Rajinderpal S. Pal's novel However Far Away dives into a marriage and an affair set at a Sikh wedding
The Toronto author spoke with Christa Couture on The Next Chapter
However Far Away by Rajinderpal S. Pal is a novel that explores love, compromise and family set at a Sikh wedding.
The book follows Devinder Gill who must navigate the emotional minefield of both his wife and his ex-girlfriend, with whom he's been having an affair, attending his nephew's wedding. Dev is certain nothing will come between him and his wife Kuldip but as the day goes on he realizes he does not have the control he thought. A series of threats including a curious daughter and an unwelcome guest only throw Dev's life into further disarray.
Pal is a writer and stage performer living in Toronto. His previous works include the poetry collections pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse.
He discussed love, settling and paying your debts with The Next Chapter's Christa Couture.
However Far Away begins the morning of the event billed as the biggest wedding Vancouver's Sikh community has ever seen. Why did you choose to centre your story around this event?
So the story started to come together 19 years ago and I wanted a story that was sort of steeped in the Canadian Sikh culture. When I thought about what kind of defines Canadian Sikh culture, wedding days are also extremely important in the culture. It's a multi-day event and lavish parties, lavish receptions. Almost a game of one-up-manship. If your son or daughter is getting married, it has to be bigger and better than somebody else's son or daughter's weddings, right? So that's what drew me to centering it around the wedding day. It also gives me a way of introducing so many aspects of the culture.
Infidelity is a core theme that runs through this novel, but instead of automatically labeling the characters involved as bad people, you show us the nuance, the humanity behind them. As author Omar El Akkad said in his praise for your book, you "show how often love and duplicity intersect." Tell me about that thematic choice.
That was very intentional. I wanted complex characters. The character of Devinder was orphaned at a young age and was adopted by the family that his parents had actually rented a room from when he was younger. I think of Devinder as a fairly typical man, I think he wants a lot of the same things that every every person wants, but I think he's also in this extraordinary situation of having that feeling that he owed a debt to the family that had adopted him. He has found himself in a situation where he made a decision to get married within the culture in order to repay that debt, but then his first love came back into his life.
He has found himself in a situation where he made a decision to get married within the culture in order to repay that debt, but then his first love came back into his life.- Rajinderpal S. Pal
Both Emily and Dev's wife, Kuldip, they know about each other, how does that shape their thinking?
They know each other, but it's also a book about silence. And it's a book about choosing silence. The working title for the book was actually settle and I wanted to write a story that included all the different meanings of the word settle you could imagine. So settle in terms of where you choose to make a home, settle in terms of the ground shifting, so Vancouver as the location, settler versus Indigenous. Settle in terms of acceptance and compromise, which is a big part of the story, I think. What do we choose to accept in our lives? What do we say is good enough that we're going to make do with this? And I think that's a very human story, a human aspect of these characters. Also settle in terms of getting even with someone, settling a score or paying off a debt. So all those meanings of the word settle come into play.
There's this notion of paying off the debts. It's a thread that's weaved through the book, Devinder to his adoptive parents, Kuldip to the family that took her in and Emily to her mother. Tell me a bit more about that.
The paying off of a debt, I think, is a pretty powerful motivator. It does guide us through our lives and particularly in cultures like Sikhism, I think there is a sense of whether it's your family or whether it's you know somebody else in your life, there is a sense of owing, especially to parents, especially to those who have come before you.
There is a sense of owing, especially to parents, especially to those who have come before you.- Rajinderpal S. Pal
There's also the sense that hopefully somewhere in the back of this book, there's a sense of this immigrant family having arrived here and having built a life and actually doing very well for themselves in Vancouver and feeling like that's a debt that they have paid off themselves and that you are benefiting from.
There's a beautiful scene where Devinder ties his nephew's turban on his wedding day. It's so detailed. I loved taking in each detail of that. What is the significance of that moment?
The turban is such a symbol of the Sikh culture. All Sikh men, devout Sikh men, wear a turban. My father himself wore a turban his entire life. The uncut hair, the kesh, is also very sacred. My mother and my sister to this day have never cut their hair in their lives even once. I wanted to capture the importance of that kesh and that covering of the uncut hair with the turban. And it's also a sense of, for Devinder it's a commitment to his adopted father that he learned how to do this so well. But he's also passing on something to his nephew, so he's passing on something to the next generation.
There's this sense that the turban has to be absolutely perfect for the day, that there can't be a single line or or thread or hair out of place, it has to be all packaged perfectly. There's a line where Devinder thinks that it's not really about perfection as much as it is about the perception of perfection. That is also another big driver for the Sikh culture that I've grown up with anyway, that everything has to be perfect, everything, particularly on wedding days.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
