It's fitting M.G. Vassanji won his second Giller Prize for a novel called The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. In-between was that book's Indian protagonist, growing up in a Kenya of Africans and Englishmen. In-between is the hero of his latest, The Assassin's Song (Doubleday Canada, $34.95): an unwilling holy man named Karsan Dargawalla, neither Hindu nor Muslim, caught up in sectarian fighting in Gujarat, circa 2002. And in-between, it could be argued, is the author himself, who was born in Kenya, grew up in Tanzania, and didn't visit his ancestral–and violence-wracked–home of Gujarat until 1993.

The Assassin's Song pleads for peace. Speaking from his publisher's offices in Toronto, where he now lives, Vassanji explains that Karsan's tolerance for both Hindus and Muslims came naturally: "It's how I feel," he says. "I cannot be one or the other."

Like his maker, Karsan sees the situation with an outsider's perspective. It became apparent to Vassanji that the fighting was about more than dogma. "It's not just one fighting against the other," he argues, "which is what, in fact, people who would like to do nothing about it would like to portray it as. But it is a fascist group that systematically goes about with pogroms. These are pogroms that happened in 1993 and 2002, because houses were marked and attacked."

Assassin's Karsan–heir to a mystical Sufi shrine–struggles against family tradition, fleeing to America and then Burnaby before succumbing to destiny. His return to India is complicated–and another element of autobiography creeps in. "I was embraced like a long-lost son," Vassanji says of his own trip to Gujarat, but he was sickened by the violence. "It curdles the blood.”¦You just say India's a part of you, in some way, and everything is a part of you–the good and the bad.”¦I suppose I tried to look at that in this book."

What links Karsan to his family and his fate is devotion, especially as expressed through sacred song. Song is what helps Karsan accept his destiny, and song is what bound Vassanji to his heritage as well. "I went to this shrine," he explains, "where these Sufis were buried whose songs I had grown up singing.”¦You can become an agnostic or an atheist, but the poetry and the music, they don't go away. The poetry has a mystery to it, and music has a mystery to it. It is not articulated. What you can articulate, you can rationalize out of it. But you cannot rationalize the music in your heart, or the poetry."

John Burns interviews M.G. Vassanji at a free event on Tuesday (September 18) at 7 p.m. at Chapters Robson (788 Robson Street).