Lindsay Pereira's new novel ‘Super’ explores the harsh realities of the immigrant experience in Canada

Lindsay Pereira’s new novel, Super, revisits the subject of one of the short stories from his previous collection, Songs Our Bodies Sing, published last year. In If You Don’t Weaken, two Sikh men—both of them immigrants from Punjab—rent a basement of a house belonging to a white couple in Canada. One of these men is in the country on a student visa, but working at the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons instead of studying, to make ends meet. His roommate is a truck driver who, nearly a decade after his arrival in Canada, has nothing to write home about. The unremitting hopelessness of their situation gets to the reader, until a fresh tragedy, ironically, brings them close to their landlord, who, thus far, had expressed no interest in their lives.

In Super, Pereira seems to offer a kind of prequel to this story. Set between Jalandhar in India and Brampton in Canada, he chronicles the exodus of another young Punjabi man, Sukhpreet, who is seduced by the promise of a good life abroad. He doesn’t want his life to end in ruin, as happened to his elder brother, who fell victim to heroin addiction in a state with an outsized drug problem.

Encouraged by his cousin Deepanshu (who rechristens himself Dan in his adopted country) who made a similar journey some years ago, and lured by the rose-tinted dreams peddled by seemingly happy Indian immigrants on Instagram Sukhpreet pawns his family’s land to pay for fabricated documents that would secure him admission to a “fake college” in Canada. Once he gets a student visa, he plans to drop out of his bogus course and find a job, which would eventually make it possible for him to bring his widowed mother to Canada.

Sukhpreet’s craving for a new life and a fresh start isn’t unique by a long shot. Along with Dan, he is one among millions of young men from Punjab with a similar fire in their belly, slogging to pass the IELTS examination to prove their proficiency in English, which would better their chances of getting into a foreign country. If the men are fixated on getting a job abroad by hook or by crook, the women of the state hope to make good marriages in foreign lands if they pass the test. When Sukhpreet meets Harneet, a resident of Jalandhar, for the first time at an aloo tikki stall at the local market, she has already embarked on this path, urged by her parents. Their chance encounter deepens into an unlikely bond—and, as it happens, is the only silver lining to the uncertainties of their collective future.

Other than this brief reprieve of sunshine, Super remains a dark cautionary tale, clinically documenting scams and the pitfalls of giving into them, offering not a glimmer of hope. It starts off with a murder, moves into a racist hate crime, and by the time it ends, the reader is left with the premonition of a vicious cycle about to repeat itself. Indeed, it is this almost obvious awareness of the tragic circularity of the immigrant experience—first, the temptation to leave home for greener pastures, followed by the inevitable disappointment, and ending with a downfall—that makes Sukhpreet’s predicament even more heartbreaking.

This predictable plotline also makes Pereira’s task, as a writer of fiction, deeply challenging. A little over halfway into the novel, the contour of the story becomes clearer to the reader with the arrival of Maynard Wilson, an unemployed white Canadian man on the wrong side of 40, subsisting hand to mouth on government benefits, waiting to be served an eviction notice any day. From this point onward, the reader may feel it is only a matter of time before the dots connect and the pieces of the puzzle click into place. And yet, to his credit, Pereira manages to hold us to the story by humanising Wilson through small details—a day in his life, for example, or a confrontation with a neighbour in the park that leaves him distraught as well as enraged.

Pereira supplies Wilson with a backstory that is detailed enough to pique our curiosity without meandering into distracting flashbacks. He portrays Wilson’s vulnerabilities, especially his selfless devotion to his dog, and peels back layers from his consciousness to explain, but never condone, his journey towards bigotry. It is a complex story to narrate, where good and evil collide and coexist, and the inner demon vies with the better angel to spark outrage in the world.

The reader must take their discomfort on board and find a way to anchor their sympathies. For every despicable act he commits, Wilson also offers a counterpoint, often via his inner monologue, which only leaves room for a sense of unmitigated despair in the end.

Super is, undeniably, a serious and important novel, grappling with the Big Questions of our time. At the same time, it is also about life’s little ironies—the selfishness that makes people deceive their loved ones and take dangerous chances. For fans of Pereira’s debut novel Gods and Ends (2021), his fourth book of fiction may feel sobering and earnest. But if Super lacks the chutzpah and sizzle of Pereira’s early style, it more than makes up for it with its large-heartedness.