‘If I was a believer, I’d talk like him’: Why MG Vassanji wrote a novel about physicist Abdus Salam

Pirmai is the newest city between India and Pakistan. But you won’t find it on a map. Like Khushwant Singh’s Mano Majra from The Train to Pakistan – torn apart by the violence during 1947, it exists as a figment of MG Vassanji’s imagination.

Unlike Manto and Singh – who loved, lost and lived through Partition – Moyez G Vassanji grew up a continent away. Born in 1950 in Nairobi, he inherited the stories of India, the songs of Kabir and Mirabai, and the Gujarati language, but never the loss of this separation. Yet, his latest book Everything There Is, therefore, is remarkable as it is a deeply felt Partition book.

The book is inspired by the life of Abdus Salam – the Pakistani physicist who became the first Muslim to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979. Nurul Islam, the protagonist – like Salam, is a physicist and professor at Imperial College London. The book begins when Islam goes to Harvard to lecture and falls in love with a young student, Hilary Chase.

Their romance sets off a series of events that shake Islam’s life. Vassanji uses this relationship as a prism to reflect on Islam’s life, his beliefs, his work, his faith in God, his values and his family. Islam is a devout Muslim. He is also very much a man of science. Vassanji is also very much an inhabitant of the world of science like Islam – a physicist turned writer. He easily navigates the world of empirical laws of science and more complex laws of religion to create a believable portrait of a man who could balance these extremes gracefully. In many ways, Everything There Is is a book of love, life and betrayal.

But at the heart of the book is Partition, and Islam’s relationship with his home that he left before the horrors of 1947. Vassanji evocatively writes about undivided Punjab – with the longing of a Punjabi –the scar across the heart and missed possibilities.

A two-time winner of Canada’s Giller Prize for fiction, this is his tenth novel. At 70, Vassanji belongs to a different generation of writers; he is not on social media and the frantic world of marketing books is alien to him. Everything There Is has been written by a writer, who like his main character Islam, is ageing in a rapidly changing world. Yet, like Islam, he still has a lot to share. Haunting, tender, this is a powerful novel about what and who we leave behind.

Everything There Is is about the fictional life of Abdus Salam. It is about love, betrayal and faith. But in many ways, it is a Partition novel. It is not something you experienced. How did you then discover it?
Most people don’t see that but for me, it is just the accident of Partition for many people. My generation didn’t even know about it. It was all India, and then Gujarat. Then to come here to see the hatred and the division. It’s like someone’s asking you to put a line across your heart, a scar. That, for me, was a very painful experience.

My wife’s family is from Punjab. Her father is from Amritsar. He had gone to Africa already, but the rest of the family had to escape overnight. But she wasn’t quite that aware of it either. It was only when we started talking that I asked her, “Do you realise you are a child of the partition?” Now of course she realises it. The whole family was split – some went to England, some went to Africa, some went to Muscat, and some went to Lahore. It must have happened on both sides to many people. I have often wondered if this Punjabi craze for emigration is not somehow related to the Partition, of never having a home.

Leaving home is a theme that you explore constantly. In an interview after The Gunny Sack your first novel, you say that when you left Tanzania you never thought it was forever. In the novel too, Nurul too, when he leaves, he doesn’t realise he can never go back. There is this aspect of leaving and not knowing it is forever. Do you think in a way your experience mirrors his? How would you view that?
No, he always had a place to go back to and to his father and his family. When I left, I thought I would always go back. Then because of Idi Amin, the pressure and panic among Asians, people started leaving. My friends left. My family first went to Kenya and then went all over. A year after I left, I realised that I didn’t have a home. That was very hard to get over. My classmates left after me knowing they would not go back.

When you talk about home, where is home actually now?
Home is many places. It’s East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. It’s Toronto, the city. In a very distant way, also India. Even now when I say home, I mean East Africa. There are people of my generation who still feel the same way. I have a friend who’s been away for 50 years now. He has just retired. But he said, “When I say home, I say Dar es Salaam.” Even though he’s been back in all those years maybe twice.

You’ve created this love story very Punjabi on both sides for Nurul – a sort of Heer Ranjha where he is in love with Sharmila, the daughter of his teacher. It is an impossible love in many ways. His world has been informed by his childhood memories of an undivided India. Can you talk about why you felt it was important to create this love story? Also, how it informs his life.
It might have been just teenage fantasy, but the way he remembers it, the way he finds out what happened to her affected him profoundly. Maybe that mythologising was also kind of a way of mythologising the world he had left behind the town and the city, the place. The two just became one. But as his wife says in the end, he never got over it. His stance on nuclear weapons was partly informed by that.

