People ( novel/linked stories) Restless Books (Brooklyn, NY), 2017

1. Temporary people LCCN 2017934293 Type of material Book Personal name Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Main title Temporary people / Deepak Unnikrishnan. Published/Produced Brooklyn, NY : Restless Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1703 Description pages cm ISBN 9781632061423 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

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  Deepak Unnikrishnan
  Deepak Unnikrishnan
  Deepak Unnikrishnan
  Deepak Unnikrishnan, Lecturer, Writing Program, Arts and Humanities
  Deepak Unnikrishnan
  Lecturer, Writing Program, Arts and Humanities

  Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi

  B.A. Fairleigh Dickinson University; M.A. Fairleigh Dickinson University;
  M.F.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago

  Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi, and an editor at The State.
  His fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica, Drunken Boat, *Himal
  Southasian*, Bound Off, The State Vol IV: Dubai and in the anthology *The
  Apex Book of World SF 4*, among others. In 2014, he won the Gwendolyn
  Brooks Open Mic Award. In June 2015, he was included in *WigLeaf’s Top 50
  (very) Short Fictions*, edited by Roxane Gay. He is presently writing a
  novel exploring the pull, languages and fables of three cities: Abu Dhabi,
  New York, and Chicago.
  Winner of Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize
  The 2016 inaugural Restless Books prize was awarded to NYUAD lecturer Deepak Unnikrishnan for his novel Temporary People, a book of linked stories about the migrant workers of the United Arab Emirates. Unnikrishnan, a first-time, first-generation American resident, was awarded USD 10,000.
  Temporary People
  In The News
  5 Hot Books; Do Bad Brains Create Murders?, Dictoary Stories and More
  (The National Book Review, March 26, 2017)
  Stories of Fragmented Lives in the Emirates - Book Review
  (The New York Times, March 24, 2017)
  Book Review of Temporary People
  (Publishers Weekly)
  Book Review of Temporary People
  (KIRKUS Reviews)
  Book Review of Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
  (World Literature Today, March2017)
  Temporary People depicts the lives of guest workers in the UAE
  (The Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2017)
  There Is No Second Generation: Deepak Unnikrishnan’s ‘Temporary People’
  (The Wire, India, March 13, 2017)
  Unnikrishnan’s ‘Temporary People’ captures the plight of workers in the UAE
  (The Washington Post, March 13, 2017)
  The man who became a suitcase. The ‘fone’ that let people talk forever. The migrant who tried to fly
  (Schrol, India, March 5, 2017)
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• Restless Books - http://www.restlessbooks.com/deepak-unnikrishnan/

  DEEPAK UNNIKRISHNAN

  Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi and a resident of the States, who has lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, Brooklyn, New York and Chicago, Illinois. He has studied and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and presently teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. Temporary People, his first book, was the inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-child-of-the-place-an-interview-with-deepak-unnikrishnan/

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  A Child of the Place: An Interview with Deepak Unnikrishnan
  André Naffis-Sahely interviews Deepak Unnikrishnan

