Workers rescued from scam centres in Myanmar wait at a detention facility in February 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP
A Dalit fisherman’s son from the seaside town of Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu sets out for Dubai chasing a better future. John Easow boards a flight from Chennai, armed with a small ‘Samsonite knock-off’, hoping to crack a graphic designer job interview. But the journey takes him to a dark place instead.
I read Rejimon Kuttappan’s novel, The River of Grey Flowers, during a low phase in my life. When it takes me into its fold after the first few pages, it feels heavy. But the funny thing is, I could not put it down. This is the kind of novel one just has to finish, no matter what.
The story takes off from a boat ride on a still night along the Moei River that forms a part of the Myanmar-Thailand border. Five people are on board, hanging on to dear life and a thin sliver of hope for survival. They are escapees from a scam compound hidden in the jungles along the border, where men of different nationalities, including Indians, Africans and Chinese, are held prisoners by gun and baton-wielding men.
Their task? To sit in front of computers, using pre-existing scripts to contact and defraud people. Behind fake profiles, the men slog away online, chatting up lonely men and tricking them into making financial investments. If they fail to meet their targets, they face the worst forms of punishment.
Inspired by real life
The author describes in minute detail life at the camp: the glare of fluorescent lights, the hawk eyes of the guards, rubbery dumpling dinners, and a brotherhood forged in cold, airless bunkers with slatted windows. Above all, there is the mind-numbing work.
Men forget time and space, their identities and lives back home. They forget to smile, to breathe, or eat, moving like zombies caught in a time loop with no beginning or end. Kuttappan’s sparse, short sentences slice through the darkness that shrouds the novel, effortlessly illuminating the narrative.
The story is told in the first-person narrative of John, and it feels personal. Before long, we are rooting for the young man who recently married the love of his life back home, and has to contend with sporadic, hushed calls from across the ocean. Kuttappan fuels the plot with taut, well-written action blocks. The punches, stabbings, scrambling in the dark, and bullets shooting dangerously past make the throat go dry.
An independent journalist who specialises in labour migration, Kuttappan has reported extensively on human trafficking and abuse of migrant workers. The River of Grey Flowers is based on the real-life testimonies of people he was instrumental in rescuing from scam centres in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
And it shows — in the gut-wrenching details about men locked up in water dungeons, tortured on the dreaded ‘tiger bench’ and in their short, clipped conversations about home and family. Kuttappan describes the grey, lifeless compound as one that smells of sweat, metal, dust, and “something acidic — broken hope”. An image that is sure to haunt us long after we turn the pages.
The River of Grey Flowers
Rejimon Kuttappan
Speaking Tiger
₹499
Published – September 18, 2026 05:45 pm IST
