There is something elusive about the author of The Book of Secrets; you can’t pin him down to a place. Dislocations, displacements, secret origins, lost connections, memories to be retrieved and histories barely saved from being written over — this is the world of M. G. Vassanji, a fascinating novelist who is difficult to classify or place. “I do not identify myself with any one label,” he remarks to me during our conversation. The biographical note on his website includes a self-definition which is noticeable for its lack of hyphens: “If pressed, Vassanji considers himself African Asian Canadian: attempts to pigeonhole him along communal or other lines, however, he considers narrow-minded and malicious.” His novels can be read as modern-day fables of people struggling with or trying to break down these narrow-minded categorisations.

The writer literally spans three continents. With his ancestry going back to Gujarat, India, Vassanji was born in Kenya, grew up in Tanzania, studied in the US and is now settled in Canada. All of these locations are crucial to the story and come together in different combinations. A PhD in nuclear physics from MIT, he switched over to being a full-time writer, going on to become the author of several novels and the first author to be the two-times winner of the Giller Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for fiction in Canada.

Following in the wake of a collection of short stories, his first novel, The Gunny Sack, was set in East Africa while the immigrant experience in North America informed No New Land and Amriika. The rich and complex The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall are intricately patterned novels woven around issues of history and identity. A travel account of India, A Place Within, appeared in 2009 and garnered the Governor General’s Award, while his latest novel, The Assassin’s Song, short-listed for four awards, including the Crossword Prize in India, opens in riot-torn Gujarat. It is also a journey through history as well as personal tribulations, framed by larger than life moral and spiritual questions. This is the novel that we start talking about as I meet Moyez Vassanji over a breakfast of croissant and coffee at a small café in Toronto and continue the conversation later at his home.

The Assassin’s Song is particularly relevant for South Asia for its subtle depiction of the changing face of religions in the area. I wonder how it was received. “It did really well in India. Khushwant Singh regarded it as among the best Indian novels,” Vassanji says, adding that “I get embarrassed with such praise and do not like to say such things myself.”

“I just wrote it. It came to me,” he says when I ask about the novel’s starting point. “I thought that I would go back in history and research the destruction of the Almout fort, the stronghold of the fabled Assassins, during the Mongol invasion, and perhaps set a novel beginning at that time, but then I realised that I should start from what I know about.” He agrees with me that it was a long route. “This is why I abandoned the destruction of Almout as a beginning and put it towards the end of the novel.”

This is the best placing, and Vassanji agrees with my comment. “Once I knew that I should start from Gujarat, I wrote about the tradition I grew up with, inspired by both the Bhakti movement and by the teachings of sufis or batins. When I was doing my PhD studies, in my spare time I would translate Bhakti poetry, called ginans [from gnan], from Gujarati that I had heard as a child. I used some of these translations in the novel but I also invented some others. I had that background simmering inside me for the last 30 years,” he says.

How did this concern with history and Indian spirituality go with a wider readership, I ask about the reception of the novel in Canada. “I was writing it and this was my main concern,” Vassanji says in clear terms. “Much to my amazement and delight a lot of non-Asian ‘white’ Canadians identified with it. It struck a chord, because many people do question and contemplate the meaning of life,” he says, adding that “these are the little pleasures you get from writing. You think that it will not be understood by anybody outside of your own tradition or experience and you are surprised by the response of so many others.”

The novel has also been translated into Hindi, Turkish and other languages. However, Vassanji is not completely ready to acknowledge it as his favorite among his books. “I found it hard to write, but when I finished it, when I wrote the last line, it was overwhelming — this sense of having pulled it off. I did not have the same feeling with any of my other books, although Vikram Lall also gave me a great feeling of satisfaction. When I wrote The Book of Secrets, I was in my early phase and was nervous whether the form I had chosen would work or not.”

This represents a departure as previously his work had a greater focus on Africa, especially The Book of Secrets, the novel I admired the most before I read The Assassin’s Song. “It had something to do with origins, and looking at our origins in Africa.

In that sense there is a connection. I was writing a story of who we are; but the confrontation with history, the telling of history which has not been told before, the discovery process itself is also a part of the novel. The narrator is a historian, but at the end of the novel we know at least as much of this character — Mr Fernandes — as we do about the past. History itself is in a sense the protagonist, a past that is mysterious and will never be completely known,” he explains. “In Assassin’s I was looking at history not so much lost as rewritten, and that too right in front of you, rewritten according to current fashion or politics.” This strikes a chord in me immediately as we like to re-imagine not the future in Pakistan but the past, opening it to ideological manipulation. “How much of history we carry with us and how much we throw away, this makes me angry,” he says with a laugh, defining this as “an erasure of history and culture.”

