A History of Burning

Spanning nearly a century and four generations, the novel traces an Indian family's repeated displacement from Gujarat to East Africa to Canada, charting the inheritances of colonialism, silence, and survival passed down through blood.

In 1898, Pirbhai, a thirteen-year-old boy from Porbandar, Gujarat, India, is lured by a merchant who promises work overseas. Unable to read, Pirbhai presses his thumbprint onto a contract and boards a dhow, a small wooden sailing vessel, with other desperate men and boys. The crossing of the kala pani, or black waters of the Indian Ocean, kills several passengers. Pirbhai arrives in Mombasa and is forced into indentured labor building the British railroad to Lake Victoria, losing his middle finger to a rock hammer. When a British colonel orders him and his tentmate Rakesh to burn down African huts to clear the railroad's path, Rakesh refuses and flees. Pirbhai, believing compliance is his only means of survival, sets the huts ablaze and recognizes in their interiors the details of his own home.

After his contract ends, Pirbhai finds work at a shop in Kisumu, Kenya, where he meets Sonal, the shopkeeper's eldest daughter. She teaches him to read by reading labels aloud. Her father arranges their marriage and sends them to Kampala, Uganda, to work in a cousin's pharmacy. They raise three children, including their only son, Vinod. When World War I brings a conscription order, Sonal secretly brews a medicine from poisonous herbs to weaken Pirbhai's legs, ensuring recruiters deem him unfit, an act she understands as fierce, necessary protection.

Vinod grows up playing cricket with African boys, but his parents forbid it after Pirbhai secures a government job, insisting the family present itself as having risen in colonial society. Pirbhai teaches Vinod that hard work and visibility to those in power is the path to freedom. When his uncle encourages him to study abroad but his parents cannot afford it, Vinod vows never to take his family for granted and commits to building their life where they are. Pirbhai secures him a job at a trading company.

Through his sisters in India, Pirbhai arranges Vinod's marriage. In 1947, as sectarian violence escalates during the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan, Rajni, a nineteen-year-old Hindu woman in Karachi, is sent to Uganda for safety. She travels alone by steamer, and upon arriving receives a telegram: Both her brothers have been killed. She gives birth to a daughter, Latika, and grieves privately, unable to shake the wish for a son. Rajni and Vinod build a partnership through daily resolve. They have two more daughters, Mayuri and Kiya. On a family picnic to the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe, a European official ejects them despite Pirbhai's decades of government service, crystallizing the family's conditional belonging.

In 1958, Pirbhai summons Latika to his deathbed and confesses the story of burning the huts, honoring the friend who refused. Latika absorbs this inheritance.

After Ugandan independence in 1962 and the death of Sonal-baa (as Sonal is known, using the Gujarati honorific for grandmother), Latika chafes against her mother's expectations. Arun, a law student from a wealthy family in Jinja, moves in as a paying boarder, drawing Latika into the student union at Makerere University and into a romance. When soldiers suppress a campus rally, Arun is imprisoned. Rajni and Vinod banish him from the house, deepening the rift with Latika. Latika marries Arun against both families' wishes and endures a year of servitude with his parents. She finds purpose writing anonymously for Jicho, an underground newspaper founded by Arun's best friend Daniel, who has been imprisoned by the Obote regime and never resurfaces.

Meanwhile, Mayuri accepts a scholarship to medical school in Bombay, and Kiya secretly dates Adroa, an African boy she has known since childhood. In January 1971, General Idi Amin seizes power in a military coup and orders a humiliating census of all Asians. Adroa, fired from his job, joins Amin's army. On the eve of Mayuri's departure, a soldier gropes Kiya on the street; when Adroa drives her home, Rajni calls Kiya a veshya, meaning whore. Latika and Mayuri hold Kiya as she breaks down.

On August 4, 1972, Amin announces that all Asians must leave Uganda within ninety days. Vinod loses his job of thirty-five years. After receiving a government order to cease Jicho, Latika writes one final issue. Soldiers abduct Arun from the apartment. With days left before the deadline, Latika hands her infant son Harilal to Rajni and locks herself inside, refusing to leave without Arun. Rajni, Vinod, Kiya, and Harilal are robbed at a checkpoint, then rescued by Adroa, now in uniform, who drives them to the airport. They board a plane for Canada.

The family resettles in a cramped Toronto apartment. Vinod works overnight as a parking lot attendant while Rajni cares for a white family's daughter. Kiya barely eats, blaming Rajni for leaving Latika behind. They raise Harilal, now called Hari, as their own, never revealing his birth parents. Years later, Mayuri marries Kunal, a technician with Canadian residency, and joins the family, though her medical degree goes unrecognized. The narrative reveals Mayuri's suppressed romance with a woman named Ruhi in Bombay, a central part of her identity.

In 1981, Kiya receives a letter from Adroa revealing he saw Latika alive in their old compound roughly a year after the expulsion. Kiya, now pregnant, and Mayuri reconnect over the possibility that Latika survived. Latika, meanwhile, lives alone in London, working at a newsagents' run by an Indo-Kenyan couple to whom she has lied about her past. She keeps Arun's lighter as a daily test of her resolve, believing her absence protects her family.

Vinod and Rajni buy a house in Scarborough with help from Mayuri and Kunal. Years later, at a garba, a communal dance held during the Hindu festival of Navratri, a woman from Kampala recognizes Latika and connects her with Kantabhen, Arun's mother, in Birmingham. Latika visits and learns her family is in Toronto. Kantabhen then calls Rajni to discuss transferring the deed to Arun's factory to Hari through Uganda's repatriation scheme, inadvertently revealing that Latika is alive. That night, Rajni tells Hari the truth: She had another daughter named Latika, who married Arun, and Hari is their son. Devastated, Hari receives Latika's contact information and the choice to reach out.

Rajni and Vinod move above a convenience store, leaving the house for their children. Mayuri moves in after separating from Kunal. On Hari's twentieth birthday, his aunts Mayuri and Kiya share memories of Latika and Arun for the first time. Hari then tells his young cousin Meetu, Kiya's daughter, about his birth parents, breaking the family's code of silence.

In 1992, a solidarity rally against police killings of Black men erupts through downtown Toronto. Hari marches with his longtime friend Solomon and others. Police respond with tear gas, and Hari stumbles home to find his family gathered outside the shop, which has been set on fire. Vinod tells Hari he sounds like Latika. Rajni says they know how to rebuild. The family stands together amid the destruction, resolved to begin again.

In an epilogue, two figures, implicitly Hari and Latika, stand on a rocky outcropping by a lake. The woman shares the story passed down by her grandfather: Pirbhai's confession of the fire, offered not as release but as inheritance. They stand in the water between shore and open lake, the waves breaking and mending around them, returning what the water takes.