  140 0 1

  JUNE 3, 2017

  DEEPAK UNNIKRISHNAN was the inaugural recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in 2016 for his debut novel, Temporary People. Composed of 28 linked stories, the novel provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the United Arab Emirates’s heterogeneous society of guest workers, who make up slightly under 85 percent of the country’s entire population. Set in the United Arab Emirates’s capital Abu Dhabi, Unnikrishnan’s novel further distinguishes itself by casting some much-needed light on an often under-discussed side to life in that city, which is now home to generations of “expatriates” whose families have been there for two — or even three or four — generations, despite having to renew their visas every single year. I spoke with him when he read from his novel at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on March 19, 2017.
  ¤
  ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY: In your introduction to Temporary People, you describe the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as “a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave.” As some readers of your book may not know, the male children of the UAE’s guest workers are legally obliged to leave the country on reaching maturity, at which point their parents can no longer sponsor their visas. Do you see that act of forced ejection as having impacted your decision to write? I’m interested in how your family came to the United Arab Emirates.
  DEEPAK UNNIKRISHNAN: I was born in 1980 into a Malayali family and brought to Abu Dhabi as a 30-day-old infant. My maternal grandparents were based in Kenya for a few decades or so, and sometime around 1970 or 1971, my grandfather decided to go the Persian Gulf on a whim, out of boredom. Around the same time, my father answered an ad in The Times of India for an engineering job with the government of the Trucial States, because the United Arab Emirates hadn’t yet come into being. My parents’ marriage was arranged in Kerala, India, and my mother arrived in either 1975 or 1976. We also have uncles and aunts there. So my family history has been embedded in that part of the world since at least 1972. Everyone in my extended family has dipped their toes in the Gulf at one point or another, or you know someone who has done that.
  In Kerala, the expectation is that you’ll always return, because you’re always going to be Malayali — not Indian, Malayali. The Indianness is a fairly recent development. So there are certain expectations of what you ought to be. When you grow up in Abu Dhabi, you’re trained by your folks to detach yourself from the place, but then you return to it periodically — not physically but mentally — and then sometimes you do so physically as well, and everything evolves, the city evolves, people evolve, your parents evolve, you evolve, and you can’t get a handle on it simply because you don’t know what to talk about. Or you try to talk about it with friends. I went to an Indian school — it’s actually called the Abu Dhabi Indian School — and we were trained to be Indians. They played the Indian national anthem alongside the Emirati one; we even had school assemblies, because the British are good that way, they leave behind certain vestiges that you have to take and pocket. So, I would tell my friends that I missed Abu Dhabi and they would tell me, “Are you nuts? Go to India, it’s our land, we can break rules there, cheat, do whatever we like, or go to the United States or Canada,” and I never completely understood that. It really bothered me that I was one of a handful of people who — maybe “cared” is not the right word — but who was used to the place, and who missed it.
  In The Promised Land [Naffis-Sahely’s forthcoming collection of poems], you talk about your father aging, your mother aging, you have dedications to every member of your family. Your dedication page and my dedication page are not very different, and there’s a reason why Temporary People is dedicated to my family, because I wanted a kind of document to acknowledge that my people were there, but I didn’t know who my people were. I wanted to write a book that questioned almost everything, simply because we’re talking about a city that evolves so quickly. Fifteen or 20 years from now, your people and my people might not be there anymore.
  For the past few months, I have been immersed in the literature of exile, and it occurred to me that whenever we talk about exile, the return — while usually longed for or fantasized about — is hardly ever described. The Western mindset, in particular, conceives of exile as expulsion and nostalgia, an attitude perhaps best summed up by Victor Hugo, when he called exile “the long dream of home.” Our image of the exile is that of a consumptive dreamer hallucinating of home in a foreign land. This is rather strange, given that one of Western literature’s founding texts is the Odyssey, which, of course, deals with Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. Yet, Odysseus himself is wary of that return — he doesn’t see it through rose-tinted glasses at all; in fact, he famously returns home in disguise to test his wife’s loyalty. I feel that we have this in common with Odysseus: in our case, “the return” is never a pleasant dream or memory, it is a very physical reality, and one that is most certainly going to happen.
  Exactly. The Odyssey is also about the return. It’s not always about the expedition. It’s the presentation behind the ritual of the return that I’ve always been interested in. When I was a child, whenever we went to visit our family in Kerala, we would always say, “We’ll be back.” If my sister or I ever said goodbye to anyone, my mother would tell us, “You don’t say ‘bye,’ you say ‘we will come back.’” That was always the refrain, because people were still waiting for us. However, what if those people died — what would you be returning to, exactly? So you’re also returning to a mythology. There is a certain kind of mythology that you’re expected to return to. You’re supposed to be somebody, always …
  … Because you have to fulfill a function, because you are not a person — you are, in fact, merely a utensil waiting to be used and then discarded. It recalls a two-page list of job titles featured in “Pravasis,” one of the shorter chapters of Temporary People: “Tailor. Solderer. Chauffeur. Maid. Oil Man. Nurse. Typist. Historian. Shopkeeper. Truck driver. Watchman. Gardener. Secretary. Pilot. Smuggler. Hooker.” Et cetera.
  Absolutely. Acronyms come into play here, I’m an NRI — a Non-Resident Indian — or at least that’s what I’m supposed to be. You have to put on this face to show that you’ve returned from battle with booty or prizes. In Abu Dhabi — and the UAE in general — you must be categorized, you have no choice. Look — our parents knew what the mandate was: you come to the UAE and you work. If you don’t work, you leave, right? Yet, based on that logic, if you’re speaking to a mathematician who’s also a little bit of an asshole, he’ll ask you, “So why the attachment?” That part they don’t get. They don’t understand that attachment is involuntary. When I moved to the United States, I was very envious of people who could claim places or spaces. I was reading your poetry collection last night, and the first part reads like Italo Calvino; you’re talking about a city, about what the city did to you, that you’re a product of a particular kind of city/space/place. In Malayalam, which is what my parents speak, there’s a little bit of literature, and there were films, which always referenced the Gulf, but always as “the other,” a place that you went to and then returned from. There’s very little about children, very little about people like you and me, people who are of the place — or thought of themselves as being from the place — and who wrote about it. That bothered me.
  One of my favorite stories (or chapters) in Temporary People is entitled “Moonseepalty.” Anand and his friends are the children of Indian migrants and they are devoted fans of soccer. After Anand’s bicycle is stolen, and his complaints to a passing policeman fall on deaf ears, Anand witnesses an Arab boy sweet-talk the policeman into letting him and his friends play soccer where they technically shouldn’t, thus exerting their Arab privilege via language. When Anand decides to take matters into his own hands, his friends leave him behind, frightened of the possible repercussions. I felt that this story perfectly encapsulates the neuroses of the children of migrant workers in the UAE — children who grow up painfully aware that they should always be on their best behavior in order not to jeopardize their parents’ ability to remain in the country and thus provide for the family. How did you deal with that neurosis?
  My parents — especially my father — taught me to be so paranoid that everything was internalized. That said, the reason I think the way I do is because of the place itself, and that needs to be acknowledged; and I’m not finding that in the narratives that are coming out of the West, because it’s as though the place has been already judged and branded. My hope with the book, at least when I was writing it, was that it would be a kind of document where I could test the narratives I was hearing from the West, test the stories my parents weren’t talking about, test the stories that my generation actually wanted to investigate or examine, and actually look at it and open up a conversation. Whatever impermanence is there, it grows within you, it’s a part of you. There are certain things that I do because of Abu Dhabi — attachments/detachments, the way I am with people. Relationships frighten me. There is still a suitcase somewhere that hasn’t been unpacked.
  Temporary People has won much praise for its inventive mingling of languages — English, Malayalam, and Arabic — and in “Moonseepalty,” language becomes the weapon of choice in the turf war between Anand’s friends and their Arab rivals. The Arab boys are able to get what they want because they speak the country’s only official language, whereas the Indian boys — who constitute the true demographic majority in that country — are instead harassed and asked for their identity papers. Your playfulness with language and your use of surrealism have earned the book comparisons with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. What do your various languages mean to you — or rather, how do you relate to them?
  We learned Arabic in school, but our teachers taught us the language in English, so we knew how to read and write in it, but we didn’t learn how to truly use it. I tell people that English is the only language I can read, speak, and write in. The other languages are there, but they’re broken. That said, they’re operational, and if I’m making any political statements in this novel, they are all about language. English is a broken language, and that has to be acknowledged. Ridiculous and wonderful things can happen to words, especially in Abu Dhabi. Part of the reason is that Abu Dhabi is a genuinely surreal place. That’s what the book is also about. I do not want it to be just another narrative about the place, because I think any reader approaching this book deserves to be surprised. What I’m saying is that things have happened here; they’ve affected me, they’ve affected my family, and they’ve affected people in general. Some of these people are grateful, while others are not. I often get asked why I dabble in surrealism, but the truth is that Abu Dhabi is a very surreal city. We deal with surrealism quite a lot in our day-to-day lives, especially when you’re thinking about what the future might look like in the UAE — we just don’t know. Of course, right now we have a kind of presidency in the United States that would have been unimaginable even just a few months ago. That’s surreal for some people too, isn’t it? The surrealism is a consequence of circumstance.
  You left Abu Dhabi in 2001 and moved to the United States to attend college. You lived here until 2015, when you moved back to Abu Dhabi and began teaching at New York University Abu Dhabi. Do you feel equally at home in both countries? What changes have you seen unfold in the UAE since your return? Do you have an idea of how Temporary People is likely to be received in the UAE?
  The United States also feels like home. I met my mentor Ted Chesler here. I wouldn’t be writing if it hadn’t been for him. I met my partner here; I became an adult here. I’m not saying the entire country as a whole feels like home; there are certain cities in the United States that I gravitate toward because they helped me understand what I have become. I used to live in Chicago, the one city where I’ve been absolutely aware of what I was: a brown man. You take the train, and it’s almost color-coded — you have a certain demographic getting off, others staying on, simply because they’re privileged enough to own homes in a certain location. I felt less exposed when I lived in New York City, because the Big Apple’s down with anonymity. The United States taught me to observe reality really well, and the United Arab Emirates taught me to be quiet; and they both help each other out, because you learn to be invisible, you almost enhance this quality of observation. So I’m grateful to both nations, because I’m a product of both. Specifically, I’m a product of cities, because I understand cities. Now that I’m back in the UAE, it’s also tested my understanding of what I had assumed the country to be. At New York University Abu Dhabi, I work with students who are incredibly motivated, gifted, and ambitious, but who have also drunk a little bit of the Kool-Aid of what the institution professes them to be, whether it is global or world citizens. I don’t buy that completely, because I think that’s a bit much. Nevertheless, I have students from all demographics who grew up in the UAE and who are not from the UAE, but who are testing waters. They’re helping me relearn what Abu Dhabi has become, and how it has evolved, because I use and think about the city in the classes I teach. But the best thing about teaching is when your students challenge you, because not only do they want to learn, they also want to learn how to disagree. And I’m all about that. How is the book going to be received by readers in the UAE? I have no idea, but that is also partly because I have the good fortune that my book is the first work in English published by a creature of the place, a child of the place.
  ¤
  André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, critic, and translator who was born in Venice, Italy; raised in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and lives in Los Angeles. His debut collection of poems is The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, August 2017).

