Shaukat Ajmeri
Home is Another Country
Fed up with the chaos and corruption in India, Sanjeev finds refuge in Toronto, where he appreciates its physical comforts and its quiet, organized pace of life. But over time, he wearies of its cold indifference and its utter predictability, and ennui begins to gnaw at his soul. One day he witnesses a senseless shooting outside his building. Unable to come to terms with this event, he packs his bags and flees back home to Udaipur, his native city. But home is no longer the place he left behind.
Bigotry fouls the air, and sectarian hatred has poisoned peoples’ minds. Friends behave strangely, and the old warmth has given way to suspicion. And there is a sharper, more private hurt: he finds love, but for that he must betray a close friendship. With a conflicted heart, he escapes to the hinterland to take up a job teaching the children who have nothing. But this naïve, new-found idealism is soon confronted by feudal villainy and ancient bigotry, setting him on a collision course with the slow, brutal machinery of power. Disgusted and dispirited, he returns to his city, hoping to salvage the love he had found there.
Home Is Another Country is a tale of hard choices, of love and betrayal, of moral rage and searing disappointment. It maps the journey of a man caught between two realities, belonging fully to neither, as he despairs for a home that may no longer exist. It is a lament for a homeland, for a world that has lost its way.
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Endorsements
“An ironically unsettling evocation of what it might mean to return home to modern India armed with ideals. The city, Udaipur, comes to life vividly, with characters that are unforgettable.”
— MG Vassanji, author and two-time winner of the Giller Prize
"The exploration of home and belonging runs throughout this perceptive and probing novel. But at its heart, Home is Another Country is a poignant love story set amidst a land torn apart by bigotry, betrayal, and authoritarianism. The novel presents a clear-eyed view of India by a writer intimately familiar with all its contours."
— Rabindranath Maharaj, author of The Amazing Absorbing Boy and A Quiet Disappearance
"Home is Another Country is an exploration of the long, agonizing distance between expectation and disappointment, between home and away. Shaukat Ajmeri has written an urgent and intimate story of people caught in the crushing nexus of power and pelf—and of a society at war with itself.”
— Rahul Varma, Playwright
"A deeply moving and earnest look at identity, belonging, and the fractured nature of 'home' in a changing world. Ajmeri writes with grace and precision, capturing both the quiet, internal shifts of his characters and the grand, turbulent politics of our times."