“You realize what they’re asking us to do? Kill for them. Soon, Pirbhai is confronted with a life-defining choice: A colonel orders that he and his friend Rakesh set fire to a cluster of huts in order to clear the path for more tracks. The conditions are brutal, with little food, no lodging and long hours toiling under the relentless sun. After arriving at the docks of Mombasa, Pirbhai works long hours as part of a crew building a railroad to Lake Victoria in Kenya. Without saying a proper goodbye, the boy leaves his family in Porbandar and spends months in a boat on the Arabian Sea. “A History of Burning” opens in 1898 when Pirbhai, an intrepid 13-year-old, is tricked into indentured servitude (his signature on the paperwork is a thumbprint of black ink he is illiterate). The result is a haunting, symphonic tale that speaks to the nuanced complexities of class and trauma for this particular family. By any standards, it’s a daunting undertaking: Oza’s narrative traverses almost a century of time, four generations of family, five continents and multiple languages, with the story moving between the perspectives of 10 characters (largely told in the third-person voice with a few detours into the first person during the last quarter of the novel). With each disruption of movement, the author skillfully interrogates sweeping themes of survival, inheritance, immigration, colonialism and racism.

The declaration rings out in this epic novel about an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again. More than halfway through Janika Oza’s remarkable debut, “A History of Burning,” one of the characters writes in a letter, “I made choices to stay on the side of living.

Siddhartha novel book review