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• Conversational Reading - http://conversationalreading.com/four-questions-for-deepak-unnikrishnan-on-temporary-people/

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  April 4, 2017
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  Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan on Temporary People

  Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan is a book (variously described as a novel, short stories, and something in between) based around the lives of people who come to the United Arab Emirates and, in the author’s words “are eventually required to leave.” Indeed, the UAE has become infamous for importing foreign-born people in order to build the massive infrastructure of a booming nation, only then to be told to go when their work is complete.

  For this book, Unnikrishnan won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, as Unnikrishnan himself is a immigrant to the United States. This is his first novel, and it has been getting rave reviews, in venues like The Washington Post and The New York Times.

  Unnikrishnan has also recently been on a book tour throughout the United States for Temporary People, and of course this is a strange time for a book that so deeply deals with the immigrant experience, particularly when it occurs Middle Eastern context. Below, we talk about the book, what it’s like to be releasing a book like this at this political moment, and about home, migration, and related subjects.

  Scott Esposito: Temporary People is based around transitional workers who come to the United Arab Emirates to do the work necessary to build up the country and are then forced to leave. As you mention at the beginning of the book, “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.” Do you have any particular sources or experiences that underlie the lives depicted in these pages?

  Deepak Unnikrishnan: I am the child of Indian parents who have lived in the UAE for over four decades. I am the nephew of uncles who have lived, or continue to live in the Khaleej (Arabic for Gulf). My family has a warm and complex relationship with the Emirates, so in that sense, yes I understand what it’s like to live in a city that hosts you for a while, not forever. I also have friends from high school who have either left or stayed. And some of those who stayed are raising their own children in the place my mates and I were raised. So you could also say, yes, I’m aware of certain states bodies occupy when their documents buy them a fixed amount of time. I’m also hyper aware of the privileges my sibling and I have enjoyed, proximity to parents sitting pretty on top of that list. None of my first cousins grew up with both parents by their side. Their fathers sent money from the Khaleej. Their mothers looked after them. And if you’re from here, if you’ve paid attention, you see men and women who have come from elsewhere; people who’ve left much behind and you can read such sorrow on their faces. But then if you wait a little bit longer, you can also spot the drive and the joy and the craziness of what being a temporary resident means to these people. The hopes they carry in their heads, the stories they’re itching to tell. When I tell people Abu Dhabi raised me, I’m not just talking about the city. I’m also talking about its people, those who’ve been here a while, those from here, and especially those who may not last long, but help the city run. And it’s interesting you call these people who populate my book transnational. I am not sure that’s what they are. I’m not sure what they are, but transnational feels like a stretch, or some form of happy lie. What I’d say instead is that these men and women who reside within the pages of Temporary People are people who are conscious of time, all the time. And that state, where they are always thinking of their futures, does something to them, something visceral. Because you see, they are not forced to leave. They just have to leave. There’s a difference between those two scenarios. I suppose when you know you have to leave, often you’re just wondering about how to leave. And that can break some people. Others thrive.

