David Dabydeen is nonchalant when asked about his surname. “We know nothing about our name. It’s an empty space,” says the Guyanese writer of Indian descent. He has done his share of delving into family history and discovered that his grandfather left Calcutta in 1855 as an indentured labourer in the ship SS Appollinaire, but the origin of the name, a possible oral corruption, has eluded him.

For Dabydeen, diasporic cliches war with a life lived in intensity (picture above with wife and child by Sanat Kumar Sinha). He will tell you that “Bollywood movies are trash”; that he plans to name his eight month-old son “Ganesh” in a Hindu ceremony; that in a similar ceremony he was given the name “Ganpat” at a temple in Tirumala last year. But he will also talk with feeling about the “ramshackle library” in Berbice, Guyana, a window to the outside world, and England, “the land of books where everyone knew Shakespeare, and thugs who grunted racial abuse”.

The 52-year-old professor at University of Warwick is the author of works like The Intended, The Harlot’s Progress and the poem Turner, which tries to salvage a past for the drowned slave in J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship. His works dwell on the search for identity, a quest that has been his own.

“The Caribbean islands are a space of annihilation,” he says. His childhood is conflicted, with similarities to the narrator of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (“the first Caribbean book I read”): a young boy who manages to leave behind post-war Port of Spain for Britain and its promise of a future. “In Guyana, we celebrated Diwali and also went to an Anglican church. But we were a bit ashamed of our Hindu names,” he admits. He does not believe in clinging on to the past. “I tried to google my grandfather’s caste. For Caribbeans, the loss was the beginning of a brotherhood.”

The high point of the adolescent years was watching “Bombay movies”. “We often watched a movie more than seven times. We would go home humming lines from the songs. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand a word,” he recalls. Singer Lata Mangeshkar was a major draw, as were actors Raj and Shashi Kapoor.

He left Guyana for England at the age of 13. It isn’t right to overuse the idea of ‘exile’, for people banished from home, and more importantly, language, feels Dabydeen. “It is rather a sense of discomfort. I am not at ease here: I don’t understand the language. In Guyana, I go back as an expatriate living in a hotel.” England is home for him today.

He would rather delve into the unconscious that skirts definition. His forthcoming work Molly and the Muslim Stick is about a sexually abused girl who talks to a stick, which in turn has its own history, having evolved from a seed planted in the Middle Ages during the Crusades.