Life can be incredibly, disorientingly and emotionally destructively cruel.
That might not be immediately apparent to anyone with a reasonably cushy middle class existence in a plush Western liberal democracy, but for many people the stark, horrifying reality is that their hopes and dreams often take a distant back seat to a hard scrabble, sometime perilous, struggle for survival.
Two people who are well acquainted with this disquieting reality are Shan, a refugee who has heartbreakingly had to leave his wife and son behind as he flees the civil war in his home country of Sri Lanka in the early Noughties, and Nia, a nineteen-year-old woman from Wales who has fled her substance abuse-broken family and is seeking a new life in London.
These two people form the nucleus of the thoughtfully affecting story in Nikia Lalwani’s novel You People, a book which understands with incisive understanding and palpable empathy what it is to exist between dreams and reality, between worlds that are legal and illegal, public and private.
In this moving book, Shan, who is in the UK as an illegal immigrant (though under international convention, the acting of seeking asylum is never illegal) is trying to get his family back even as Nia tries to leave hers far behind, but both of them find themselves in literally the same place, an Italian restaurant called Pizzeria Vesuvio, run by the enigmatic but apparently kindhearted Tuli, a Sri Lankan man who acts as a Robin Hood of sorts for all kinds of people trapped in that void between buoyant hope and soul-searing truth.
“He’s [Tuli] good. Surely he is good? He is the altruist we need on each street corner. The one who’s got your back, can help you stand up after the fall. He’s wise: King Solomon capable of enough empathy and hubris to decide who deserves the baby. He is a walking set of choices and consequences: love thy neighbour, the greater good, take your pick. This image of him – of them – filters and echoes through her [Nia] memory, there are a thousand iterations or more. She can never be certain of its imprint or impact.
She tells herself the story as it unfolds from this moment. She does it to understand him, and so to believe in his cure.” (p. 4)
On the surface, and in many important practical ways, Tuli is the saviour of a great many people who would otherwise fall through the cavernous cracks of government policy and societal expectation, people who might never see the light of day ever again otherwise.
Time and again he steps in to give someone here money, someone there shelter, and while repayment is often expected, it’s not enacted in some harshly inhuman way but rather with gentleness and understanding, all while keeping everyone at bay.
While Shan is intensely grateful for all of Tuli’s many kindnesses, Nia is curious, wondering how a man who lives so much in the shadows can do much good out in the harsh light of a world that’s often scant on fairytales and happy endings.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that much like those he helps, Tuli is an imperfect man of the margins, tiptoeing between the legal and the illegal, existing in a grey area of compromise and uncertainty, driven by a kind heart but forced to play in a place where weakness and humanity are all too often spurned.
It’s the understanding of the great many compromises that encumber even the most well-intentioned of lives that gives You People so much rich emotional resonance, with no one truly judged, save for the grasping people smugglers for whom human beings are a resource and not soul replete with closely-held dreams of a better future.
It is all too easy to look at the issue of refugees, which is too often, and with deep cruelty and lack of empathetic understanding, used as a political football, and not make easy, baseless assumptions about why people make the decision to leave their country of origin.
The truth is, as Lalwani beautifully and insightfully explores, is that no one leaves their place of belonging and supposed safety willingly, only doing so when it becomes untenable, for a whole host of reasons, to remain.
Given the choice, all of us would want to stay happily put right where we are, safe in the bosom of family and friends and a culture we know and love but what happens when this place of birth and nurturing is no longer the bastion of sanctuary it once was?
Then like Shan, and a number of the cooks at Pizzaeria Vesuvio, who are constantly at the mercy of immigration agents and do not have the peace of mind that should come from reaching a place of sanctuary and safety, you flee, your heart ripped out of you in so many soul-sapping ways, hoping that maybe somewhere else will offer what your now broken homeland cannot.
The poignancy of You People, written with quiet beauty and a rich understanding of people and evocation of character, is that it makes powerful points, simply and without fanfafe, laying bare the truth of many immigrants’ lives as they find themselves caught between war, people smugglers and unwelcome governments, none of whom takes the time to understand what life is really like for the dispossessed.
“OK. I [Shan] am OK. He is OK, you are OK? Meaning: I am alive, he is alive, you are alive? We are all still alive.” (P. 131)
You cannot read You People without feeling deeply for everyone involved.
Lalwani doesn’t paint any of the characters as saints, recognising that everyone is capable of flawed decision-making and great regret, but she does give everyone the chance, with writing that is moving and lyrically impacting, to be seen for who they really are, with Shan and Tuli coming to light with real humanity and truth.
This is the type of book you don’t so much read as live and experience with the characters so alive, the situations so real, and the predicaments so fearfully real and yet tantalisingly hopeful, that you feel as if this the real world sprung to life in poetically rich and emotionally insightful form.
You People is a richly rewarding journey from the very worst to the best of places, and sometimes back again, with the novel unafraid to be unflinchingly real about how terrible the world can be but also how full of possibility and goodness it can be too, something which can be all too quickly forgotten in the glaring harshness of cruel and unfeeling world.