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?”

Emotional monotone

Yet this question — “Why migrate?” — soon becomes the novel’s emotional resting point. Sukhpreet and Harleen, his love interest, repeatedly return to the same existential dilemma, their interior lives collapsing into a single register rather than revealing distinct emotional worlds. Instead of accumulating emotional complexity, however, these reflections merely reaffirm what the reader already knows.

The same mood is mirrored in the chapter dedicated to Sukhpreet’s cousin, Dan, who broods over his expensive life in Brampton and the stiff competition he faces as a food delivery executive.

Pereira broadens the lens through Maynard Wilson, a middle-aged white Canadian facing eviction as migrants increasingly move into his neighbourhood. But even here, the change in perspective does not add much texture to the novel’s emotional landscape. The novel reduces its Punjabi characters to cultural shorthand as they appear to subsist on paratha, aloo kulcha and lassi, just as Jalandhar’s streets seem to be filled with noise. The details feel flattened, almost stereotypical, and the emotional landscape remains narrow.

There is little narrative tension to sustain the reader from beginning to end, nor is there vigour in the prose. The novel circles the same swirl of thoughts, never quite gathering the force needed to move the reader.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist with bylines in leading international and Indian publications.

Super

Lindsay Pereira

Fourth Estate India

₹699

Published - August 04, 2026 05:00 pm IST