The Toronto circle Jamie James. The Atlantic Monthly. Boston: Apr 2000.Vol. 285, Iss. 4; pg. 126, 5 pgs In accomplished stories and novels South Asian writers who are exiles in Canada are re-creating the worlds they left behind SOME of the finest English-language fiction of our time is being written in Canada. Perhaps the most famous of that country's authors is Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient, who was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A writer whose work deserves to be as well known as Ondaatje's is Rohinton Mistry. One of the most important events in my life as a reader was my discovery of A Fine Balance (1995), Mistry's second novel, which is set in an unnamed city that appears to be Bombay, the author's native city, in 1975. This was the year that Mistry emigrated to Toronto-and the year that Indira Gandhi proclaimed a state of emergency, setting herself up as India's virtual dictator. The novel has four major characters: two tanners, uncle and nephew, untouchables who flee the caste violence in their village to make a better life for themselves as tailors; a proud middle-aged widow who defies her family in her determination to remain independent; and a dreamy young man from the mountains whose family sends him to study in the city. The four of them meet on page eight, and their lives intertwine with gathering dramatic intensity as the city descends into chaos in a narrative of superb Chekhovian irony spiced with earthy wit. Imagine-four fully formed characters! Most of the new American and British novels I see have only one character to whom things happen-a shadowy standin for the author. A Fine Balance has a complicated, engrossing plot, not for the sake of creating suspense per se (though I found myself putting off dinner or staying up too late in order to read just one more chapter) but because life is complicated, and to chronicle four lives satisfactorily requires narrative complexity. I believed in Mistry's world as I did in those created by Dickens and Trollope, and I cared about his characters as I did about Jean Valjean. It is a passionate story, expertly told-a nineteenth-century epic novel of conscience, written in a suburb of Toronto in the last decade of the twentieth century. Although the vessel is a literary atavism, purely European in form, the contents are authentically Indian. In that sense, too, the book is Dickensian: Bombay is endowed with all the racy vividness of Mr. Pickwick's London and populated by a large cast of unforgettable minor characters, grotesque and humorous. Rajaram, for example, who supports himself by collecting and selling barbershop sweepings, is a man of Micawberish optimism for whom the worst disasters in life are "only small obstacles." Like every book, A Fine Balance is flawed. In my view, Mistry does not fully justify the tragic fate that befalls one of the principal characters. His prose style is flexible and polished, but occasionally it strays into the overly ornate. Earthiness at times descends into adolescent scatology. Yet in the context of his overall achievement these are trifles, and may flow from one of Mistry's best qualities: his exuberance. The story of how Mistry became a writer is itself like something out of a Victorian novel. After graduating from Bombay University with a degree in math and economics, he emigrated to Toronto, where he found work as an accounting clerk. He took literature courses at night school, reading Dickens, Trollope, Chekhov, Joyce-names that would later be linked with his in reviews of his books. In 1982 his wife, a schoolteacher, drew his attention to a prestigious Canadian short-story contest called the Hart House Literary Contest. He devoted a couple of weekends to writing his first story, which won first prize. The next year he wrote another story for the same competition, and again he won the top honor. Classic in form and wry in tone, these stories tell of life in a Parsi apartment building in Bombay. Mistry's talent was waiting for him, educated, confident, and fully formed, when he conjured it up. It's as though someone spent years listening to Arthur Rubinstein records and then, without taking piano lessons, sat down and played like Rubinstein. More stories followed the prizewinners, and were collected in a 1987 book called Tales From Firozsha Baag (that's the name of the apartment building where the stories are set; in the United States the book is called Swimming Lessons and Other Stories From Firozsha Baag). Then Mistry wrote his first novel, Such a Long Journey, also set in an apartment building in Bombay-this time in 1971, when India intervened in Pakistan's civil war. (One teams a lot about recent Indian history, painlessly, by reading Mistry.) The novel revolves around the moral dilemma of a naive bank clerk who is drawn into political intrigue by an old friend who works for Indira Gandhi's secret police. Such a Long Journey doesn't seem like a first novel; the author isn't a character, as authors are in so many first novels, yet he is present on every page, Elegantly plotted, inhabited by a large cast of vivid characters, written in luxuriant prose, it reads like the work of a master at the top of his form rather than that of a young writer finding himself. The novel won prizes that brought with them bags of cash, and was made into a film, which had a great success in Canada and has just been released in the United States. Next Mistry wrote A Fine Balance, which accrued even more prizes-including the Giller, Canada's top book honor-and yet more bags of cash, a dozen foreign editions, and another film deal. M. G. VASSANJI also took up fiction as a second career, though his switch was perhaps more spectacular: before becoming a writer he was a successful nuclear physicist, with advanced degrees from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. And if Mistry, a Bombay-born Parsi, seems an exotic transplant to Toronto, Vassanji is even more cosmopolitan: a descendant of Indian immigrants in East Africa, he was born in Kenya and raised in Tanganika, a country that no longer exists (in 1964, when