Love, music and culture collide in new novel set in Vancouver [Video]

Rajinderpal S. Pal was sitting on a bench in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood on a June afternoon in 2005 as he watched a man who looked just like him run by. 

Pal, a poet, was instantly struck. He wondered what the man might be running from — or toward.

“I came home and I actually wrote seven pages of prose and that opening scene of Devinder running alongside the ocean was written on that afternoon,” he told CBC’s North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.

Almost 20 years later, those seven pages are part of Pal’s novel, However Far Away, released earlier this week.

The book focuses on Devinder, a character Pal says he modelled after himself. 

“I wanted a character who was Sikh Canadian but very much identified with the culture of Canada — the type of music Devinder listens to, the films he would watch, the way he dresses, they would be very much Canadian,” he said. 

Devinder …