A Migrant’s Ordinarily Extraordinary Story: Christopher Raja’s Into The Suburbs
Christopher Raja’s memoir Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story is a story of isolation, not just from a place, but also from family, and in some ways, from the self.
Immigration is not new to the Raja family. “You have no idea about your real name, do you?” asks young Christopher’s aunt in the first chapter. His grandfather gave up half the syllables in his name for a promotion during the British Raj. Years later, Christopher’s father leads his family halfway across the world to Australia to “create the world he wanted to live in”.
And that’s how every immigrant story starts, with leaving what you have with the hope of something better. Christopher Raja’s story examines the distance between the two. There’s a chasm that opens up every step of the way, between a life of respectability and a life of anonymity, between a wife who wants to stay where they are and a husband who wants to leave, between father and son. Raja’s Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story is a tale of isolation, not just from a place, but also from family, and in some ways, from the self. It is fitting then, that this narrative takes place in the emptiness of the Australian landscape, with its ‘crushing vastness’ and ‘oppressive stillness’, a country where the majority of the population comes from away, or as quoted by the author ‘where second hand Europeans pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores’.
For young Christopher, it becomes the ‘land of heroes and outlaws’ and he fashions himself into a mixture of the two at his new school: rebellious, reckless, trying too hard to look as if he weren’t trying. When he moves from public school to a private institution in Brighton where his father teaches, he adopts a new persona, becoming one of the bohemian crowd. He learns to admire writers whose work is “fed not by their lineage, but by their sense of alienation”. When at the sight of a barber’s, his girlfriend suggests he get a coif, he says he ‘obliged’.
If one of the most important qualities of a migrant is adaptability, our protagonist remains a migrant throughout his life, allowing himself to be made and unmade by his circumstances, including the school he goes to, the area he lives in, and the woman he is with. Even his assertion of independence is bound by the company he keeps.
This may not be too different from the life of any other teenager, but in Into the Suburbs it is even more pronounced, especially since the prose tends to focus on a single, linear narrative, without telling us enough about Christopher’s inner life or the impact of any of the incidents. It is as if things simply happen, that the protagonist is not in charge of his narrative here, even when he is involved in the action. Being a migrant shapes him forever.
The only place where he pushes back perhaps is with his disciplinarian father, David. Again, it is a narrative familiar to most immigrant children, this demand for excellence in the expectation that only absolute success can be a justification for their family’s move to a new country. But in light of David’s relationship with his own father, the expectation is like an inheritance. When David’s mother died during childbirth, his father was unforgiving in his grief and cared little for the newborn. If David’s father was neglectful, Christopher’s is stifling, consumed by the dream of his son’s success, and preoccupied with his failures. This preoccupation grows as the family moves from a flat in the city to a house in the Australian suburb of Keysborough, not quite Brighton, but still what he calls ‘a real Australian home, complete with a backyard in which to play cricket.’
If one of the most important qualities of a migrant is adaptability, our protagonist remains a migrant throughout his life, allowing himself to be made and unmade by his circumstances, including the school he goes to, the area he lives in, and the woman he is with. Even his assertion of independence is bound by the company he keeps.
But there is an empty sameness to Keysborough, the ‘expansive barrenness and unobtrusive beauty’ of the suburbs. The suburbs are the pinnacle of the great immigrant dream, built on the promise of mundane luxury and dull contentment, with streets upon streets of nearly identical houses and families. It is the sign of having trimmed down the rough edges just enough to fit into a new life in a new country, of being like everyone else. In Keysborough, where it seems like the Rajas have finally made it, they cannot keep still. David’s efforts are redirected towards his son and his house. For an irritated young Christopher, the constant housekeeping that became a way of ‘taming’ the ‘harsh dry continent’, ‘of denying nature and repressing reality’. It is the most pedantic form of migrant restlessness — the search for something better and the work it takes to get there. In more ways than one, this restlessness pushes the family apart. Being a migrant may be an experience of isolation, but it is one that can exist regardless of time or place.
Despite these complex themes, there are instances where I found the book wanting. The narration is excessively linear and the author focuses on directly explaining the plot’s significance to the reader rather than have it unfold through action, which results in jarring dialogue such as “The plane smells of humans being left behind and the anguish of leaving”. Sometimes information and characters are randomly introduced without having any further significance in the plot. In the middle of describing his university admissions, the author suddenly breaks into a description of global warming with, “Every year it seemed the Earth’s temperatures rose due to increasing emissions”, but doesn’t connect the emotion directly with the plot.
We see a lot through a young Christopher’s eyes but there is a lack of retrospection given that this is a memoir. This is the most evident when the author is describing the women he meets and dates, viewing them through the gaze of a teenage boy feels uncomfortable. There is no context in which introducing a character as “a beautiful girl with budding breasts” should be acceptable.
Into the Suburbs is not particularly different from any other story of Indian immigrants, or even any other Indian family. That’s what makes it worth a read. It is a reminder that ordinary lives are as worth examining as those we deem as something more special.
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Kanika Jain is a writer based in Mumbai. She is interested in media, culture, and gender. You can find her words in The Hindu, Huffington Post, and on Twitter @KanikaKJain.