  SE: Temporary People is publishing in the United States at an interesting time, when we are having our own debates over the degree to which this country welcomes outsiders, and how we see their contributions to this country. You yourself were raised in the UAE and immigrated to the U.S., and this book won the first Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. So two questions: what do you feel that these stories of the UAE bring to an American context, and will this book be published in the UAE?

  DU: I am the son, nephew, and grandson of migrants. My parents raised my sister and I in a city they didn’t fully understand at first. Yet they expected us to prove ourselves worthy to live in a place they were afraid to claim, but went to anyway. We were always expected to behave and be respectful, not embarrass them or ourselves. And with my folks having aged in the Khaleej, the place represents something else now to my family, part history and memory, something sacred, joyful, and sad. They care about the Khaleej, my parents. It’s home, you understand. But they care about India too. Americans may understand this basic need to acknowledge/accommodate two nations, one that raised you, and the other that adopted you. But what they may not get is what it means to return to a nation after you’ve left it for a while, what it means to return to the place where you were born, so that you may die. And it’s perfectly fine to not understand the significance of this voluntary act, without veering towards pity, or professing rage. But in an age where attachments are questioned, people corralled, questioned and bullied over nationality and paperwork, certainly in the States, there’s something instructive in contemplating why/how people cherish a place even when they aren’t required/expected to do so. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to romanticize any of this, the leaving part especially. It’s hard to leave a place, man. It sucks to be a creature perpetually wedded to paperwork, but my hope is when people read my work, they are not only ingesting the language of temporary people, they are also thinking about vulnerability, why living elsewhere is often an act of sacrifice (especially if you are a parent), with the expectation of hope; and if you’re lucky, good fortune. I hope some people in the States (and elsewhere too), the ones who rage against foreigners – especially the most vulnerable, children, refugees, and the undocumented – come across the book, maybe skim through it, then contemplate over what it must be like to explain yourself all the time to people who assume they know what you are, people who wonder whether you’re harmless, that you’ve hopefully got something to give. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are migrants or temporary residents the world over just fed up with explaining themselves. I’d wager some of them don’t know what to say anymore and that they are tired. And you bet I hope readers in the UAE will get to read the book.

  SE: You’ve been on a book tour, doing events for this book in New York City and San Francisco, and elsewhere throughout the country. What have been the responses to this book? Have these events veered toward the political context here in the U.S.?

  DU: Let me be frank. I didn’t think many people were going to come to the readings. Don’t know why, but I didn’t buy that folks wanted to hear some stranger they’ve barely heard about talk about the Khaleej, or hear me recite myths and tales mined from the place, but I’ve been surprised and humbled by the response. I’ve bumped into people I’ve gone to high school with. I’ve had people come up to me saying, Man, that happened to me too! I’ve seen brown and black and white people in the audience. I’ve had questions that covered multiple topics: home, language, and yeah, cities. And sure: politics, too. That comes up a lot, and I find myself wanting to talk about the state of the States. It’s home too, you know. I mean some of us are frightened. I have friends who are angry, who’ve turned soothsayers. And we don’t know why we’re all behaving this way, and then we know why. I ‘d like to think people want to talk about the current state of affairs, but a part of me believes most folks have also made up their minds. It’s as though we’ve got to pick this camp or that camp, and that scenario frightens me. I’ve also had little old ladies come up to me in the Midwest to apologize, to state that the current administration doesn’t speak for them. And I remember being moved by that. They didn’t have to do that, walk over to the brown man and try to calm him down, but they did. So there’s hope. At the same time, there are people who voted for Trump. And a part of me wants to know why. And a part of me is afraid to know why. But it’s important to know what’s going on with the country. It’s important to talk. I’m not saying we should all hold hands and pretend everything’s okay. Everything’s not okay, more reason to have difficult conversations. Something broke. What?

  SE: I’ve seen this book variously described as 28 stories and as a novel. How do you see it, and why? Are genre conventions like these something that may hold more weight here in the States than in the literary culture of the Middle East?

  DU: I identify as a short story writer. Writing a collection, that’s what I thought I was doing when I began the work. But gradually I realized I was also toying with things, language most certainly, and to an extent, form. So the work began to morph. I started calling it “the book,” because that made more sense. As more time passed, it became clear the chapters, as I call the tales, needed each other to speak to one another, as well as to speak over one another, to create something almost animal-like and city-like. Because I wanted my book to sound a certain way, you see. I wanted readers to hear these people, temporary inhabitants with accents and myths, and I wanted them to appear and disappear, maybe reappear. That meant I had to break certain conventions, explore what a book was supposed to do, then burn certain rules. But some of these breakthroughs were unintentional. I’d like to claim that everything was thought out. But no, I hadn’t really given architecture of the book much thought until I started studying at the Art Institute. And all of a sudden, I was like, wait a minute, I want the languages in the book to mimic streetlights and road signs, take the reader somewhere familiar yet unexpected, wild. And I suppose it helped that I didn’t have much of a literature background. I was a bit of a novice, and slightly stupid, plus arrogant, useful qualities if you’re trying something new, and you don’t know you’re trying something new. But yeah, genre holds a lot of weight in the States. I’m in fact super pleased the book has not only been described as a collection or a novel, but also been reviewed as either a fragmented collection or a novel held up by some-short-some-long stories. There’s been no universal consensus on what the work is or what it’s become and that’s pretty wonderful! But to be fair, I think genre matters in other nations too. And I’ve been guilty of wandering over to certain sections at bookstores, seduced by genre. And that’s a shame, because at the end of the day I identify as a user of words, someone who deploys language to express his thoughts about imaginary and realist realms. Shouldn’t that be enough? At the risk of sounding pompous, it might be helpful to ditch categories from time to time and relearn how to read, especially if the work stems from someone’s imagination, especially if we want our minds blown.