Vassanji was in his teens, it merged with Zanzibar to form Tanzania). After studying in the United States, Vassanji moved to Toronto. Vassanji's finest novel to date, The Book of Secrets (1994), was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Giller Prize. The story begins in East Africa at the time of World War 1, as German Tanganyika and British Kenya are about to go to war, and sweeps forward to the present day. It has a complex narrative structure in the manner of Conrad, including omniscient storytelling about the past, quotations from letters and journals, and the firstperson narration in the present of a Goan schoolteacher named Pius Fernandes. Fernandes comes into possession of the 1913 diary of a colonial administrator named Alfred Corbin and resolves to find out more about the man. He uncovers a coil of espionage, miscegenation, and adultery, of love and magic and war, set in jungle villages, in Dar es Salaam, and in London, as he traces the transition of Vassanji's homeland from colonialism to independence to socialism. The Book of Secrets is Vassanji's third novel. The first, The Gunny Sack (which I haven't been able to get my hands on), is a loosely autobiographical account of the novelist's immigratory past, his rootless roots. He once described the book in words that shed some light on his methods in The Book of Secrets: "I imagined a person with a gunny sack with lots of memories, half remembered. The young man picks out a memory from a gunny sack and it becomes part of a story. A way through which he gives order to his memories. What the narrator is doing is what the author is striving to do-to give shape to the past. He has his gunny sack. I have the book." Vassanji's second novel, No New Land (1991), about the problems facing an immigrant family in Toronto (again Indians from East Africa), has a sketchy feel to it. It's more a series of vignettes than a plotted story, with mild humor touching on a Muslim's first taste of pork and first sip of alcohol, and sentimental pathos about the protagonist's difficulties in finding work. Though competently done, it gives no hint of the masterpiece that was to follow. WHEN Vassanji and his wife arrived in Toronto, they found many South Asian writers at work in Canada but no literary journal to publish them, so they established the Toronto South Asian Review. One of their first discoveries occurred in 1992, when the manuscript of a story called "Pigs Can't Fly" arrived in the mail, covered by a hopeful letter from its author, a twenty-seven-year-old Sri Lankan immigrant named Shyam Selvadurai, then working as a clerk at a bookstore. This enchanting, luminously written story is a reminiscence by a narrator who when he was a little boy preferred playing dress-up with girls to cricket with boys. His favorite game was "bride-bride," in which he and the girls play-acted a wedding. The dressing of the bride would now begin, and then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki's cracked full-length mirror-by the sari being wrapped around my body, the veil being pinned to my head, the rouge put on my cheeks, lipstick on my lips, kohl around my eyes-I was able to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve. The story became the first chapter of an episodic novel called Funny Boy, which narrates the boy's coming of age and his parents' struggle to accept his homosexuality even as their country is falling into a nightmare of ethnic warfare between Tamil and Sinhalese. As in A Fine Balance and The Book of Secrets, history at once creates and mirrors the turmoil in the life of its characters. The novel ends on a note of terror, when the narrator's world literally goes up in flames, and his family leaves for Canada. Selvadurai movingly evokes his narrator's soul (of course it's his own), but in some ways his most remarkable accomplishment is his marvelous dynamic control (if I may put it in musical terms), from the pianissimo of the deft, telling detail to the thundering fortissimo of the finale. Selvadurai's second book, Cinnamon Gardens (1999), is an ambitiously conceived historical novel set in Ceylon in the late 1920s. It centers on two characters: Annalukshmi, who considers herself to be a "'new woman,' who was not ashamed or afraid to ask for her share of the world," and her uncle Balendran, a closeted homosexual. Once again, personal and public drama reflect each other. Ceylon was moving toward independence: the labor movement was progressing, and a British parliamentary commission was laying the foundations for what would eventually become modem Sri Lanka. Yet the mores of the time remained traditional, disapproving of women who demanded their share of the world and, needless to say, scandalized by homosexuality. Cinnamon Gardens (the title is the name of an affluent residential district of Colombo, the capital of Ceylon) is well researched and intelligent, and the fugal construction, revolving the action around two main characters with congruent conflicts, is an interesting idea made to work. However, the book is marred by flat prose and a too-dry tone of detachment, which appears to be an attempt to reproduce the ironic understatement of the English novelists writing at the time in which the book is set. Moreover, Selvadurai is curiously indecisive about whether his novel has a social conscience or not. On the one hand, there is the subplot of Balendran's older brother, Arul, who marries a woman of low caste and is renounced by his tyrannical father, the personification of the injustice of a regime on the verge of becoming ancien. When Arul is dying, Balendran goes to him and undertakes responsibility for his nephew's education, defying his father's wrath. On the other hand, the novel glamorizes the luxurious lifestyle of Cinnamon Gardens, indulging in a genteel, Merchant-Ivoryesque eroticism of the well-set dinner table, and in nostalgia for cozy parlors and long chauffeured cars. Balendran's and Annaluksluni's rebellions both end on a muted note: he and his male lover decide to be just friends, she gives up her unsuitable suitor so as not to roil the family. Cinnamon