"The Man Without Shelter" by Indrajit Garai

The Man Without Shelter follows the exploits of Arnault, a Frenchman released from wrongful imprisonment after 23 years’ incarceration. Early on, the story focuses on Arnault and his troubles, but as the narrative progresses the point of view shifts over to Lucy, an idealistic attorney who gets involved in Arnault’s legal dealings. She’s a character who wants to do the right and ethical thing, but really learns her high idealism from Arnault’s example.

At story’s outset, Arnault is released from the penitentiary and thrust out onto the Paris streets just before midnight. He’s paid in Euros for his labor while in prison (the only French currency he’s familiar with is Francs), but has nowhere to go, and no valid state ID. He needs both of these things before he can secure employment in a city full to overflowing with refugees who also need work. He could seek a homeless shelter for his permanent address, but with so many homeless people living in Paris, these shelters have waiting lists a mile long.

In this way, author Indrajit Garai steeps his readers in the present-day pitfalls and hardships faced by the homeless refugees crowding Paris. They’re preyed upon by immigrant gangs who deal in drugs, violence, and human traffic; the state has attempted to fashion a bureaucracy to deal with the problems in a humane way, but its shortcomings become the niche that private foundations try to fill.

Garai clearly wants us to witness these social ills in detail. His story is a simple framework to illuminate them. Lucy, the young idealistic lawyer, works at clearing Arnault’s name from prior suspicion; meanwhile Arnault is spectacularly rising above his difficulties in a daring and much-filmed rescue of a child hanging from a balcony four stories above a Paris street. Arnault and Lucy don’t communicate through the months during which he trains and becomes a firefighter and rescue worker while she works doggedly on his behalf in court.

Large sections of The Man Without Shelter read like a social history and critique of conditions facing the homeless and refugees now huddled in Europe. One gets the feeling Garai has encountered the ill effects of these conditions by close, personal observation. Garai, an American citizen born in India, and now living in Paris, wrote the novella in English (there’s no translator’s credit), and his style contains some odd, gentle missteps one might expect from a Francophone writing in English. Many of the nouns are plural, for instance, even when it isn’t needed.

That is a quibble, however. This book is a spare, straightforward narrative using some fairly plain plot devices to frame its larger theme. The distress of these people, beset on all sides by ill fortune, official indifference, and criminal manipulation, must be seen and addressed. This story is a framework for doing it. One admires Garai for his impulse, but this book lacks the soul or the gritty mise en scène of Garai’s touching prior novel, 2019’s The Bridge of Little Jeremy.