In this ambitious novel of spiritual faith and the lures of the temporal world, the protagonist, Karsan Dargawalla, is the inheritor of a centuries-old dargah in the village of Haripir near Ahmedabad.

Karsan is the one ordained by his father to succeed him to the Sufi priesthood of Pirbag, above his more aggressive younger brother, Mansoor. The narrative moves in three time frames, from the 13th century figure of Nur Fazal (a legendary Sufi saint ancestor) to Karsan’s boyhood and the present post-Godhra scenario and the sectarian killing fields of Modi’s Gujarat.

Karsan is a reluctant heir, torn between hero-worship of his father and his intrinsic need to explore the ‘real’ outer world of knowledge, material comforts and his own natural concupiscence.

A compulsive reader with an insatiable curiosity of the world beyond Pirbag, Karsan lands a fortuitous free scholarship to Harvard University, where he partakes voraciously of all the fruits of freedom and modernity. He discovers an undying ardour for the poetry of Keats and John Donne and is well on his way to the groves of academe.

But he is no young, anti-establishment rebel. Buried in his books, he steers clear of the violent anti-Vietnam war student demonstrations, along with the company of his more straitlaced, ‘square’ friends who are destined to be senators or distinguished professors.

But the distance between his hallowed seat in Pirbag and the new world of academic excellence widens inexorably till his father’s exhortations by post dwindle to silence. Karsan moves to Canada, marries and settles down to an academic life but suffers an enormous tragedy that leaves him questioning again the notion of his own existence.

More than thirty years after his initial departure, Karsan is recalled to Pirbag in the wake of the Gujarat riots and the destruction of the holy shrine he is meant to inherit. Will Karsan now take on the mantle left by his father? Or will his rational scepticism take him on another divergent path?

Skillful narration
M G Vassanji, a Canadian of Gujarati origin, is a skillful story-teller. What he lacks in cutting-edge immediacy, he compensates with broad, pellucid strokes taking in over five decades and the historical ancestry of Pirbag.
Neither Hindu nor Muslim, like his father before him, Karsan must tread the middle ground. Unlike his brother Mansoor who wholeheartedly embraces Islam and turns to its darker side when he finds that there is no elevated neutral ground in times of extreme sectarian conflict— Karsan as the educated ‘Westerner’, but with an inherent sense of compassion towards the loyal disciples of his revered father, must come to terms with his own unique destiny.

Apart from Karsan’s immediate family, there are a few other interesting characters, notably the truck driver Raja Singh who brings the young Karsan news of outside world through newspapers and magazines picked up on his journeys through India.

A seasoned hand with his fifth novel, Vassanji doesn’t feel the need to impress readers with verbal brouhaha or a tersely drawn narrative. While Modi’s Gujarat is indeed fertile hunting ground for a novelist with such skills, Vassanji plays well within himself to weave a satisfying, though not electrifying, work of fiction.
An undercurrent of passion and honest emotion pulls the narrative through over some implausible moments such as Karsan’s all too easy entry into Harvard or some of the convenient coincidences that crop up now and then.