He grew up in undivided India. It is interesting that the generation understood the state boundary, but did not necessarily accept the cultural boundary, cultural division. How did his worldview clearly shaped by his experience of undivided India – idealistic, maybe naïve – contrast with his friend Zaffar’s? [Who is willing to modify his anti-bomb stance once he hears India is also making one] How do you see that reflecting even in East Africa?
There were communal divisions in East Africa. But for us what community meant was not what it means here. It was just different sects, Hindu sects, Muslim sects. We didn’t know much about the others. I’m doing research on the lower castes in Dar es Salaam, for example, where were they cremated? Or was it in the same place? I don’t believe it could have been. There was some communal rivalry at cricket matches. But there was no hatred as visceral as it seemed when I first came to India. This was just the months after the Babri Masjid. I couldn’t believe this type of violence was possible, or even imaginable, in the place where Gandhi was born.

As a minority in a small country, we lived very sheltered lives. We did not experience the real evil that exists in the outside world. The evil that exists within families was not even possible. There must have been some. What happened with Alice Munro… There was no room for that.

I have read that when Abdus Salam got the best result in Punjab, all the shopkeepers were out celebrating –Hindu and Muslim. Then, when he came back all those years later, all the shop names had been Islamised.

There is this powerful scene when Nurul goes back home after Partition. The city has changed – different after those who have left. His mother refuses to talk about Partition. She looks away. There are expensive things in the house that were never there before but obviously belonged to a “set” – suggesting that they were taken from the house of someone who left. I was curious how you created this memory, of the city that was changing, and silence around Partition, even though you had never experienced it.
This is human nature. People work to their advantage and don’t want to think about the rest. Unless they are affluent or thinking people, then they would ask.

Ordinary people would just say “Okay, nobody's there to take it so I might as well.” No questions asked. It was a very revealing moment, even for me to write about it. The more innocent they are, the easier it is for them to forget what happened. Maybe that’s how they can go on.

In Partition as one psychologist said, everybody has a little bit of blood in their hands.
You look away or you don’t want to hear about it.

Or in taking that object, you’re also guilty of taking part in that moment of madness.
My father-in-law was born and raised in Amritsar. He never wanted to speak about it. He came to India many times but never went back to Amritsar. But he told us to go. He found a Sardarji visiting Vancouver and told him exactly where he lived. He was waiting for us.

Did you find the house?
Yes. I went again two or three years ago by myself. The neighbour was still there. The old house had been partly demolished. there was a prayer house hind. For my wife, it was a tremendously moving. We met the neighbour. His name was Chadha. He invited us to sit down. The house, he said, looked exactly like this one. It was a grand old house. He said, “My sister was a very good friend of your father’s sister. Do you want to speak to her?” My wife said, “Yes, I’ll speak to her.” But when she spoke, she was in tears. The other woman was in tears too – and this was a generational after the Partition. It was emotional for me too.

It is a loss that you can’t process. Ritu Menon writes about going to Lahore and being assaulted by memories that were not her memory but felt like hers.
The woman whom we spoke to was called Madhu. We went to see her at her house. We had chai. A few months later, we got a call from Los Angeles. Madhu’s daughter was calling us. My wife spoke to Madhu. My father-in-law’s younger brother was also in Vancouver. He put on his best clothes, flew to LA and met her.

You write about Hargobind Khurana’s village being close to Abdus Salam’s home. Salam was, of course, influenced by Ramanujan. But the idea of this Punjab, of science, and as you said in an interview, what this could have been.
For a scientist, there’s no boundary. The US government has now established laws for Chinese scientists. But we think in terms of the theories of science. In my own work, we would get preprints from Kyiv and Moscow, which we would use. It is just science. I’'s just physics. The best textbooks, which meant the most difficult, were from Russia. Now, of course, they have just ruined that whole camaraderie of physics.

This is particularly true of the subcontinent. You talk about Bhabha and Abdus Salaam and their having crossed paths?
I imagine so. I don’t know. While writing the novel, the facts could be manipulated. I felt that they might have, because physicists, especially then, travelled a lot. They were both at Cambridge, except Bhabha was a little earlier.

You talk about the racism that happens. Abdus is the first one. He was a genius, the only brown one in a completely white world. I wanted to draw a parallel with what you talk about in an interview, where you say that when you go back to Africa, you’re not African enough, you are sort of a misfit in many ways.
I never completely belong. I am never completely accepted.

