Amriika

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

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)

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

The Assassin’s Song

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.

A Place Within: Rediscovering India

Part memoir and confession, part travelogue and history, this book is the result of my travels to India over the past 15 years, beginning 1993. What struck me during my first visit was the shock of the familiar. India is endless, and within India each town or city seemed endless. The places I visited over the years include Delhi, Gujarat, Shimla, Kerala, Orissa, Calcutta and Dharamsala, among others. In Gujarat I made several road trips through Kathiawar, my ancestral area. There was no Kunta Kinte moment, there was not supposed to be one. I did visit many Khoja villages and shops, Khojas being the community I come from, an extended family of sorts. India provokes response and this book is mine. My visits to temple, mosque, church, or synagogue, a beautiful monument or a willfully neglected ruin, an area devastated by mob violence or a friend's house or club, a venerated author or a humble mukhi, from the southernmost tip of Kanya Kumari to the misty heights of Shimla, from the viceroys' residence to a Kali temple were all driven by my attempts to understand myself culturally and historically.