New Delhi, Aug. 24 -- Fauzia Rafique's slim novel Keeru, elegantly translated from the Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz, contains multitudes in less than 200 pages. As a work of fiction, it trains its gaze on the lives of the titular character, Muhammad Hussain Khan Keeru, and a few of his closest associates. But Keeru is also the story of millions of others in the subcontinent-dead or alive, known or unknown to the world.

It is a story of persecution and migration, the conflicting impulses of religion, politics and humanity. Above all, it is a tragedy in which identities are made and unmade, brutally and violently, over and over again.

Keeru bears the scars of a history that is all too familiar to anyone living in India or Pakistan, though it...