‘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 Sadaat Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, where Bishen Singh refuses to return to, or 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...

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