Could you talk a bit about how that experience was also Salam’s experience?
When you’re that good and that respected, it doesn’t matter. It is never mentioned in Salam’s speeches or in his biography. I couldn’t imagine that he had not experienced any animosity or insult. His wife said that only once did he allude to it – If only I were one of them, he had said. A lot of the top physicists were of Jewish origin and a few were of Christian origin. There was an Indian. I forget his name. He was from Kerala. He felt slighted because he was passed over. He had a theory and then it was Feynman and Gall-Mann who got the credit. It’s impossible to believe some idiot may not have slighted you for the colour of your skin or your accent.

In Abdus Salam’s case, which I also used in this novel, there was a guy who was on a vendetta against him. You wonder, what’s his obsession? There was a handbook of particle physics where Abdus Salam’s name was just in a footnote but there was a big picture of Steven Weinberg, who was also associated with the same theory. It may not be racism, just personal animosity.

Also, the Islamic bomb.
He says, in my book, at least, “What is that? Does it say Allah o Akbar before it crashes?” It’s a stupid concept. But the concept was created partly in the West. There’s a book called The Islamic Bomb. What the hell is an Islamic bomb? But they wanted to create fear.

How did you narrow down writing on Salam? Why him?
I was always intrigued by him. I came from the same scientific culture – theoretical physics. At that time, there was this belief that if you understood the laws of physics, then you understood pretty much understood everything.

I remember reading, maybe it was Feynman’s lectures, where he says, nature in the form of man begins to understand itself. This is what physicists thought they were doing. Feynman and Abdus Salam were more or less at the same level. How can you then go down and pray? I just couldn’t get it. So, I created a person who did. I don’t know if I resolved that.

Salam was so highly accomplished that he could say, “God forgive me, I didn’t pray.” Whereas someone else would be in tears before Allah. According to one source, he loved sausage rolls. But he would say, “Don’t tell me what's in it.” The same could be said about his relationship with Scotch. I put that in my book. It didn’t matter whether it's true or not. He had a mystical relationship with God. You believe in him. You love him, and he should understand me in return. I’m not a believer. But if I was, that’s the way I would talk.

The book is also about ageing. This is a theme that Islam grapples with and takes comfort in knowing that the Prophet was 40 when God was revealed. Can you talk about the aspect of ageing for a scientist and also as a writer?
I don’t think there is any scientist who had his breakthrough after age 30 or 35. It is the depressing part for the physics community. In terms of writing, it bothers me. Not ageing per se, but whether you have anything more to say.

The new generation comes up. There is a new kind of criteria. It’s all identity. I don’t fit. For me, it is universal. I don’t believe in borders. We all come from a place, so we have origins. But that doesn’t make us different. We live in a culture which in my interpretation, builds walls and we start accusing each other and asking for reparations. That’s not what I am here for. As a writer, you often don’t belong.

But isn’t that what drives you to write – the fact that you don’t belong.
Of course. But the whole literary community is sort of dominated by the young. The publishers are always looking for new prize winners. You may have won two or three prizes for them. But you’re a dead horse. There’s no loyalty in this business. However, I’ve been lucky. So far, the publishers have stayed loyal.

Sakina talks about Munni, and she says there is virtue in being ordinary. Can you talk about that?
You’re free of the anxiety of ego. You don’t have to overachieve. I know for a fact that in the cultural field, egotism is a huge thing. It’s a cause of anxiety and depression. In the West, writers have committed suicide. It’s good to be normal. My wife says, “You’re driven from somewhere, and you’re there, and until the end of your days, you’ll be on that path.” I often wonder, How did I get into this?

How did you get into this then?
I always wrote. I went to MIT. The easy course was humanities. There was a guy who said, “Keep a journal.” So I kept a journal. In another course, I had to write a story. I had these stories, especially since I had left home. I had a lot of stories. Then when I went to Toronto, I realised I might not be able to go home again. I wanted to remember everything. So, I started writing, and I just never stopped.

Mandira Nayar has been a journalist for over 20 years. Till recently she was the Deputy Chief of Bureau at The Week magazine in Delhi. She writes on books, culture, history and politics. She is the co-founder and programme director of Agla Varka, a cultural platform to begin meaningful conversations on Punjab.

Corrections and clarifications: This article has been corrected to remove a mistaken earlier reference to Toba Tek Singh as a fictional town.