A History of Burning

In 1898, a young Gujarati man named Pirbhai is coerced onto a ship and carried to East Africa to labor on the British railway. To survive, he obeys an order to burn a village, an act that becomes the family's buried original sin. A History of Burning follows four generations of his descendants across the twentieth century as they build a comfortable life among the Indo-Ugandan community, only to be expelled under Idi Amin's 1972 order against South Asians. Pirbhai's grandson Vinod, his wife Rajni, and their three daughters are forced to flee again, this time to England and Canada, where safety is never guaranteed. Oza traces how the unspoken secret at the root of the family keeps shaping descendants who have no idea why their lives are bent the way they are.