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• Foreward Reviews - https://www.forewordreviews.com/articles/article/an-interview-with-deepak-unnikrishnan-winner-of-new-immigrant-writing-prize/

  http://conversationalreading.com/four-questions-for-deepak-unnikrishnan-on-temporary-people/

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Unnikrishnan, Deepak: TEMPORARY PEOPLE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Unnikrishnan, Deepak TEMPORARY PEOPLE Restless Books (Adult Fiction) $17.99 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-63206-142-3
Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical
debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.In 28 engrossing linked
stories, Unnikrishnan blends Malayalam, Arabic, and English slang as well as South Asian and Persian Gulf cultures to
capture the disjunction and dissociation of temporary foreign workers who live in the Arabian Peninsula but will never
receive citizenship. In "Gulf Return," a laborer swallows his passport and turns into a passport, and his roommate
swallows a suitcase and turns into a suitcase so that their third friend can dash away with them both to the airport. In
"Birds," Anna Varghese tapes construction workers who fall from tall buildings back together. "Anna had a superb track
record for finding fallen men....She found everything, including teeth, bits of skin." The tongue of an English-speaking
teen escapes from his mouth, shedding words with every step in the agile "Glossary." "Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
died at the scene but the surviving nouns, tadpole-sized, see-through, fell like hail." A lonely renegade cockroach called
The General mimics humanlike qualities in the ingenious "Blatella Germanica." "It was when he started picking up the
language of the building's tenants, bits of Arabic from the Palestinians and the Sudanese, Tagalog from the Filipinos,
modern variations of Dravidian languages, that he began crafting a custom-made patois from the many tongues he
heard, then practicing it at night in the kitchen, as he foraged walking on two legs and in costume, that he startled the
other Germanicas in his community, and they ostracized him." The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and
his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the
kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Unnikrishnan, Deepak: TEMPORARY PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357462&it=r&asid=43749a9e78c8e2d69ac36a861fc5493a.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357462

---

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Temporary People
Frank Tempone
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Temporary People.
By Deepak Unnikrishnan.
Mar. 2017. 224p. Restless, paper, $17.99 (9781632061423).
Unnikrishnan's first book, a novel made up of 30 linked stories and the winner of Restless Books' inaugural Prize for
Immigrant Writing, experiments with genre and form in documenting the lives of those imported to erect the skyline of
the United Arab Emirates. "Foreign nationals constitute over 80% of the population" there, but they're considered
expendable, temporary people. At best, they are ignored and deported when their work is completed; at worst, they're
beaten, broken, and raped. Unnikrishnan tells their stories in experimental prose that moves from vignettes that read like
mythical texts to transcribed interviews. The most compelling writing renders the characters' plights in the abstraction
of magical realism: "an English-speaking teen ... was waiting to cross the street, when his tongue abandoned him by
jumping out of his mouth and running away." And when a boy lies in wait to attack a roach infestation in his parents'
apartment, "a female would drop a copper-colored egg purse polished like a crystal in a crack somewhere." A careful,
patient reader will love Unnikrishnan's inventive and caring connected tales.--Frank Tempone
Tempone, Frank
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Tempone, Frank. "Temporary People." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244748&it=r&asid=5cbd09312965e497f3973af70e661326.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244748

---

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Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary People
Henry Bankhead
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p92.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary People. Restless. Mar. 2017.224p. ISBN 9781632061423. pap. $17.99. F
Inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel employs its own brand of
magical realism to propel readers into an understanding and appreciation of the experience of foreign workers in the
Arab Gulf States (and beyond). Through a series of almost 30 loosely linked sections, grouped into three parts, we are
thrust into a narrative alternating between visceral realism and fantastic satire. In the section "Birds," workers who have
fallen off buildings patiently wait for repair like obedient robots. "Mussafah Grew People" describes a realm where
extra workers are grown from seed in secret warehouses, underscoring the disposability and commodification of foreign
workers everywhere. "Moonseepalty" depicts the effects of blatant racism against foreigners, while "Kloon" further
delves into the degradation that foreign workers face at the hands of the wealthy elites. The alternation between satirical
fantasy, depicting such things as intelligent cockroaches and evil elevators, and poignant realism, with regards to
necessarily illicit sexuality, forms a contrast that gives rise to a broad critique of the plight of those known
euphemistically as "guest workers." VERDICT This first novel challenges readers with a singular inventiveness
expressed through a lyrical use of language and a laserlike focus that is at once charming and terrifying. Highly
recommended.-- Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bankhead, Henry. "Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary People." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 92. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371195&it=r&asid=59ed838022459391003773c2027184c0.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371195

---

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Temporary People
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Temporary People
Deepak Unnikrishnan. Restless, $17.99 trade
paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-63206-142-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
There is much to admire in Unnikrishnan's fanciful and fervent debut, a collection of stories about the lives of guest
workers in the United Arab Emirates. In one of the early pieces, the U.A.E.'s capital city, Abu Dhabi, is described as a
"board game, labor its players, there to make buildings bigger, streets longer, the economy richer. Then to leave."
Unnikrishnan explores the depredations, sorrows, and longings of these foreign laborers, who are often treated as
disposable, with a dark whimsy. The style varies widely; one tale consists simply of a list of professions and adjectives.
Some of the longer allegorical stories-including one about a nurse who reassembles the bodies of injured construction
workers "with duct tape or some good glue," or another about a "master scavenger of the spoken word," a cockroach
who picks up the languages spoken by the diverse residents of an infested building--achieve the proper mix of absurdity
and pathos. Others, however, force a flimsy conceit to bear too much weight. Interspersed throughout are briefer pieces,
from one paragraph to several pages in length, concise meditations that offer up the book's best expressions of what it
means to be an outsider in a land far from home. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Temporary People." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 38+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339261&it=r&asid=e6ef720ac897b1184778cc77fe72034b.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477339261

"Unnikrishnan, Deepak: TEMPORARY PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357462&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Tempone, Frank. "Temporary People." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244748&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Bankhead, Henry. "Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary People." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371195&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. "Temporary People." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 38+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339261&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.

