But apart from the occasional reference to Bombay, that Indian past received little mention in his home or in the larger community. Born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, Vassanji knew his Khoja Muslim forebears had travelled from Gujarat, in India, to settle in East Africa a hundred years earlier. Vassanji himself did not give the subject much thought until he was far away from the community where he grew up. Throughout the novel, the teacher, Fernandes, repeatedly asks: “Does anybody care about history?”
In The Book of Secrets, which earned Vassanji the first of his two Giller prizes, a retired history teacher in Dar es Salaam pieces together the colonial past of an Asian village in Kenya. His book The Gunny Sack, which received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize, features a hero who uses family heirlooms to resurrect the little known history of Indians in East Africa. From his earliest novels, he has exhibited a preoccupation with the notion of historical preservation. Vassanji? Guided by nostalgia, instinct and an accumulation of residual proofs-documents, diaries, photos, furniture, shards of memory-he reconstructs a cultural history that is not merely past, but virtually extinct.
Is there any Canadian writer who contemplates the meaning of time with greater distinction and intellectual grace than M.G.
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