It is easy to read about another person’s tragedy from a comfortable distance. Manikarnika Dutta, Oxford historian, specialist in imperial and post-colonial history, now finds herself at the mercy of bureaucratic arithmetic. The Home Office, wielding its cold calculus, has decided that 691 days abroad in a decade is too many. No matter that those days were spent in archives essential to her research. No matter that Britain’s claim to be a global intellectual hub relies on scholars like her. No matter that her husband—granted residency under the “global talent” scheme—was deemed worthy of staying while she, an equally brilliant mind, was not. The decision landed in her inbox like a hammer blow:
You must now leave the United Kingdom.
For Dutta, the battle is just beginning. Lawyers will argue. Petitions will circulate. The three-month limbo begins, a stretch of time in which she waits to see if the country she has called home for 12 years will continue to treat her as a disposable inconvenience.
But what if this had happened 50 years earlier?
What if there were no lawyers, no petitions, no institutional backing? What if the recipient of that deportation order was a 20-year-old, alone in a foreign country, with no legal aid, no safety net—just a sinking realisation that the only home he had known since adolescence was being yanked away?
Morecambe, 1973.
A crummy, cheap accommodation on Chatsworth Road, the Barbary Coast of the North West. The plaster on the walls peeling like sunburnt skin, the mattress barely softer than the floor. I had just returned from a badminton tournament in Holland, my body aching but my spirit high. Then came the knock—loud, heavy, the kind of knock that isn’t asking permission to enter but announcing a verdict.
I opened the door to a police bailiff, stone-faced, carrying an envelope that looked like it weighed more than my entire future. Home Office. Urgent.
The words swam before my eyes.
You are in breach of your conditions of stay. You must leave the United Kingdom within 14 days.
Panic. Humiliation. A cold sweat of failure.
At 20, I had no lawyer. No powerful institution backing me. No Guardian journalist to document my plight. Just the burning shame of knowing I had switched from a psychiatric student nurse to a bank clerk, an administrative technicality now deemed worthy of expulsion.
I thought of my father, waiting in Malaysia with an I-told-you-so smirk. His voice echoed in my mind: You were only fit to climb coconut trees. I thought of the Kuala Lumpur Syrian Orthodox Church elders who had expected me to carve out a respectable future, their disappointment already hanging in the air like incense in a Sunday service.
And then the darker thoughts came. The creeping whisper: It would be easier to just disappear.
But despair has a nemesis—anger. And mine burned hotter than my fear.
And then there was my cousin, PC Cherian—the man who had sponsored me to come to England but seemed to resent every step I took forward. He had already tried to sabotage me once, sending an anonymous, poison-penned letter to my Bank Manager, Brian Heeler, at the Morecambe branch of the National Westminster Bank. The letter, written with the elegant strokes of a fountain pen, declared that I was not to be trusted with money.
A calculated betrayal. If Heeler had believed it, I would have been sacked, my meagre existence in England shattered.
But fate—or perhaps just Heeler’s good judgment—intervened. The letter’s venom was too obvious, its spite bleeding through every line. The handwriting was traced back to my own cousin, his jealousy exposed like a rotting underbelly. Heeler, with a quiet shake of his head, tore the letter in two and consigned it to the bin.
That was the backdrop to the deportation notice. No safety net. No allies I could count on. Just a country that had turned against me, an envious relative sharpening his knives, and the looming spectre of returning to Malaysia in disgrace.
But I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I threw on my running shoes and sprinted towards Morecambe seafront, the salty wind slapping my face, each step pounding into the pavement a refusal to accept my fate. I ran until my lungs burned, until the suicidal thoughts had no space to breathe. Then I hitch-hiked to Lancaster University, walked into the indoor recreation centre, and found an England badminton champion for a gruelling singles session. By the time we were done, my thoughts were clear.
This was not how my story would end.
I fought. Alone. Without resources. Without hope. And yet, today, I am still standing—a British Citizen, a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.
Manikarnika Dutta has the world behind her now—universities, lawyers, colleagues willing to fight. But the feeling in that moment, when the deportation order lands like a guillotine, is universal: the suffocating terror of having the ground pulled from beneath your feet. The cold calculation of a system that sees you as a statistic, not a person.
And yet, as history has proven time and again, the human spirit does not go quietly.
Had I given in, had I surrendered, my story would have been forgotten in the cracks of time. But here I am. And I hope Dutta will be, too.
Somewhere, Al Pacino and the late Gene Hackman in Scarecrow would be clapping.