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  BOOK REVIEW | FICTION

  Stories of Fragmented Lives in the Emirates
  By SHAJ MATHEWMARCH 24, 2017
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  Deepak Unnikrishnan Credit Philip Cheung
  TEMPORARY PEOPLE
  By Deepak Unnikrishnan
  227 pp. Restless Books. Paper, $17.99.

  Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel-in-stories narrates a series of metamorphoses. Guest workers dissolve into passports, a man begins “moonlighting as a mid-sized hotel” and a sultan harvests a fresh crop of laborers. Elsewhere a man has grown a suitcase for a face, while a teenager’s tongue has fled his body, verbs soon spilling out and assuming forms of their own. All this surreal shape-shifting patches together a mosaic of the frenetic, fantastical and fragmented lives of the South Asian diaspora in the United Arab Emirates, one that recalls the cry of its closest forebear, Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”: “Please believe that I am falling apart.”

  What separates Unnikrishnan from Rushdie, and the vast literature of exile that precedes them, are his subjects. “Temporary People” explores the lives of arguably the least privileged class of nomads in the 21st century: guest workers. Joining the South Indian writer Benyamin’s “Goat Days,” a novel of modern-day enslavement in Saudi Arabia, and the British-Emirati director Ali Mostafa’s “City of Life,” a film that weaves together a cross-section of lives in Dubai, “Temporary People” is a robust, if somewhat scattered, entry into the nascent portrayal of migrant labor in the Gulf.

  Photo

  Bereft of language, status and self in a foreign land, Unnikrishnan’s characters radiate desperation and desire as they perform backbreaking work and cope with second-class citizenship. Well, that’s technically incorrect: They can’t become citizens. Under the United Arab Emirates’ visa system, these “temporary people,” who make up as much as 80 percent of the population, will eventually have to leave. In Unnikrishnan’s imaginings, this ever-present threat of displacement comes to the fore only during his characters’ most naked moments. His depictions of sex are entangled with the ganglia of residency, race, class and gender, as well as the instability and inadequacy of language, the collection’s constant refrain.

  Mingling English, Malayalam and Arabic in a series of Kafkaesque parables, Unnikrishnan’s book features a lot of action and even some humor. Unfortunately, his hybrids of language and genre don’t always succeed. The trilingual patois can fall flat, as when each section is called a “chabter.” At times, self-evident themes are laboriously spelled out: “Pravasi means foreigner, outsider. Immigrant, worker. . . . Absence. That’s what it means, absence.” But perhaps one can excuse an overemphasis on this theme in particular: Left to the demimonde of the city, these characters can never forget that the Dubai dreamscape is reserved for locals and Western expats, not those in exile, like them.

  Surrounded by injustice, Unnikrishnan’s characters don’t always remain passive. At times risking arrest, they fume, curse, kick and even bite. In each of the collection’s three best stories — “Mushtibushi,” a precocious child’s testimony about a sexually abusive elevator; “Moonseepalty,” the cannibalistic reunion of two estranged friends; and “Kloon,” a clown’s foray into prostitution — the migrant laborer’s growing sense of shame finally explodes.

  “Temporary People” pairs well with an older cousin in nonfiction, John Berger’s “A Seventh Man.” In that stirring cri de coeur about migrant labor in Europe, Berger reminds us of a point that is embedded within Unnikrishnan’s stories: Countries that send migrant laborers to global metropolitan centers are often forced to do so. “There should be a transitive verb: to underdevelop,” Berger writes. “An economy is underdeveloped because of what is being done around it, within it and to it.” Unnikrishnan’s collection poses its questions obliquely, but demands explicit answers. What causes a society to look like this?

  Shaj Mathew has written for The New Republic.

  A version of this review appears in print on March 26, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Unwelcome Guests. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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  Books
  Unnikrishnan’s ‘Temporary People’ captures the plight of workers in the UAE
  By Ilana Masad March 13
  Deepak Unnikrishnan’s new novel is made even more moving by the author’s statement about writing it: “ ‘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.”

  (Restless Books)
  It is hard to grapple with the idea of a country where so few people hold citizenship while so many others toil to make it work, which is partially what Unnikrishnan’s book deals with. The elements of this novel, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, range in form from short-short stories to poems to one particularly memorable piece that is simply a list of dozens of occupations that become slowly more political, until the painful end: “Operator. Earth Digger. Stone Breaker. Foundation Putter. Infrastructure Planner. Rule Follower. House Builder. Camp Builder. Tube-Light Installer. Helmet Wearer. Jumpsuit Sporter. Globetrotter. Daydreamer. City Maker. Country Maker. Place Builder. Laborer. Cog. Cog? Cog.”

  Pieces such as this are all about the language play, while others focus more on voice, like the incredibly disturbing “Mushtibushi,” in which an apartment-dweller is responsible for collecting the reports of child molestation and kidnapping in his building. At one point, he interviews a 12-year-old girl who believes that the elevator itself (a Mitsubishi model) is hurting children.

