Ahmed Essop is the preeminent chronicler of the lives and aspirations of the Indian community of the Johannesburg area. In the racially divided South Africa of the apartheid era, the period during which most of Essop's extant work was written, the Indian community occupied an ambiguous position. Never accepted into the ruling white enclave, Indians nevertheless enjoyed a slightly more privileged position than the black majority, subject as it was to pass laws, curfews, economic dispossession, and "Bantu Education." Although left-wing Indian intellectuals played an important part in the resistance to apartheid and played a significant role in the formulation of African National Congress (ANC) policy, the apolitical merchant and petit-bourgeois class was constantly open to the seductive possibility of collaboration with the white regime in a confirmed second-class status as opposed to the decidedly third-class status of the black majority.

Essop's work deals with the conflicting loyalties...