Gardens is a considerable accomplishment. It demonstrates that Selvadurai has the ability to create a naturalistically detailed fictional world. However, readers of Funny Boy will come away with the feeling that the author has deliberately withheld himself from his second book; and knowing what an interesting self that is, readers will miss it. THERE'S no question that these writers form a school, perhaps a major one, but who claims them? When Bruce Meyer, a professor at the University of Toronto, wanted to include Such a Long Journey on the syllabus for his course in Canadian literature, members of the faculty objected, claiming that it wasn't really a Canadian book. Yet some Canadian academics have told me that they don't consider Rohinton Mistry to be a South Asian writer. If Mistry isn't Canadian or Indian, what is he? The case of Vassanji is even more complicated: Could anyone call him an Indian-African-Canadian novelist and keep a straight face? Vassanji is sometimes called a Tanzanian writer, but that doesn't seem right either; he was fourteen years old when the country was created, and the socialist nation that Tanzania would become was a very different place from the Commonwealth nation of Tanganyika, whose President, Julius Nyerere, translated Shakespeare into Swahili. Selvadurai calls himself a Sri Lankan writer, saying that Cinnamon Gardens was written with a Sri Lankan readership in mind; but aside from some epigraphs from the classical Tamil poem the Thirukkural, the literary references and world view of the book are thoroughly Western, with echoes of Jane Austen, Leonard Woolf, and even Louisa May Alcott. But the President of Sri Lanka read Funny Boy, and the book provoked a national debate about homosexuality and led to proposals to repeal the antisodomy law there. The concerns of these writers are entirely those of their native countries and their countrymen. Forty years ago, when Rohinton Mistry was a child, the chief subject of literature in the developing world was the evil of colonialism. Then, in 1961, V. S. Naipaul published A House for Mr. Biswas, an epic comedy about the Indian community in Trinidad. At that time Trinidad was still a British colony, yet none of the principal characters in the book (which Naipaul wrote in London) is British; the author found his material in his own people. Naipaul's vision was radically new, and his example seems to have inspired the Torontonians (though Vassanji, for one, says that he has avoided reading Naipaul, lest he be influenced). When I began reading these novels, starting with A Fine Balance, I was baffled: How was it that this vivid evocation of Bombay had been written in Toronto, of all places? It would be hard to think of two cities more antipodal: hot, smelly, boisterous Bombay, one of the oldest cities on earth; cold, pleasant, orderly Toronto, where almost everything is shiny and new. Many of the people I met on a recent visit to Toronto made a great fuss about how Canada's multiculturalism differs from the multiculturalism of the United States, invoking metaphors such as the mosaic and the salad bowl as opposed to the melting pot. As Bruce Meyer put it to me, "When you come to Canada, you don't have to leave the other country behind." The weakest work by M. G. Vassanji that I have read is No New Land, in which he describes how immigrants from Dar es Salaam have re-created their African life in Toronto and attempts to discern exactly what has been lost. Their Dar, however close they tried to make it to the original, was not quite the same. Rushing to mosque after work in your Chevy, through ice and slush, for a ceremony organized in a school gym, dumping your coats on a four-foot mound of other coats and throwing your shoes and boots among the several hundred other pairs-and then afterwards scrambling to retrieve them-was not the same as strolling to your own domed, clock-towered mosque fresh after a bath. Rohinton Mistry's weakest work is the short story "Swimming Lessons." Most of the other stories in his collection are about the lives of the Parsi residents of Firozsha Baag; a few contain anecdotes about former residents who have emigrated to Canada; but "Swimming Lessons" is set entirely in Toronto. The nuanced pathos that animates Mistry's fictional vision of India is altogether lacking in this clumsy, insubstantial effort at autobiography. Perhaps the reason that Vassanji's and Mistry's attempts to write about the immigrant experience fall flat is that they themselves aren't immigrants in the usual sense but rather exiles. (The case of Selvadurai is more clear-cut, because the decision to move to Canada was made for him by his parents, when he was nineteen, against a background of war.) Toronto is home to these writers, in that it is where they live, but it can never become their homeland. Immigrants come to a place precisely in order to leave the old country behind, to make a new home; exiles cannot do that. The prototypical artist in exile is, of course, James Joyce. He left Dublin when he was twenty-two, and spent the rest of his life writing about the city, in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. As the years passed, the Dublin of Joyce's fiction became ever more remote from contemporary reality-yet it was never anything less than authentic Dublin. Even in Finnegans Wake, which lacks the vaguest semblance of reality, the city that had been lost to Joyce for decades is still present, as a sort of distilled cultural essence coursing through the riotous prose. Whatever brought Mistry, Vassanji, and Selvadurai to Toronto,they have stayed there to distill the essence of Bombay, Commonwealth East Africa, and Sri Lanka. Like Joyce, they inhabit in their imaginations places that have ceased to exist, as time has cruelly transformed home into a strange land. The act of strolling to a sunny mosque fresh from a bath gains in power and significance precisely because it is recalled in the slush of a Canadian winter, and because the remembered mosque may not still be standing. For these writers, the only way to hold onto home has been to leave it behind.