MG Vassanji talks about his discovery of India, his ancestral homeland

If MG Vassanji has to search for his past, his own provenance, he would need to sit beside an unrolled map and then trace backward - from Canada where he lives to Tanzania where he was brought up, hop the border to Kenya where he was born and then all the way to the shores of India from where his great-grandfather, a Gujarati, left for East Africa over a hundred years ago.

But making arrows in an atlas is too easy, insufficient. Sometimes you need to take the next flight out of your present and land in Delhi airport at 3 am. Vassanji, known for his novels and short stories such as The Gunny Sack, The Uhuru Street, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and The Assassin’s Song, did that in 1993 — “to get to know the India part of me”. Sixteen years and 10 notebooks of journal entries later, he has brought out his first non-fiction book A Place Within (Viking, Rs 599).

Sitting in a blackish-blue cane chair, away from the spring sunshine, at the India International Centre, the 59-year-old speaks softly: “This is a necessary book for me, to establish continuity with the country, to place myself historically.” He breaks into a wide smile, goes back to a day from his childhood in Dar-es-Salam, where he sang Gujarati songs, played dandiya ras and watched Mother India at Odeon cinema. “India was there and wasn’t there,” he says epigrammatically. And thus the journeys - through the ruins of Delhi, the bylanes of Gujarat, searching for Ghalib’s haveli and Irfan Pathan’s home, meeting Mulk Raj Anand “trapped in the past” and Bhishm Sahni “singing

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