The Gunny Sack (1989)

First published by the African Writers Series, whose first series editor was Chinua Achebe. Achebe was brought to meet us at my school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, by our headmaster Peter Palangyo, who also became an AWS writer, with his novel Dying in the Sun. And so publication by AWS was particularly gratifying and seemed only fitting. AWS is now more or less defunct. The book, when brought out by Penguin India, received a rather generous response from Khushwant Singh. A misprint in that edition stated that I was born in 1905, which brought an enthusiastic note from a fan congratulating me on keeping at it at my octogenarian age. The Gunny Sack  was published by Doubleday Canada in 2005, and again by Penguin India in 2008, and can be obtained from them.

Uhuru Street (1990)

This is the name of the street in Dar es Salaam where I grew up; now it seems narrower and brims with people and traffic, SUVs jamming the sidewalks I used to play on. Two-storey building are being (hazardously I think) extended vertically up to six and eight storeys.

No New Land (1991)

Set in Toronto’s Don Mills, about an immigrant family from Dar es Salaam.  Even the elevator is against you.

The Book of Secrets (1994)

If The Gunny Sack  was a novelistic organization of memories, oral histories, and myths, The Book of Secrets  is the story of a written record (a diary or journal). To get an authentic sense of period for TGS I had to consult the journals and biographies of British colonial administrators and explorers, who were, for all their faults, wonderful recorders. TBOS is the story of the fate of one such journal written by a colonial administrator at the outset of the First World War as it arrived in East Africa.

Amriika (2000)

How far can political commitment and radical dissent go? How far west can you go? In Canada this novel, beginning in Boston-Cambridge in the Vietnam War era,  was seen as documenting the travails of an immigrant; in India it was seen as precursing 9/11. The reader can draw his or her own conclusion. “Amriika” is how Indians pronounce America.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004)

I was three and in Nairobi’s Desai Road when the Mau Mau Emergency began in Kenya. I always knew I would write about it, from the Indian perspective. After  Amriika, when my publisher asked me what I was doing next, I told her “I am going home.” This book is it. Books set in Kenya, especially those made into movies or TV serials for Masterpiece Theatre, glorifying the English aristocracy in Kenya, hardly mention the presence of Indians, who played an important role in the growth of Nairobi, the building of the railway, and the politics of the country. Their dilemma was that they were neither white nor black; and they were both Asian and African. This book is also my tribute to the Punjabi railway workers of Kenya. My own background, of course, is Gujarati.

When She Was Queen (stories, 2005)

These are set in Canada, East Africa, and India, at times in all three at once.

The Assassin’s Song (2007)

Set at a thirteenth-century shrine (dargah) of a mysterious sufi who had come as a refugee to the kingdom of Gujarat (India) from war-torn central Asia. The story is narrated by the heir to the shrine who grows up in a rapidly changing India post independence. The shrine is neither Hindu nor Muslim (such places exist), and the novel is in a sense about the burden of tradition. The song of the title refers to the centuries-old tradition of singing mystical devotional poetry at such shrines; and the story is told in the aftermath of the bloody communal violence of 2002, in which the shrine was destroyed. The inspiration for the book came from the shrines I visited, related to the Gujarati Khoja tradition and their songs, called "ginans."