That observation reverberates through Abdul’s life. Palestine survives only as inheritance. Afghanistan survives as memory. India becomes shelter without ever becoming certainty. Home is never a place he possesses; it remains a movement between losses. 

Perhaps that is why Tabish has spent three decades writing about people who inhabit several worlds at once. Looking back over his extraordinary body of work — Victorian London in The Thing About Thugs, colonial archives in Night of Happiness, the Danish suburbs of Just Another Jihadi Jane, the haunted coasts of The Body by the Shore — he sees a single thread that runs through all of them. “An engagement with difference,” he tells me. “It was not conscious to begin with. It happened. But looking back, that is what I see.”

Difference in his fiction is existential. His characters are caught between multiple worlds at once, connected by lines of migration, language, memory and desire. Does he see himself as a writer caught between worlds too, and how has that tension changed for you over the years? “I see myself more as living between different worlds and in different worlds, with lines of connection running between them. If sometimes this retards my movements, at other times it enables them too. But my characters are not me, and some of them feel, given their circumstances, caught between worlds, too. Maybe I am more privileged than my characters, maybe I am luckier or less sensitive to the wear and tear of living between worlds. I would not want to live differently,” he says.

Difference, however, is not celebrated sentimentally, but lived through abrasion. Abdul carries history inside his body like an old wound. He cannot discuss Palestine as an abstract geopolitical conflict because Palestine has shaped every chapter of his life. But his politics consistently evade slogans. “I support Palestinians because I also support Israel,” he tells the narrator. “A just and equal existence for Palestinians is the only way to justify Israel. Everything else is religious fanaticism.”

It is an astonishing sentence in today’s shrill public discourse because it refuses the comfort of binary loyalties. Abdul’s sympathy grows neither from nationalism nor religion but from an ethical insistence upon equality. Politics, in the novel, is never ideology floating above life; it is woven into daily existence, sexual choices, friendships, griefs and conversations.

That is equally true of Abdul’s queerness. The narrator notes that being gay in India was “legal, but only in English.” It is a line witty and painfully accurate. Law changes faster than culture. Recognition on paper does not dissolve fear in ordinary life. Even the café where queer men and women gather bears another history of exile. It is owned by a Tibetan refugee and an Armenian immigrant and named after the African-American jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. Tabish constructs an alternative cartography in which refugees recognise one another across nations, languages and histories.

Abdul himself remains restless even while in love. His nightmares do not allow him the luxury of undisturbed sleep. Friends murdered in Kabul return night after night. His parents disappear into history without explanation. Sometimes he wakes unable to recognise either the narrator or the room around him. “The shark had followed him,” the narrator realises, recalling Warsan Shire’s unforgettable line that no one leaves home unless home has become the mouth of a shark. Abdul escaped the shark, only to discover that exile had carried it within him.

Tabish is too subtle a novelist to reduce trauma to diagnosis. PTSD, the narrator remarks, would have been too neat an explanation for Abdul. What interests him is not the psychology of illness but the persistence of history. The wars continue long after they are seemingly over. They migrate into dreams, relationships and bodies. 

Eventually the hidden war raging inside Abdul acquires a visible form. Leukemia interrupts the invisible violence with an unmistakable one. It is a cruel irony that physical illness brings emotional calm. “There was nowhere to flee,” the narrator says. For the first time, the endless flight stops because the body itself has become the destination.

The scenes surrounding Abdul’s death are among the most moving Tabish has written. The narrator sits holding his hand long after life has left it, unable to release his grip until a nurse gently intervenes. Then he removes the silver chain Abdul always wore and places it around his own neck, fulfilling the dead man’s final wish. It is a gesture almost unbearably intimate in its simplicity. At some point, the narrator asks the reader: “Have you ever known any refugee intimately? Have you touched a refugee’s face with your fingers, skin brushing against skin; laid your ears against his chest to listen to the running beat of his heart?” 

Love appears in complicated ways across his work; between friends, lovers, families, even across cultures and borders. How important is tenderness and everyday humanity when Tabish writes about big, painful things like terror, migration, or loss? “We like to make fun of the 1960s, or reduce it to the matter of ‘free sex’, but they did get this right: love is life; life is love. Of course, love is much, much more than sex. There are so many kinds of love,” he says. 

“As Kabir put it, pothi padhi padhi jag mua pandit bhaya na koi / dhai aakhar prem ka padhe so pandit hoi. (Reading thick books hasn’t made anyone learned / You are learned only if you can decipher the alphabets of love.) But of course love has been commodified too, as ‘sex’ for instance, and hence I can only narrate it in complicated ways. Along with love, enmeshed with it, one has tenderness and everyday humanity. It is all one bolus. If only people did not lose sight of it, or give up on it,” he adds.

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It is a striking answer from a novelist whose fiction is steeped in history, philosophy and literary allusion. Perhaps it is also the key to Drown All the Refugees. Beneath its ghosts, arguments, genocides and political rage lies an insistence upon tenderness. Maria waiting for Pedro. The narrator refusing to let go of Abdul’s hand. Even the novel’s anger at the bombardment of Gaza emerges from an attachment to human lives. Love is difficult, compromised, haunted. But it remains, as Kabir understood centuries ago, the only language capable of resisting the brutal simplifications of power. In the world Tabish imagines in his novel, refuge is not finally granted by nations. It is granted, briefly and imperfectly, by one human being to another.

