Brown Skin, White Lies is a fugitive confession stitched from the ruins of a migrant dream. Told in searing, lyrical fragments, it follows Arjun Ajith Nair, a young man from Kerala who lands in Australia chasing a better life — only to find debt, silence, and the quiet humiliation of survival under someone else’s name.
As visa promises collapse, Arjun slips into the country’s shadow layer — answering calls under fake names in call centres, dodging questions from landlords, and falling in love with someone who carries her own broken story. When a moral choice turns into a criminal act, Arjun flees across borders — moving through cities, checkpoint by checkpoint, rewriting himself with every stop.
Set across Australia and a string of nameless transit points, Brown Skin, White Lies explores what happens when you lose your place in the system — and what remains when there’s no country left to return to. Arjun’s voice is unreliable, intimate, and brutally clear — a narrator documenting the act of erasure as it happens.
For readers drawn to stories of displacement, masculinity, and moral fracture — this novel asks: what do you owe the truth, when the truth never protected you?
Brown Skin, White Lies is a fugitive confession stitched from the ruins of a migrant dream. Told in searing, lyrical fragments, it follows Arjun Ajith Nair, a young man from Kerala who lands in Australia chasing a better life — only to find debt, silence, and the quiet humiliation of survival under someone else’s name.
As visa promises collapse, Arjun slips into the country’s shadow layer — answering calls under fake names in call centres, dodging questions from landlords, and falling in love with someone who carries her own broken story. When a moral choice turns into a criminal act, Arjun flees across borders — moving through cities, checkpoint by checkpoint, rewriting himself with every stop.
Set across Australia and a string of nameless transit points, Brown Skin, White Lies explores what happens when you lose your place in the system — and what remains when there’s no country left to return to. Arjun’s voice is unreliable, intimate, and brutally clear — a narrator documenting the act of erasure as it happens.
For readers drawn to stories of displacement, masculinity, and moral fracture — this novel asks: what do you owe the truth, when the truth never protected you?
Pampady, Thursday, 6 October 2016
7:15 p.m.
Pampady evenings start in the wok: an iron pan black as
temple soot, buffalo meat spitting under a hail of pepper,
chilli and curry leaves. Diesel tang from the bus stand drifts
in, mixes with cumin, settles on your lungs like down-
payment smoke.
Biju’s Makeshift Mess has six plastic tables and exactly zero
cutlery. You eat beef fry the way God and the GST office
intended - right hand, first three fingers, no witnesses. The
place suits us: cheap, dim, judgment-proof.
Achan sits opposite me, khadi shirt still smelling of antiseptic
from the pharmacy. He worries the callus on his thumb, last4 BOBBY MOHAN
week’s sugar-test prick that refuses to heal. When I ask if it
hurts, he shrugs. “Only when results come out.”
We are not here for dinner; we are here to talk about forty
lakh rupees (Seventy thousand Australian dollars, if you round
up and hold your breath) without the town listening. Beef in
Kottayam buys you that privacy: the respectable folk won’t
step inside after dark.
Achan pinches a cube of meat, dips it in gravy, lifts it to his
mouth. The beef oil stains his cuff in the shape of a comma;
the sentence after that comma is his:
“Tomorrow, after opening prayer, we see the loans officer.
Bring your mark sheets, the MBA brochure. Printed-
serious.”
He says it lightly, but the tumbler of watered-down gravy
trembles on the metal table. Inside my head a slide-show
flicks: Melbourne skyline, tuition line, the imagined red
stamp-APPROVED-that will let us breathe. I burn my
tongue on chilli and hope.
Two auto drivers at the next table argue diesel and visas.
“My cousin blew ten lakh, came back cleaning toilets in
Dubai.”
“Still toilets with air-conditioning, da.”
They laugh. I count the zeros of ten lakh on my greasy
palm.
The clank of bracelets announces Roy Joseph- safari suit,
cologne that could disinfect a ward. He ducks inside, scans
the room, spots us.
