UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES

In M.G. VASSANJI's new novel, a prominent scientist teeters on the borders of physics and faith

- Shougat Dasgupta

Two Pakistani citizens have won Nobel Prizes-Malala Yousafzai, who shared the Peace Prize in 2014 with Kailash Satyarthi, and the great physicist Abdus Salam, who in 1979 became the first scientist from a Muslim country to win a Nobel. Considered the 'father' of Pakistan's programmes in mathematical and theoretical physics and space research, Salam was commemorated on a stamp in 1998, released after Pakistan's first public tests of nuclear weapons in 1998.

But in 1974, five years before he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, Salam quit Pakistan for London in protest, when the constitution was amended to declare Ahmadis, the sect to which he belonged, to be 'non-Muslim'. In Everything There Is, the Canadian writer M.G. Vassanji, born in Kenya to Indian parents in 1950, fictionalises Salam's life, imagines what it might have been like to be both a man of science and of faith, even as he comes under attack for both his science and his faith. It is Vassanji's tenth novel and circles a question that underlies all of his considerable catalogue: how to reconcile the gap, the distance between personal and public histories?