Which Route Back?

Rajiv Kothari, twentysomething hero of Sameer Parekh’s first novel, understands that. He has just lost his father, Vasant, a man who journeyed from Gujarat to America’s eastern shores to pursue his studies in electrical engineering and stayed on, earning a comfortable surburban existence for his wife and two sons. For him, a new immigrant, belonging in his adopted land too had little to do with patches of earth. It is toil, he would tell Rajiv, that kept him bonded: “Work. That is all that connects us to this place. Without work, I have zero claim on this house or this half acre… your skin will always argue with your passport.”

For Rajiv, born in America, if that connection appears less fragile, his sense of identity is even more hazy. Nudged by loss out of his certainties, he seeks to construct belongingness with stories. In an disconcerting, if often clumsy, mix of memory, improvisation and fact, he takes his narrative back to his grandparents. But loneliness is not just the migrant’s condition — they too have been displaced from secure ideas of home by time and circumstance.

Trouble is, Parekh tries to interweave too many stories and the tapestry keeps unraveling. There is first the mystery of his grandfather’s exact role during the freedom struggle; family legend credits him with blowing up bridges and adopting a new name to escape detection. There is the story of Rajiv’s parents, striving to update their status amidst newer waves of immigration. Most poignantly, there is Rajiv’s chance meeting with another Vasant at the airport, a young graduate just arrived to be enrolled in his father’s old college.

Parekh, a Boston-based doctor, does in the end spring some surprises. But through it all he suggests that belonging lies in the process of making and maintaining connections — with the new country and the old — that it cannot be a static end product. Ignore the rough edges, the odd threads that don’t tie up and few phrases that jar, and this is an impressive debut.