This first column is a celebrating the first birthday of the Desilit-Toronto Book Club, supported by MyBindi.com, the first and only book club in this most international of cities that focuses exclusively on South Asian fiction from across the Diaspora.

It seems apropos, then, that the first book we read this year would be Toronto-based writer, M.G. Vassanji's articulation of a most complex Diaspora: The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003). The story begins in the South Asian community in 1950's Kenya, to which Vikram belongs, and which is politically and socially sandwiched between intimidation by the British colonizers and fear of the Mau Mau guerillas. Among Vikram's and his sister, Deepa's, playmates are British brother and sister, Bill and Annie who, along with their parents, are slaughtered by Mau Mau guerillas, something from which Vikram never recovers. His and Deepa's closest friend, however, is Njoroge, a Kenyan boy, whose grandfather and the only guardian he knows dies in custody after the British police do dragnet sweep of African communities in the wake of that slaughter. Njoroge and Deepa grow up into a passionate love affair that is sabotaged by Deepa's parents and that ends in tragedy many years later. The bulk of the story follows Vikram through the sixties to the eighties, from Kenya after the end of colonial rule, to university in Tanzania back to a changing Kenya and eventually to a small town in southern Ontario. He lets opportunities for love slip through his fingers and survives an insipid marriage in which he sires two children. He is sucked from a successful civil service career into the corruption of a post-colonial Kenya, where he becomes involved, with others, in scams that skim millions of dollars of aid money from public coffers, earning him the notoriety of one of the most hated men of his time and place. He escapes to Canada, from where he tells his story with the distance and detachment of an elderly man who has made a prickly truce with his decisions and his destiny.

Our discussion of this book was opened by Daryl, one of our regular attendees, who spoke about not feeling much affinity for Vikram Lall because his voice was too dispassionate to be particularly engaging. There was agreement around the table that Vikram seemed disengaged from his own life, incapable of passion in his relationships with women, lead by the nose in his career and morally suspect in his cavalier attitude toward the back-alley dealings that had him scamming a post-colonial Kenyan economy for $300 million dollars to line his own pockets, his attempts to make retribution at the end notwithstanding. Abishek, however, pointed out that despite this unsympathetic narrator, the book is a fabulous education on a time and a place that includes a dimension of the South Asian Diaspora otherwise unavailable to many of us. Again there was agreement around the table and a recognition that, despite his antipathetic nature, Vikram Lall portrays the people in his life, from his sister, Deepa, with whom he has his closest relationship, to the Masai woman turned Punjabi Hindu wife of his grandfather's best friend, with respect for their complexity that makes us trust what he tells us even if we do not fully trust him The discussion ended by being positive about the book in that there was some consensus that perhaps a dispassionate narrator provided an objectivity, and that the eye of a more passionate and engaging narrator would be suspect for its subjectivity. We ended, as we always do, by relating what we learned from the discussion to ourselves as South Asians.

At our next meeting, on July 9, we will be discussing Shauna Singh Baldwin's English Lessons and Other