Talking about models and influences, Vassanji names Dostoevsky and Conrad as important for his development as a writer. Dostoevsky because of his multi-dimensional fiction and Conrad “because his people did not belong in one place, there is an ambiguity about them and he explores this ambiguity.” Ambiguity is important for Vassanji also as he does not like to pass judgment on his characters. He mentions the figure of Vikram Lall. Some think of him as a criminal, because he is corrupt. But there are good aspects to him also; he is an ordinary man who falls into the ways of corruption in a corrupt place. Eventually it is the reader who can pass judgment on any character or given situation.

I draw his attention to the blurb on one of his books which identifies echoes of writers like Naipaul and Rushdie, but Vassanji does not agree. “Reviewers are often lazy,” he states categorically. “There is affinity among us only in having origins in the subcontinent, but there are vast differences too. I don’t really read Rushdie’s work, not to disparage it, but how much can you read? And you have to be careful what you read while you’re writing. I was excited about Midnight’s Children. Satanic Verses I stopped reading midway because by that time his own life had become so much more interesting,” he says with a chuckle.

Naipaul is another story. He grants that The House for Mr Biswas is a great book and that Naipaul is a stylist in the real sense of the term, but his interest stops short there. “I am sure that he must have written a good book but he doesn’t know much about Africa,” he explains, referring to Naipaul’s recent book. “We have a different way of looking at things. I speak the language, I know the people of the Africa or India I write about, so I have a great deal of empathy there. Naipaul reports about the places he visits, while I get absorbed. He journeys from place to place on a helicopter, while I travel on the local bus.”

It is clear that Vassanji likes to maintain his distance. “I keep away from writers who may have an overlapping interest. So I read totally different things,” he says. Among contemporaries, he expresses his admiration for Philip Roth. “I find an affinity with Jewish writers because they have a similar sense of community and family,” he says and probably this is why he wrote a book on Mordecai Richler. He enjoys reading Indian works in translation, because he finds so much freshness there than in works in English. He mentions Krishna Sobti (Hindi), Vaikom Muhammad Bashir (Malayalam), Geetanjali Shree (Hindi).

Talking about contemporary Canadian writers, he adds that “Alice Munro is a wonderful writer but with a very different cultural background. At first I thought that would matter, but then I read one of her books in its entirety and I found that I could identify with what she was writing, it had a universality.” Munro is unique among present day writers as she has concentrated on short stories, avoiding novels. The short story is of particular interest to Vassanji. “I write short stories in between novels but have not done so recently. I probably will, when I feel that pull. A short story calls for a different frame of mind.”

Recently he has contributed an introduction to a new edition of Gandhi’s autobiography. “I was heavily influenced by Gandhi, in my college days,” he says. “His family were Kathiawaris like us, and he lived a long time in South Africa. His mother belonged to the Pranami sect and Gandhi himself did not do murti puja. There were a lot of crisscross influences on Gandhi and on my people in towns like Porbandar. He believed in Rama as an absolute God, and this had affinity to the Islamic concept of God,” he says. He would like to read more about Jinnah, but is more interested in the human aspect, not so much the political legacy. Another historical figure which fascinates him is Alauddin Khilji who had “a very rich life compared to any other sultan,” he says. “There is an almost Shakespearean drama in Khilji’s life. It is so much alive. There is a graphic description of it in Barni’s historical account,” he says and mentions Amir Khusrau’s historical masnavi as one of the sources for this period’s history. “No, I don’t want to write a Moghal novel. It has been killed, done to death,” he immediately corrects me and then adds: “I would like to re-imagine Khilji’s life if I had more time and background.”

He makes no secret of his new novel, called The Magic of Saida, to be published next year. Named after a young boy who is half African, “It deals with the African side,” says the author. “Ostensibly it is about a man looking for a childhood sweetheart, a modern-day African Orpheus, but I used this opportunity to explore German colonialism and the writing of history. I was fascinated with the Swahili form of poetic narration used for writing history.” Another element in the book is magic, “the ‘magic of the Book’ used for healing and advice as well as dark magic.” But for more details, one will have to wait for the novel.

In addition, he is also working on a travel book on Tanzania, but feels the need to make at least one more trip to fill in more details. He mentions another novel started some time ago, saying that he would like to go back to it but is not sure when that will happen.

There is no particular plan to visit Pakistan but Vassanji says that he would like to. “I have been there once, very briefly, but it scares me a bit,” he says and when I probe this further, he identifies the reasons as “politics and ideology. Just because I had a beard, I found that some people immediately took me for some kind of Islamist or fundamentalist. In the tradition I grew up in, you had to be a radical to grow a beard, and if I got teased for my beard, it was to be called a Sardarji, not a fanatic. Some people become obsessed with religious identity.

It defines them. Faith should be a private thing. Culture and history are more important in defining who you are,” he adds as we bring the conversation to a close.

The writer pens fiction and literary criticism