The author dwells on the idea of hope through a young Sikh who has eyes only for the Canadian dream. (Representational image)
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Migration is among humanity’s most propulsive acts. From survival, hope to conquest, migration encompasses all shades of a dream. Driven by reinvention, it has long shaped the dreams of Punjab’s youth, for whom Canada has become a near-mythical destination. As immigration increasingly becomes a political fault line, Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, Super, follows Sukhpreet, a young Sikh determined to cross that border.Sukhpreet first moves to Jalandhar to prepare for the IELTS, joining the conveyor belt of young Punjabis, scrambling to learn English and get a vague employable degree. Try as he may, his thick, Punjabi-inflected tongue resists rolling off English words with ease. Even when his score falls below the passing mark, he manages to secure admission to a dubious Canadian college by fabricating papers that exaggerate his two-acre farmland, all so that he can finally be in a place where the lakes are impossibly blue, and life has dignity. This conviction also stems from the fact that he is his mother’s only hope (his father is deceased and the elder brother is lost to drugs).Unlike his cousin Deepanshu, aka Dan, who is already in Canada, and other aspirants, Sukhpreet feels like a misfit. He doesn’t like to listen to “brash” Punjabi hip hop and often wonders: “Why was he to choose between Canada and Australia, never Calcutta and Assam? When did India become a land where Sikhs were not welcome, and was this an imagined slight on their part or based on a real fear of displacement?”
