Letter from an Exile

Sangeetha Thanapal

In April 2012, Prabagaran Srivijayan left Malaysia for a short trip across the Causeway to Singapore. He had borrowed a friend’s car. The car was searched and police found heroin in the armrest of the vehicle.

Praba, as he would be known as in the media, maintained his innocence throughout his trial. The prosecution of his case was a farce. His lawyers were not allowed to visit him in prison. The man whose car he was driving was never brought to testify at his trial despite Praba giving the police names and addresses of those who had participated alongside him. The Singapore carceral state ran roughshod over his case, to the point where there was an appeal at the International Criminal Court of Justice. The three judges on his case – all rich, Chinese men drunk on their power over life and death – refused to wait even a few days. At 6am on a balmy July morning, the Singapore state murdered him. They strung him up like a prized pig and hung him, an act which broke his neck and choked him to death.

What, then, to me, is my country?

My country has never loved me. It has never loved the dark-skinned Indian coolie. It may have loved the brown native once, a long time ago – now 'second-class citizens within their own land'. A remembrance perhaps.

My people came to Singapore as coolies. The coolie trade, meant to replace slaves after the abolition of slavery in the UK, meant that hundreds of thousands of lower-caste and Dalit people, mired in poverty and pain, were packed onto ships like sardines and sent to the colonies. Many died of hunger, thirst and disease. Those that survived the journey eventually would work on rubber and tin plantations in Malaya and Burma and some of them would go on to move to Singapore.

Praba and I; we are kin, coming from the soul of a people long left for dead on plantations. Ancestors who hoped for more, but never found it. Poverty and caste discrimination got us on those ships, but if we thought things would be better where we went, boy oh boy, were we wrong. This is migration’s failed promise.

My country is a place where Indian people find it difficult to gain employment and are discriminated against trying to find a home.

This country is not a home.

My country is a country where there are no anti-discrimination laws, and no way to fight back when you have been the target of racism. Where those who fight back become the targets of racism and state repression.

It is a country where speech calling out racism is considered 'hate speech'. A country where, even during the height of the pandemic, when Chinese Americans were targets of racism in the United States, Chinese Singaporeans told Indians that we are 'dirty' due to the 'Indian variant'. What selective delusions these people have.

What, then, to me, is my country?

It is the country that disproportionately jails Indians and Malays. A country that continues to use my people as cheap labour to build its skyscrapers, while treating us as disposable, ready to be discarded at the slightest whim. A country which kills us in custody.

Police brutality is not just an American problem. It’s not only an Australian problem. Not exclusively a Western World problem.

My country, which says Muslim children are terrorists, even though the state stole this land from the Malays who make up the majority of modern Muslims here. My country, which believes Indians are argumentative and that Chinese people are the reason we have economic success, as if the rest of us are just languishing in the background.  

My country, despite all evidence otherwise, is a country that believes racism doesn’t exist.

What, then, to me, is my country?

I am an exile, missing the feel of the sun on my face, the lights of Deepavali, the scents of Raya, the streets that are only still and deserted on Chinese New Year, the wet markets, the libraries, the trains – the life I once knew.

Perhaps this is the real question; What, to my country, am I?

Unwanted.