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  Author Deepak Unnikrishnan (Philip Cheung)
  Some of the stories are clearer allegories for the plight of the United Arab Emirates’ migrant workers. In “Birds,” a woman bicycles around a neighborhood at night and fixes the men who have fallen from buildings in construction sites. In “In Mussafah Grew People,” workers are scientifically developed and grown from pods, their futures predetermined by their 12-year shelf life. In two separate Kafkaesque chapters both named “Blattella Germanica,” Unnikrishnan writes about cockroaches that learn human languages, make clothes for themselves and survive insecticide attacks by pretending to be dead.

  There is nothing comfortable about Unnikrishnan’s “Temporary People,” but it is challenging, thought-provoking and timely.

  Ilana Masad is a writer and editor in New York.

  TEMPORARY PEOPLE
  By Deepak Unnikrishnan

  Restless. 272 pp. Paperback, $17.99

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  MORE-IN

  The book is a political manifesto cleverly disguised as fiction

  Pravasi means you’ll have regrets [...] it’s always meant: absence. Those words of an aged mother who yearns for her son sums up the essence of almost all the stories in Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan.

  The tempering of English with Malayalam and Arabic, and in the tone and angst of the narrative, the book is first and foremost an ode to the Gulf Malayalee.

  Maybe if read by someone with zero Gulf experience the book would have drawn a few loud laughs. For someone who has been a Pravasi, the humour is so dark, you are tempted to throw away this book and reach out for Ulysses for some lighter reading. Only temporarily, just like the people.

  Temporary People is one part dystopia and one part nostalgia; it’s the brutal dashing of hopes of every aspirant pravasi. Set mainly in the 90s and earlier, the stories are about those who made the UAE what it is now, the good and the bad.

  It’s the decades of silence and subservience of hundreds of thousands of worker ants that laid the foundation of the Emirates. The book is a political manifesto cleverly disguised as fiction.

  “We don’t like Arabees but we rarely told them that. We wanted to talk back, we wanted to fight [...] but we didn’t want to get into trouble.”

  Nothing syrupy

  Unnikrishnan doesn’t try to sweeten the narrative with the ‘good’ stories’. Given where he is now, one would assume his own is a ‘good’ story. But then those stories would only feed the narrative of the silent and subservient.

  There is a ‘chabter’ of a young man brought up in the Emirates trying to visit his dying father, but he can’t visit his ‘home’ so easily, because no matter how long you’ve lived there, how much you love the place, no exceptions will be made for you to get a visa quickly. It’s the story of every third culture kid in the Gulf. Forever they will remain pravasi, because it’s not them who are absent from home, but it’s the absence of a home itself.

  Then there’s another where a young Indian boy is bullied by some ‘Arabee’ children, and the unmentionable done to him by the shurtha, the ghost-like police who are everywhere in the stories.

  The child knows no other home, yet what he can think of is the revenge he would wrought, had it been ‘back home’. Again, the refrain of every Pravasi.

  Unnikrishnan’s observations of the life of the temporary people is so astute and seering, one is aware with every turn of the page that this is not fiction. This is the life of millions, compressed into 272 pages.

  It begins with an ‘in memoriam’ to the city itself; the constant destruction and the rebuilding; to achieve perfection, to be the best and tallest and first of many things. Clichéd as it may sound, there’s an Orwellian purpose to this rebuilding. The workers who are always on the brink of death, and put together to be put back to work. The labour farm where clones are grown, the mutiny, the dispensability of man and clone.

  “The city was a board game and labor its pieces, there to make buildings bigger, streets longer, the economy richer. Then to leave. After.”

  Barring some insightful movies in Malayalam, there is so little available in the creative space on this unique diaspora that lives in limbo between Ivday (Here) and Avday (There)—yet another chabter.

  There was an anthropological study released by Neha Vora some years ago, ‘Imposssible Citizens’, that attempted unsuccessfully to commit to longevity the vacuum in which Indians lived in the Gulf. In Temporary People, Unnikrishnan uses the liberty fiction affords to tell a story so true and so real, at once dark and fantastical.

  Yet, you do frequently tire of the reading and the morbid stories itself. If you persist, he will reward you with yet another peek into a life so surreal, it can only be fact as imagination alone cannot travel those depths. The boy who tries to gas roaches out of existence, and fails; the man who is happy his wife is crying over the phone, across the ocean, because she misses him, and then despairing as his friend steps in to console her; the molestation of children; the seeds and fear of the Arabee that’s sowed early in the lives of the TCK; sex however, wherever and with whomever. In masterfully telling the diaspora tales, Unnikrishnan doesn’t overtly attack the Emirates, but disembowels the shiny and the new, laying bare the ugly.

  It waits to be seen if the UAE will censor Unnikrishnan and his book, since he continues to live there and teaches at the New York University in Abu Dhabi—to all appearances living the Gulf dream.

  The Emirates has a zero tolerance policy for criticism, and Temporary People makes no attempt to show the ‘other side’ on which the country builds its impressive PR.

  The writer is a journalist who has lived in Qatar for 17 years. She is the Associate Editor of Migrant-Rights.org.

