Deepak Unnikrishnan: We Didn’t Talk About Pain
Cover image: Simon and Schuster. In Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, a worker falls from a building and another stitches him back together. People are cultivated in petri dishes like plants, dissected at the airport. They don clown suits to earn some scratch, eat entire airplanes just to get out of town, and wage unsuccessful war against freedom-fighting, uniform-wearing roaches. Relationships are surreal dreams and life is suffused with impermanence, because home is somewhere else and departure is inevitable. No one is staying for long.
These are the people of Abu Dhabi, the guest workers who account for most of the people in town. Their status centers on a single point: work. Work defines them, sets their worth, and determines how long they’ll live in the area. Sometimes it determines how long they’ll live at all. But that is an outsider’s narrow view, and Unnikrishnan’s series of linked stories shows what this view misses. “I want to look at what you think about the city and turn everything topsy-turvy,” Unnikrishnan said during a telephone interview from his home in Abu Dhabi, where he