“Ajith-ettan, Arjun-mone!” He doesn’t sit; he looms like
unseasonal rain.
“Tomorrow is the bank, no? Take two copies of the
property deed,” he advises, voice loud enough for the
frying pan.
Achan smiles, half-bow. “Bank first, Roy-etta. Cheaper
interest.”
Roy laughs, taps my shoulder- a friendly hammer. “If they
blink, call me. Bridge loan ready. No boy should miss
February intake.”
He leaves a business card face-up on the table- Laxmi
Financials: Fast Cash, Friendly Terms- then strolls out,
white Maruti already idling. Biju’s neon splashes ambulance
light across the bonnet.
Achan exhales. “Helpful man,” he says, but his tone tastes of
antacid.
Biju arrives with a rag, winks.
“Flying soon, Arjun-alle?”
“In-shallah,” I answer; in Pampady, every language shares
the same maybe.
I pay ninety-rupee notes, still smelling of Dettol, from the
cash drawer at the shop. Outside, KSEB street-lamps
flicker; a power-loom coughs its shift to a halt. Pepper heat
clings to our shirts, or maybe it’s dread; both sting the same.
Halfway home, Achan breaks the silence:
“If it’s God’s plan, the loan will pass.”
“I studied probability, Acha. God’s plan charges interest.”
He almost smiles, presses the pharmacy keys into my fist,
camphor, rust, resignation.
Amma waits at the compound gate, sari tucked, hair
unbound. She reads our faces, opens the door wide enough
for tomorrow to squeeze through.
I lie on the coir cot, ceiling stains mapping last monsoon’s
leaks. A rooster misreads the hour and crows too early or
too late, same thing. On the stool, the clear folder glows
under a bare bulb: mark sheets flat, brochure front, no
folds, no stains. I whisper the tuition figure once, then the
loans officer’s name like an opposing mantra.
Sleep comes in small loans-repayable at dawn, accruing by
noon-and somewhere, behind Biju’s kitchen, an iron pan
cools but never forgets the flavour of debts discussed over beef.
Arjun has a dream: leave his hometown in India to pursue an MBA in Australia. Arjun has a problem: restrictive immigration systems and prohibitive enrolment fees make his dream nearly impossible to achieve. Soon, he is thrown into a spiral of debt, desperation, and lies that may very well cause him to lose everything - even himself.
Brown Skin, White Lies starts strong, sharing the often-forgotten story of a person stuck in an unfair immigration system, where paperwork and bureaucracy erase any trace of humanity, equity or understanding. Arjun - like so many other people across the world - is only seeking a better life, but the hurdles he faces in doing so have significant repercussions on his family as well as on himself.
Unfortunately, this does not translate into a compelling narrative, largely due to the stylistic choices made in this book. The idea to use an unconventional narration is admirable, but ultimately ineffective: while the idea was probably to rely on logs and serrated sentences in an attempt to convey the sense of gradual dehumanisation generated by the immigration system, the result is often confusing and hard to read, negating the possibility for the reader to develop any sort of emotional connection with Arjun. By the end, there is no empathy to be felt nor any righteous anger towards the system, as both have been annulled by ledgers and account balances throughout.
The narrative often feels fragmented and sterile, certainly unaided by the frequent repetitions and occasional inconsistencies which suggest that the book might have benefited from another round of editing rather than appearing to be intentional stylistic choices. There is simultaneously too much and not enough going on, with loan sharks, crime gangs and even a human trafficking/labour exploitation ring making an appearance but failing to generate any sense of urgency or a strong emotional response, again mostly due to the almost clinical narration. The final act, by contrast, feels almost rushed and underdeveloped, with very few feelings left once the final page is turned.
The intention to share the story of someone made to be invisible by an unjust system is praise-worthy, however in its current form Brown Skin, White Lies fails to hit the mark, though it has the potential to tell a deeply compelling story.