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  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Weekend-booking-Deepak-Unnikrishnan-11003983.php
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  Weekend booking: Deepak Unnikrishnan
  By John McMurtrie Updated 2:13 pm, Wednesday, March 15, 2017

  Deepak Unnikrishna Photo: Philip Cheung
  Photo: Philip Cheung
  Deepak Unnikrishna

  Many have marveled at the gleaming skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, forgetting that the people who build its towers are severely underpaid foreigners who are treated like wretches. Their under-explored lives are the subject of a debut novel, “Temporary People,” by Deepak Unnikrishnan. Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the book is made up of 28 linked stories that humanize these workers. Unnikrishnan, who is from Abu Dhabi and lives in Chicago, will read from his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 16, at City Lights Bookstore. He’ll be in discussion with Berkeley author Shanthi Sekaran, whose novel “Lucky Boy” — which centers on immigration — was published in January. More information: www.citylights.com.
  — John McMurtrie
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• Asian Review of Books
  http://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/temporary-people-by-deepak-unnikrishnan/
  Word count: 1399

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  BOOKS, ARTS & CULTURE
  The ARB Home About the ARB Events Search archives prior to June ’16 Books Reviews Non-Fiction Fiction Poetry Children’s Excerpts Non-fiction Fiction Poetry Book News Search archives Essays Classical music
  Rosie Milne 9 May 2017 Fiction, Reviews
  “Temporary People” by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  Unnikrishnan
  In 2016, Deepak Unnikrishnan won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, with his then-unpublished manuscript, Temporary People. The prize awards US$10,000 and publication to a first-time, first-generation American author.
  Now usually found in Chicago, Deepak Unnikrishnan is a first-generation American author from… where? He grew up in Abu Dhabi, but his parents are pravasis, the Malayalam word for migrants and temporary workers.
  Unnikrishnan explains in the introduction to the now-published book that, as the son of pravasis, his departure from Abu Dhabi was inevitable: “The UAE does not grant citizenship to its foreign labor force or their children.” Temporary People uses linked short stories which incorporate a variety of forms—official reports, transcripts of interviews, lists—to build up a fractured, kaleidoscopic portrait of migrant workers in the UAE. These include, among others, a girl who has been sexually abused in an elevator, and who thinks the elevator itself is to blame, an unqualified woman who acts as the nurse patching up men who’ve fallen from construction sites, and, in a sci-fi twist, workers grown from seed with predetermined lifespans. But the surreal individual stories are secondary to Unnikrishnan’s use of language.
  Unnikrishnan’s language is manic, and wild, and wonderful.
  Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan (Restless Books, March 2017)
  Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan (Restless Books, March 2017)
  What does it mean to be a pravasi? Unnikrishnan does not provide a definitive answer; the final chapter, indeed, is in its entirety: “Pravasis=”. There isn’t a question mark, although the reader is surely bound to see one. But while he can’t provide an answer, he is apparently trying to use language to define, as well as to illustrate, pravasi existence—sometimes through strategies as simple, and as powerful, as listing words such as temporary, people and cogs which can be attached to pravasis. Unnikirishnan suggests one way pravasis hang onto their own selves by conjuring a language so lively it defies the numbing effects of being belittled and dishonoured. He explains in his introduction that he uses:

  an amalgamation of the English language, tampered with by Malayalam slang, finessed in an Indian school on Emirati soil, and jazzed up thanks to American, Arabic, and British television. The book also explores the mispronunciations and word appropriations that take place when a country’s main demographic are people from elsewhere.

  Unnikrishnan’s language isn’t just “jazzed up”; it’s manic, and wild, and wonderful, and often quite confusing—but confusing in a good way that makes outsiders of English-speaking readers, and thus forces them to imagine what it must be like to be a newly-arrived migrant worker, faced with a barely comprehensible language, in a barely comprehensible country.
  It is difficult to give a sense of Unnikrishnan’s style in brief snippets, but he includes a story in which an English-speaking Indian boy in Abu Dhabi is abandoned by his tongue, which, in an apparent nod to Gogol, jumps out of his mouth and runs away. Alas, his tongue meets with an accident which sends all the nouns the boy has ever learned flying into the air. On the words’ landing, there were mistakes:

  The word(s) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit a window, but the word most apt to hit the window, Khiraki, crashed into a light bulb. Some words for animals, like Kelb, found the right animal, but most words found the wrong animals. The word Poocha, perfect on a cat, landed on thawing mutton. Himar maimed a chicken’s beak; its English equivalent Donkey, speared a pigeon’s throat. The word Paksi landed on housefly’s thorax, missing the mynah on the lamppost.

  Since the nouns had been expelled so violently, many ended up mangled:

  These damaged nouns, like Wifebeater, and Veed and Secret Police, were everywhere, unclaimed, hanging off rafters, store signs, pedestrians.

  There was racial confusion:

  The word Arabee attached itself to a Mumbaiker man and wouldn’t let go while Hind refused to be pried from a Local’s knee, just as the word Saaipu plunged into a Sudanese woman’s vein, swimming like a tapeworm towards the woman’s brain, as a white Eurasian woman/lady looked on before noticing two writhing nouns Kaalia and Blackie, copulating on her wrist.

  The crazily inventive smashup Unnikrishnan describes is also a description of his own style, as well as a description of what happens to language “when a country’s main demographic are people from elsewhere.”
  Things—tongues, passports, suitcases—taking on a life of their own and running off is a recurring motif, as is things-running-off’s close cousin, metamorphosis. Never mind Kafka’s man metamorphosing into a cockroach, in Unnikrishnan, massed cockroaches metamorphose into humans. They learn to walk upright on two legs, they fashion clothes out of garbage, they learn to make inarticulate sounds, and then to speak. Here’s a narrator who’s done his best to squash and spray them into oblivion:

  Before I whack the bug, I check if it’s wearing shoes or a skirt or a jacket or a tie or crotchless undies made of putrid garbage, whether the bug’s taking notes, whether it’s attempting to walk upright. I watch it before making my move. Then I get as close as I can to this thing, corner it almost, and ask, Do you speak English? Yesterday… I got my first response. Yes Boi, a little.
  Cockroaches metamorphosed into humans as a metaphor for migrant workers is shocking, and shaming, as is so much else in Temporary People.
  Rosie Milne runs Asian Books Blog twitter@asianbooksblog. She lives in Singapore.
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