I have never been anywhere so DIFFERENT from my own life as Delhi. I find it hard to articulate how out of place and foreign I felt when I visited in November 2019. With some distance, I now feel very nostalgic for that visit and want to someday dive back into the delightful, terrible, awesome bedlam of Delhi. In this 2019 book, M.G. Vassanji perfectly describes how the “crowded, jostling, cluttered and infinitely noisy” Delhi overwhelms with its millennia of history, labyrinthine neighbourhoods and masses of people. Vassanji shows us the city through the eyes of a Muslim Indo-Canadian writer, who desires to belong but can never shake off his foreignness.

I was very interested in Vassanji’s exploration of the Hindu/Muslim schism that I had no idea was still so prevalent in India until I visited. In my experience, it varies by intensity, from a benign observation of difference to a justification for violence and oppression, depending on where you are and what is happening. Just in the month I was there, our trip was re-routed at one point to avoid Muslim riots, and the Hindu government shut down the internet for several days during our trip to try to dispel unrest after an Indian court awarded ownership of a site sacred to both Hindus and Muslims to the Hindu community, after years of legal challenges - both of these events was shrugged off my our guides as normal.

I am not sure India can ever be (or ever wants to be) a completely secular society where these cultural and religious identifiers don’t matter, and this is the central conflict of the book, both in terms of the plot, the internal struggles the protagonist Munir has to understand who he is and where he belongs, and between Munir and his lover, Mohini. Beautifully written, heartbreaking and though-provoking. I loved this book.