Australia

Australia is presented less as a landscape than as the country Lin escapes and cannot bring himself to return to. It is his home, the setting of his imprisonment, and the source of the fugitive identity that follows him to Bombay. His memories of it connect friendship and intellectual inheritance with confinement, distrust, and a deliberate refusal to seek legal protection there.

Identity and Background

Lin’s connection to Australia includes both a personal home and a criminal past. Before arriving in India, he had served a prison sentence for armed robberies and escaped from an Australian prison while facing a twenty-year term. His escape made him Australia’s most wanted man and placed him on Interpol’s fugitive list. The country therefore remains present in Bombay not through travel description but through the legal danger attached to his name and the life he has left behind.

The account also establishes an earlier social world in Melbourne. Lin grew up among Jewish friends in a city with a large Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors and their children. His mother was prominent in Fabian socialist circles, drawing left-leaning intellectuals from Greek, Chinese, German, and Jewish communities into the family’s orbit. Some of Lin’s friends attended Mt. Scopus College; he read, watched films, listened to music, and took part in causes alongside them. These friendships were not incidental to his Australian past: some of the few people who stayed beside him after his life collapsed in shame and anguish were Jewish, and one Jewish friend helped him escape from Australia.

Imprisonment and Escape

Australia is also the location of the violence that shapes Lin’s understanding of captivity and freedom. In the opening account of his life, he describes being chained to a wall and tortured, and identifies the choice between hatred and forgiveness as a freedom that remained available even in helplessness. He later recalls prison guards chaining and beating him, an experience he associates with the institution that is supposed to enforce justice. His escape over the prison’s front wall, between two gun towers, converts that imprisonment into a decisive break: once outside, he is no longer simply a prisoner but a wanted fugitive moving across the world.

The escape was preceded by thirteen days and nights in hiding with an outlaw motorcycle gang. The gang sheltered Lin and a friend, supplying them with guns, drugs, and money while police searched the city. On the thirteenth night, Lin risked returning across the city to visit a former philosophy lecturer at a university in his hometown. The teacher, a Jewish intellectual Lin had respected, urged him to give up his guns, abandon armed robbery, separate from his companion, travel, and ask others for help. Lin followed the central practical advice: he returned to the gang, gave his guns to his friend, and left alone. His companion was captured six months later after a gun battle with police; Lin remained free, though he describes that freedom as compromised by being wanted and having nowhere to go.

The Refusal to Return

Although Lin later explains his escape to Khaderbhai, he rejects the possibility of going back to Australia to report the prison guards who tortured him. His refusal rests on a principle against informing on anyone, even torturers. He also doubts that testimony would make him safe or stop the abuse. In his view, the legal system would protect the guards despite evidence, while his return would put him back in prison and again under their power. The prospect of being imprisoned once more is not an abstract legal risk but the continuation of the danger he escaped.

This position gives Australia a double meaning in Lin’s story. It is the country where he had friends who helped him, including the person who assisted his escape, but also the country whose prison system he believes would fail to hold its guards accountable. His distrust is voiced as his judgment of the justice system, not as an independent account of its operation. The contrast matters: loyalty to friends and refusal to inform coexist with his conviction that formal institutions will not protect him.

Narrative Significance

Australia functions as the story’s absent point of origin. Lin’s account begins with the consequences of leaving it: an escaped sentence, a fugitive identity, and a life redirected toward India and Bombay. The country is recalled in fragments that explain how he came to travel, why he distrusts imprisonment, and why return does not appear to him as a viable restoration of his former life.

The past also persists through relationships rather than geography alone. Lin’s Australian friendships complicate any simple opposition between a hostile home and a welcoming elsewhere: people from his earlier life showed loyalty when he was in trouble, even as the prison and legal system remain sources of fear. His teacher’s advice helps turn flight into a new course of action, while the friend who helped him escape gives that departure a human bond to the country he leaves. Australia thus remains both the place he escaped and the network of people whose help made escape possible.