Fiction: A Dalit fisherman from Tamil Nadu in search of a better life ends up as a ‘cyber slave’

When I finally woke, the sun was already halfway up the sky. Thin blades of light slipped through the cabin’s slatted window, slicing the darkness into trembling ribbons. My skin felt borrowed – tight, bruised, scorched along the seams.

Yesterday’s lashes still burned across my back like invisible wire. My shoulders ached. My wrists throbbed where the cable ties had bitten deep.

I lay still, staring at the corrugated tin ceiling. Each dent looked like a star in a sky that had stopped caring. Around me, the others moved with the soft logic of people who had learned to survive by being quiet.

Kumaresan bent over his boots, murmuring a broken Shiva hymn under his breath. Rajesh splashed his face at the basin, as if rinsing off yesterday’s weed and whatever nightmare it carried. Govind sat cross-legged on his bunk, humming that same tuneless half-lullaby, half-warning.

No one asked how I was. No one ever did.

Pain didn’t need translation here. It was communal.

I forced myself upright. My body screamed. I ignored it. If I let the bed hold me, I wouldn’t get up again. That certainty hung in the room like another prisoner.

The water from the corner spigot hit sharp and cold. I dabbed my ribs with the edge of my blood-stiff T-shirt, then pulled it back on. It was the only shirt I had.

By the time I stepped out, the breakfast line had already formed – a slow, shuffling procession towards the pantry, a rusting shipping container wedged between two prefab offices. Inside, steam clung to the ceiling like ghosts of meals that might have existed in better lives. The cook, pot-bellied, with a patchy beard and a stare that seemed permanently unplugged, dropped a scoop of watery dal onto rice and slid it towards me.

No greeting. No eye contact. Just transaction.

I ate mechanically – undercooked rice, vinegar-soaked cabbage. My jaw moved because it had to.

Then – clang. Two sharp strikes. Like gunshots in a chapel.

Work.

My legs protested. My back tightened. But I moved.

The fabrication shed swallowed us like a furnace.

Sparks erupted where welders carved fire into steel. The air smelled of molten metal, sweat, and something acidic – burnt hope.

Jyothika waited at the entrance, eyes thin and sharp behind her glasses. Clipboard in hand.

“John. Row six.” She didn’t look up.

Row six.

The others streamed past me, quiet as ghosts returning to their graves.

I walked slowly – past the Tamil boys, the Nepalese, the trembling Burmese kid – to the far end.

Row six: the Africans.

They worked with the controlled economy of men who had spent their words long ago. Nothing wasted. Nothing loose. Their eyes didn’t wander, but they saw everything.

A tall man looked up. Burn scars climbed his neck like vines.

His gaze held no challenge – just recognition, as if he’d seen me before in other lost men.

He nodded once. I nodded back.

At my desk, I switched on the desktop. The work began. Seconds crawled.

Blink.

First call.

Name: Mr Lee

Region: Singapore

Profile type: romance-loss/crypto recovery

The script loaded like a sentence being passed.

My finger hovered.

“Hi there…I was just thinking about you.”

Send. The lie licked awake.

Beside me, the tall man typed with clean, precise movements. His headset sat on him like a second skull.

“You been here long?” I whispered.

He finished a line. Hit enter. Only then did he turn. His eyes were deep and patient, like they had learned to expect nothing, and so nothing surprised them.

“Long enough,” he said. Somalia in the way he shaped his vowels.

I nodded. Could mean weeks. Could mean years. Could mean forever.

“I’m John.”

“Guta. Guta Sharmarke.”

A pause. “My name back home means ‘brave and doubly blessed’. Funny, right?”

“Names like that don’t exist here,” I said.

He grunted – half laugh, half memory. “Nothing exists here. Except warnings.”

He didn’t need to look at the red slip taped above my screen. Mine was fresh. His was fading.

My eyes drifted to his neck. The burns rippled like melted plastic.

“Electric coil. Two floors down. The room with the drain,” he said.

“I know it,” I whispered.

Recognition passed between us – clean, direct. No pity.