Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People looks into the devastation to lives caused in a town called Khaufpur due to a gas leak from an American owned chemical plant, called the Kampani by locals.

Pakistani Mohsin Hamid plays equally close to real events in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, written as a chilling monologue in a teashop in Lahore’s Anarkali. A former investment banker tells an American stranger — or so we think — how 9/11 took him away from the West. As night falls, it becomes increasingly unclear which of the two may know more about the other and whether it was in fact an innocent encounter. Or, was it the beginning of reconciliation or confrontation?

And, coincidentally, Kota-born, Cardiff-raised and London-based Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted has been published in India just this week. In an extremely uneven novel, Lalwani paints the darker side of the great immigrant dream. At the age of five, Rumi, short for Rumika Vasi, gives her parents — especially her father Mahesh, who teaches at university in Cardiff — obsessive purpose when her teacher hails her as a mathematics prodigy.

Just that classification sets up the very interior cultural conflict of this still newly immigrant family. Mahesh finds it patronising, seeing her possibilities as being more contingent upon nurture and application. Nonetheless, it puts him on course to gaining as swiftly and methodically as possible acclaim for her educational accomplishments. Rumi’s regimented life is a way to get her the benefits of modern education. It, however, also exiles her from the social and personal freedoms that come with modernity.

... contd.