Ismith Khan is a Trinidadian writer descended from the Pathan people, originally of India, whom Khan described in his interview with Daryl C. Dance as "this group of people who are in the hills of Afghanistan right now fighting with the Russians.... They are an unconquered people--the British never made it into those hills." A common, though unfortunate, tendency in most critical assessments of Caribbean writers of Indian origin is to focus almost exclusively on V. S. Naipaul. Unlike Naipaul, who comes from an orthodox Brahman family, Khan, a third-generation Trinidadian, has a Muslim background. Though not as accomplished a craftsman as Naipaul, Khan presents a sympathetic and evocative portrait of the plight of his community. Khan's significance in Caribbean literary tradition lies in his literary explorations of issues of identity--"the double consciousness," to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase--of being a Pathan from India, in...