Mumbai author Lindsay Pereira on the fractures of migration in his latest novel, Super

Mumbai-based writer Lindsay Pereira gravitates towards marginalised communities of society; helium says, “I empathise with them more”. He graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and holds a PhD successful Literature for his enactment connected sex attitudes implicit successful 19th-Century Indian fabrication from the University of Mumbai.

It is the benignant of world item that feels subtly operative successful shaping a fabrication that is attentive to subtext, and omission. In his latest novel, Super (published by HarperCollins India), the canvas expands.What expands with it is not conscionable geography, but the standard of inquiry. Lindsay moves beyond the contained worlds of his earlier enactment into a terrain that is some wide acquainted and insufficiently examined — the dependable outflow of young Indians chasing the committedness of stableness elsewhere. The caller draws from a sharply escalating reality, 1 that Lindsay himself grounds successful information and observation, yet it resists turning that world into a fixed argument. Instead, it lingers connected the motivations that precede departure and the quieter reckonings that travel it.

This preoccupation with lives successful modulation is not caller successful his enactment truthful overmuch arsenic it is extended present into a broader, much uncertain terrain. His debut novel, Gods and Ends (2021), enactment him connected the literate map, earning shortlistings for the JCB Prize for Literature and the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award. His second, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao, was longlisted for the 2024 Crossword Book Award and went connected to triumph the Mumbai Literature Live! Literary Award. A postulation of abbreviated fiction, Songs Our Bodies Sing, followed successful 2025, continuing his involvement successful the often overlooked negotiations that signifier mundane lives.

Super explores a improvement that has, successful caller years, acquired some urgency and fatigue: the dependable migration of young Indians to countries similar Canada, propelled by a premix of fiscal stableness and inherited aspiration. The caller follows Sukhpreet Gill, who mortgages his household onshore and leaves down the pistillate helium loves, from Jalandhar to Canada successful pursuit of a amended future. Running parallel to Sukhpreet’s communicative is Maynard Wilson’s story, a Canadian grappling with unemployment, mounting debt, and a resentment simmering implicit the shrinking opportunities successful his country. When their lives intersect, the caller exposes their vulnerabilities — the 1 that drives radical to permission their country, and the 1 that seeks stableness astatine home.

Lindsay, who is besides a journalist, is unusually nonstop astir the empirical scaffolding down the novel. “Between 2014 and 2024, for instance, determination was an summation successful planetary pupil enrolment, from India to Canada alone, by implicit 1,200%. By 2023, India contributed to the large inflow of planetary students successful Canada, with 278,065 officially documented,” helium says, adding, “I utilized that information to effort and recognize what was driving this surge, wherefore students felt a request to get away, and what they hoped to find successful a overseas country. I besides work aggregate reports astir the interaction of migration connected section communities, which helped maine signifier these characters. The purpose was to effort and go a neutral observer, which I anticipation to person managed.”

The outgo of migration

The novel’s cardinal figures, Sukhpreet and Maynard, are conceived, successful Lindsay’s words, arsenic “emotional anchors for 2 opposing points of view… some of which were authentic for me, and worthy of consideration.” This hostility is sharpened from the outset, with the caller opening connected an untimely decease that decisively alters its affectional register. Without revealing excessively much, the incidental shifts the communicative distant from aspiration towards thing much precarious. It becomes a mode for Lindsay to analyse however the committedness of a caller beingness is complicated, adjacent undermined, by the realities awaiting those who get to an situation that is not ever welcoming, and often marked by a scepticism, adjacent a thinly veiled disdain, towards migrants from those who see the state their own. Migration, aft each is structured by vastly antithetic stakes.

“Super isn’t conscionable astir crossing borders,” helium says. The novel’s astir persistent interest is what helium calls “the nonaccomplishment of self… an erosion of individuality that occurs erstwhile 1 is displaced from a spot of familiarity.” It is an thought helium returns to with deliberation, describing a authorities successful which “there arises a hazard of becoming emotionally adrift.” Super captures the gradual drift — the mode displacement settles successful done small, accumulative adjustments.

Yet this accent connected interiority besides shapes the novel’s limits. Lindsay often approaches the worldly conditions of migration — labour, legality, systemic exclusion — astatine an angle, allowing them to stay contiguous but not afloat interrogated. “To defy a expansive communicative is conscious,” helium says. “It is lone by illuminating moments that I tin effort and spark ideas astir a bigger picture.”

When asked whether beingness overseas is, successful immoderate meaningful sense, amended — a question that shadows some the caller and the larger sermon astir migration — Lindsay declines the premise. “It’s intolerable for maine to proclaim that beingness overseas is amended oregon worse,” helium says. “That tin lone beryllium defined by idiosyncratic circumstances.” What helium offers alternatively is simply a reframing. “There ever is simply a cost. What 1 is prepared to springiness up determines the level of restitution with wherever 1 is.”

Where the caller feels astir assured is successful its attraction to isolation arsenic erosion. “There is besides the interaction of isolation, which is often dismissed,” Lindsay notes. “That nonaccomplishment of steadfast crushed tin person devastating consequences that play out, similar successful the lawsuit of some Sukhpreet and Maynard.” For Sukhpreet, it is astir leaving down the woman, and family, helium loves successful Jalandhar and stepping distant from a beingness that, nevertheless limited, is familiar. For Maynard, it is astir a antithetic benignant of nonaccomplishment — the feeling of being sidelined successful his ain country, of watching stableness gaffe successful ways helium cannot rather control. What the caller stages, then, is not a elemental absorption but a shared erosion of ground, wherever some men, successful antithetic ways, are forced to reckon with what it means to nary longer consciousness unafraid successful the spot they thought they belonged.

Lindsay is much nonstop erstwhile speaking astir politics. “Everything we bash is governmental whether we take to judge that oregon not,” helium says. And yet, successful fiction, helium opts to “use characters oregon situations that basal successful for arguments similar these,” a strategy that aligns with his broader suspicion of overt messaging.

If determination is simply a coherence to his approach, it lies successful his committedness to penning arsenic a signifier of inquiry. “I began penning fabrication lone erstwhile I felt I had thing circumstantial to say,” helium notes.

“I americium little funny successful a reappraisal than I americium successful observations astir however a publication fits into a larger context,” helium says. “Where it comes from, wherefore it exists, and what it says astir america all.” It is, perhaps, the astir utile lens to presumption Super: not arsenic a definitive relationship of migration, but arsenic a caller that registers its affectional upwind portion remaining ambivalent astir its underlying systems.

Whether that ambivalence reads arsenic restraint oregon evasion volition beryllium connected the reader’s expectations. Lindsay, for his part, appears contented to permission the question open, which whitethorn beryllium the point, and besides the problem.

Super is disposable astatine bookstores and online