AustLit

'If you crouch and hug your knees to your chest, and feel the skin of a man’s arm peeling against your own, and the sweat collecting on your nose drips onto the back of another man hunched over in front of you; if slices of light sift through the wooden slats a foot above your head, and your stomach feels like it is grinding stones, your throat clenches against swallowing each waft of urine and vomit, and the sting from a gash torn through your thigh by a rubber gear belt swung at you like a mace burns like the entire limb is being ripped off, like the chilli powder a filthy hand ground into your eyes; if you and the hundreds in the hold with you have been like this for twenty days, the gentle but maddeningly off-beat rocking of the sea pierced only by the occasional screams of women above deck, and you don’t know when it will end, and even when it ends you don’t know how every day after that will end, if you will be in bed with your wife or in jail, as confined to a cell as you were to the village your grandparents built a thousand miles from here, where you had a house but no quarter, land but no country, time but no future; if you do not exist on paper, anywhere, if no one will take you in, and you are drifting, always, then you know what that means. You know the tamarind is always sour.' (53)