There are two sentences in Vidya Madabushi’s novel The Days Toppled Over that I find especially worthy of our time: “Hard work was the price they were willing to pay. Exploitation was the real price exacted from them.”
At a time in Australia when many of us feel smothered by rising interest rates, inflation and corporate greed, this rings with a depressingly contemporary truth – and yet Madabushi’s second novel is not the average Australian’s story. Instead it’s a sometimes confronting look at the lives of international students who arrive in Australia hoping for brighter futures but who are quickly subsumed into the daily grind without any stability or assurance that they’ll ever be able to call this country home.
Set between Bangalore, India and Sydney, The Days Toppled Over follows Malli and Surya, two siblings who are dividing their inheritance after their parents’ untimely deaths in a car accident. Malli, who lives and works in Bangalore, has selective mutism, meaning she only speaks to her immediate family and communicates with everyone else using a whiteboard and marker, the colour of which depends on her mood. Surya leaves India for Australia to study but ends up working incredibly long hours in an Indian restaurant for a boss who confiscates his passport, pays measly wages and has no compassion or empathy for his employees.
Malli and Surya keep their sometimes-fraught relationship going over weekly conversations – always on the same day and at the same time – until Surya suddenly disappears. Malli, desperate to find her brother, travels to Sydney with the help of Nayan, the moderator of a missing person’s forum.
Despite Surya’s disappearance, The Days Toppled Over is no thriller. It’s a heartening and eye-opening slow read, neither compulsive nor boring. It’s often sobering in its explorations of the intersections of race and class – and also gender, in the case of one of Surya’s female colleagues, depicting the vulnerability of migrant workers reliant on sometimes unethical employers who impose unfair working conditions.
This is a world where taking sick leave has deep consequences; where international students go weeks without seeing a dentist for an infected tooth because it would mean sending less of their hard-earned money home; where domestic and sexual violence can fester. In one scene a white saviour-esque character, thinking she’s helping after a racist attack on the restaurant workers, chastises the owner for not defending his employees – failing to realise her gesture does not bode well for them.
Madabushi deftly examines the realities of being an international student in Australia and depending on an often-unfair system without it ever feeling didactic. Her own experiences as an international student navigating 457 visas lend the plot much of its credibility. She writes characters with a tenderness that leaves little room to explore any of their shortcomings or flaws but does not render them unrealistic. I felt for all of them, trapped in some sort of limbo, but especially because their quest for permanency fosters competition within their friendship circles and creates friction with the more established members of their community. In one scene Surya doesn’t want to face a former colleague from the restaurant buying cat food in a supermarket because “he’s now just become another office worker” in a suit, though he thinks well of him for being able to “afford to own and feed a cat”; In another, when Surya and his mates are kicked out of a club, another group of south Asians give them a look that says “you’re giving us all a bad name”.
The Days Toppled Over is Madabushi’s first book published in Australia (her first novel, Bystanders, published in 2015 in India, was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones south Asia prize). Its explorations of what constitutes success – and the price we pay for it – are likely to remain with you long after you’ve read the last page. It’s intelligent and warm, and punchy where it needs to be, reminding us all that we’re shackled to some sort of system, and that life is just a “competition of who can roam the most inside the cage”.
The Days Toppled Over by Vidya Madabushi is published by Vintage ($32.99)
