3 Review(s)

THERE'S A SAYING about Indians who voyaged to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century: Gone to Tapu. It means Gone to the Islands. It also means Disappeared. The folks who gathered their wooden feeding bowls, their rupees and chappals, and trudged onto the huge English boats couldn't think too much about a return. In their world, if you travel-led west of the Indus River. you were lost to everyone back in India, Often I think there are other ways to be lost, to fall off the edge. Just by not knowing the people closest to you. "VHF PROFESSOR OF LIGHT” is the story of young Meggie Singh and her father, a charming, befuddled professor of philosophy from the Caribbean. Meggie grows from childhood to the brink of being an adult, groomed by her father in a rich mix of philosophy and storytelling which illuminates the lost history of her family scattered over India, Guyana, America and England. Now older, she learns to recognize the scratch of his pen on paper, the curves of his thoughts, as he struggles to write a book on the nature of Light. The paradox of light. both particle and wave, comes to resonate with the larger questions of identity and immigration, of belonging and moving on. A gripping depiction of the intense bond between a father and a daughter-a father who is driven mad in his quest to understand light, and a devoted daughter who risks falling off the edge with him. Marina Bud hos has written a novel of passion and logic, one that illuminates what it means to grow up ans to grow apart.