Tabish is careful never to romanticise displacement. Refugees are people upon whom history has exerted unbearable pressure. What distinguishes Drown All the Refugees from many contemporary novels about migration is its refusal to isolate refugeehood from the larger structures that produce it. The refugee is not an exception to modernity, but one of its inevitable products.

The author does not allow history to remain comfortably compartmentalised. The trail of death and destruction in Gaza summons memories of King Leopold’s Congo, of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa, of Indigenous Americans driven from their lands, of Aboriginal Australians, of colonial massacres absorbed into official history. These are not digressions, but reminders that genocide is never unprecedented. Every new atrocity carries the sediment of older ones.

Tabish, a professor of postcolonial literature, has frequently returned to Joseph Conrad’s character Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) in his fiction and criticism, and Drown All the Refugees echoes that lineage. He observes that television channels resemble Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow, who lied to Kurtz’s naive fiancée, the ‘Intended,’ to protect her from the horrific truth of colonial violence. Civilisation, Conrad wrote, raises grotesque idols demanding human sacrifice. 

Tabish updates that image for the twenty-first century. The idols now wear the reassuring masks of democracy, humanitarian intervention, market rationality and endless news cycles. Sacrifice continues; only the vocabulary has become more sophisticated. “Drown all the refugees!” is placed in dialogue with Kurtz’s infamous “Exterminate all the brutes!” Both sentences expose the monstrous logic hidden beneath the rhetoric of civilisation.

William Faulkner, too, gets a mention. The plantation house, the decaying Compson family, the residue of ancestral violence beneath everyday life — all consciously echo The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! But Tabish’s plantation is not Mississippi but postcolonial India, itself connected through imperial circuits to Scotland, the Caribbean and the wider colonial world. History refuses national boundaries. Colonialism created one interconnected catastrophe, and its ghosts migrate just as relentlessly as its refugees.

The narrator repeatedly contrasts societies layered with remembered violence against a nation determined to deodorise its own past. America, he suggests, walks upon ground from which historical debris has been carefully swept away. Elsewhere, every step risks breaking through rotten planks into bones, blood and buried histories. It is one of the novel’s boldest metaphors. The past is never safely beneath us. It is the unstable floor upon which the present precariously stands.

For all its political urgency, Drown All the Refugees remains profoundly interested in literature itself. Its narrator is a novelist constantly questioning the adequacy of narrative. Can fiction represent atrocity without aestheticising it? Can language bear witness without appropriating another’s suffering? Can stories still matter when algorithms determine attention? 

Tabish has wrestled with these questions throughout his academic and creative life. Books such as Literature Against Fundamentalism, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness and Babu Fictions investigate precisely how stories liberate and imprison us. Unsurprisingly, he approaches fiction not as instruction but as conversation. “I try to write at a tangent,” he tells me. “I try to leave gaps for the reader to explore, and also create traps for the reader to avoid or extricate herself from. Writing like that is a two-way street for me (fun for me and fun for the right kind of reader) because finally we need a conversation in any book, a conversation between the reader and the writer.”

Drown All the Refugees exemplifies that philosophy. Every apparent conclusion opens another question. Every ghost demands another history. Every memory uncovers another silence. The reader becomes not a consumer of narrative but its ethical participant, required to complete the work that the novel deliberately leaves unfinished.

In many of his previous books, like The Thing About Thugs and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, Tabish has mixed dark humour with serious violence and misunderstanding. Why does he think laughter and irony are important tools when writing about fear, otherness, and extremism? “Laughter is a dose of sanity in a world going insane. It is also a protection against such monsters as totalitarianism and fundamentalism. We need it more than ever today.  His understanding of irony is equally revealing. It is “the ability to say two or more things at the same time, to look at human weakness with a critical mix of humour and tolerance.”

That doubleness permeates Drown All the Refugees. The novel is furious without becoming shrill, mournful without surrendering to despair, intellectually ambitious without sacrificing emotional intimacy. Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Tabish what still compels him to write at a time when the novel itself is so frequently declared to be in decline. “Yes, reading is under threat. Reading books. Because audio books and screen reading do not allow the same space and time for deep attention, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes.”

Han also points out, Tabish adds, that the capacity to contemplate (pay deep attention) is the corner-stone of human civilisation. “We seem to be tossing it over thoughtlessly, but then we are destroying nature thoughtlessly, too. Both are part of the same structural sickness caused by capitalism. That is a reason enough to write for me,” he says. Tabish knows the limits of fiction, but he also understands its necessity. “The ship might be sinking,” he says with defiance, “but I am not going to go down quietly.”]

 

By the end of Drown All the Refugees, the reader understands that the novel’s ghosts are the ghosts of colonial histories, abandoned homes, drowned journeys, lost lovers and unresolved injustices. They are also the ghosts of language itself, the words we use to evade or distance ourselves from suffering. Tabish’s achievement is to make these ghosts visible without reducing them to allegory. The novel does not offer the reader the comfort of pity; it demands recognition. As the narrator insists, pity can become a way of absolving oneself while leaving the structures of violence untouched.

Drown All the Refugees asks us to see the displaced not as shadows, but as fully human presences whose lives are entangled with our own. At a time when migration is often discussed through the language of crisis management, Tabish has written a novel that restores mystery, grief, love and moral complexity to the subject. It is a book that shakes you to the core, and as Mohammed Hanif’s blurb on the cover says, makes you look at our world in a different light, because it understands that the horrors of our time are not always hidden, but often visible in plain sight. It’s we who chose to turn away, look the other way.