Excerpted with permission from River of Grey Flowers by Rejimon Kuttappan, published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2026.Rajesh’s seat stayed empty, a small void that felt louder than the humming machines. As I switched on my computer, Jyothika walked up to me, her face drained of colour.‘Where is Rajesh?’ she asked.‘He wasn’t in the cabin yesterday,’ I said. ‘He left late in the evening. Why? What happened?’She hesitated, glancing around, then leaned in. ‘Rajesh was found dead,’ she whispered. ‘He jumped from the building near the fence…they say he was trying to escape.’River of Grey Flowers, Rejimon Kuttappan, Speaking Tiger Books, 2026.My mouth went dry.‘There’s more,’ she said, her voice barely holding. ‘They found a note in his pocket. It’s addressed to you, John.’‘To me?’She nodded slowly. ‘It says…“There is no escape from this hell.”’Before Jyothika slipped away from my desk, a flicker caught my eye: Hong, striding into the workstation like a storm cloud. Straight for me. I knew it in my gut—they were closing in.Hong loomed closer, his voice a low rasp: ‘Follow me.’We walked out—past the humming servers, past the ghosts of late-night coders still clinging to the air. On the way to Red Cell, Hong stopped abruptly in a corridor that smelled of stale coffee and ozone. Without a word, he thrust open a cabin door. The hinges complained, creaking like old bones.Inside, under the weak glow of a single bulb, it sat: the Tiger Bench.I had never seen one before—not even dared to whisper its name during those long nights when paranoia gnawed at the edges of my mind. It was a brutal thing—iron and wood, built with a purpose that didn’t need explanation. Its slats and metal braces seemed to hold stories no one survived long enough to tell.Hong lifted a small radio set from his belt. ‘Unit Three. Cabin Twelve,’ he said. ‘Now.’Moments later, two men appeared—broad-shouldered, expressionless. Hong pointed at the Tiger Bench. ‘Tie him.’My breath caught. ‘Hong…wait—’But the sentence died in my throat as the aides closed in. One grabbed my arms, pinning them behind my back. The other forced me down onto the bench’s narrow plank. Cold iron cuffs snapped shut around my wrists and ankles, locking me into a position that felt natural for a second, just a man sitting, before it shifted into something far more sinister.‘Raise it,’ Hong ordered. The aides slid rough bricks under my feet, lifting my legs at an unnatural angle. Then another set of bricks. And another. Each stack pushed my knees higher, tightening the tendons in my legs until they screamed. My spine arched involuntarily, trying to escape the strain.A sound burst out of me, raw and volcanic, something between a scream and a sob. It tore the air open.Hong crouched until his face hovered inches from mine. ‘So,’ he said softly, almost conversationally, ‘you want to escape.’ The word escape curled in the air like smoke. ‘Did you really believe we wouldn’t know?’Another brick. My tendons snapped tight like violin strings pulled past pitch.Then everything cracked open inside me. Images rushed in. Thenmozhi’s face first, her quiet smile dissolving into fear. My mother’s hands, always warm even when the world wasn’t. My father’s voice, stern but steady, telling me once that courage wasn’t noise, it was breath.The Tiger Bench didn’t just hurt now; it dissolved the edges of reality. My legs jerked once, twice, then went completely numb. I tried to lift my head. It felt like trying to push a stone uphill with my teeth.‘He’s done,’ one of the aides said.Hong didn’t argue. He just looked annoyed that the instrument had stopped playing before the interrogation ended. He leaned in once more, studying me the way a tailor examines a ruined seam. ‘He’ll wake,’ Hong said. ‘We’ll continue later.’My neck gave way. My head rolled sideways, pressing against the cold iron brace. The wood under me seemed to pulse, alive with someone else’s heartbeat. My eyes fluttered once, twice. Everything dimmed.River of Grey Flowers is a work of faction—fiction built on true-life stories. Every major arc in this novel is drawn from real events that the author, Rejimon Kuttappan, documented firsthand as a journalist and from the lives of people he helped rescue from scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.Since 2022, Kuttappan has been directly involved in rescue operations, working with families, embassies, and advocacy networks to free young men and women trapped in cyber-fraud compounds across Southeast Asia. He has listened to their testimonies, tracked their ordeals, and witnessed the human cost of a trafficking industry that preys on economic desperation and the promise of overseas work. These testimonies—of torture on tiger benches, of bodies disappearing into border rivers, of families pawning everything to pay ‘freedom prices’—form the marrow of this novel.Set against the socio-political landscape of Tamil Nadu, the story follows John, a young man from Ramanathapuram who migrates to Dubai on the promise of a well-paying job, only to be lured to Thailand and trafficked across the border into Myanmar. Inside a fortified scam compound, he and his friends are forced to run online fraud operations under threat of electric batons, water dungeons, and the dreaded tiger bench—a medieval restraint device that has become the signature instrument of control in these camps. The novel traces their survival, their desperate attempts to escape through dense forests and across the Moei River, and the parallel fight by John’s wife Thenmozhi to rally government intervention from Chennai.Deeply rooted in Tamil culture and politics, the narrative weaves in the contested history of Katchatheevu, the Thoothukudi police firing, and the legacies of leaders like Karunanidhi and MGR—not as backdrop, but as the living forces that shape the characters’ sense of justice, identity, and belonging. The novel is at once a thriller, a love story, and a searing indictment of the global trafficking networks that operate in plain sight.Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist, author, and specialist in labour migration. His work focuses on forced labour, migrant rights, and cross-border exploitation across South and Southeast Asia and the Arab Gulf.