Books: New Novel Hits All the Bases
[Left] Rajesh C. Oza speaks with Jake Chacko at the launch of his debut novel at Stanford University Bookstore, CA. Credit: Anu Oza
Rajesh C. Oza’s debut novel, Double Play on the Red Line, published by Third World Press, was inspired by his daughter’s experience with Northwestern University’s Innocence Project. It reimagines the disproportionate wrongful convictions of Black men through the eyes of an Indian American journalist.
Ratan Vyas—or Ratangunjshankar Vyas—is a newly minted assistant professor of journalism at a big-name university in Chicago. A die-hard baseball fan, Ratan takes a journalistic interest in Ernie, an African American peanut vendor at Wrigley Field, after the latter is assaulted by spectators frustrated by the Cubs’ poor performance. Ernie, once a gifted player for the Kansas City Monarchs and on the verge of being signed by the Chicago Cubs, saw his career end when he was convicted of murdering Declan Younger, a white man. He served sixteen years in prison.
As Ratan begins his academic career, he becomes consumed by Ernie’s story. Poring over microfilms of 1950s newspaper reports, he immerses himself in the history of racism, colonialism, and sport, drawing connections between cricket’s colonial legacy and baseball’s own troubled past. Newly married and separated from his wife, Mandara, who is in India awaiting immigration paperwork, Ratan channels his loneliness into the work of understanding Ernie—a man whose life seems both distant and strangely familiar.
What begins as a journalistic curiosity turns into a deep friendship. Over shared apple slices, walks, and long conversations, Ratan and Ernie bridge worlds divided by race, class, and age. Their exchanges about family and loss reveal how both men carry inherited burdens—of caste and racism, of exile and exclusion. As Ratan’s empathy for Ernie deepens, so too does his connection with Mandhara, a medical student navigating her own intersection of privilege and prejudice as the daughter of a Brahmin father and an Adivasi mother. “Were hierarchies embedded in us,” Ratan wonders, “like some kind of cancerous, unfeeling, twisted double helix?”
Oza’s narrative unfolds like a ball game, with each section (titled A Single, A Double, and A Triple) mirroring an inning on the field and moral progress in life. The story begins with a man uncertain of his place, and ends with two men “stealing home,” reclaiming dignity and belonging. Baseball is not merely metaphor here—it is the organizing philosophy, the shared rhythm through which truth, justice, and identity are explored.
Ratan’s investigation is never just about clearing Ernie’s name; it is about understanding what it means to be an outsider in America and how history’s inequities shape ordinary lives. His pursuit of Ernie’s truth takes him from the archives to the streets, through conversations with aging witnesses and old friends who hold fragments of a buried past. Each encounter moves the story one base closer to closure.
Lovers of baseball history will relish the many references to Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig, and the Chicago Cubs, but the novel’s real power lies in its emotional texture, the quiet ache of separation, the pull of unfinished lives, and the slow, redemptive work of empathy. Oza’s love of literature is evident in the lyrical banter between Ratan and Mandhara on their long-distance phone calls, and in the cadences of his conversations with Ernie. At times, the reader wonders if it is the character speaking—or the author himself, musing on art, memory, and moral rectitude. The novel’s final chapters—set against a Chicago autumn and the Cubs’ improbable run—bring both men to a quiet reckoning.
Already the author of three nonfiction works, Oza, a long-time contributor to Khabar, is currently at work on several new projects, including a memoir, a collection titled Short Stories, Shorter Poems, and Shortest Bread, and a book linking the Ramayana to America. With Double Play on the Red Line, he has crafted a moving meditation on race, exile, and the small mercies that allow us, finally, to come home.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.
Rajesh Oza talks to Khabar about his novel
The novel draws inspiration from your daughter’s involvement with Northwestern University’s Innocence Project. How did that experience shape the story’s moral core and the way it unfolded on
the page?
In 1999, under the leadership of Professor David Protess, Northwestern University began an investigative journalism course with the premise that the American justice system has many people—disproportionally Black men—who have been wrongfully convicted. Having previously written three books of nonfiction (including Satyalogue // Truthtalk based on my Gandhian Khabar column), I tried to write about my daughter’s experience with the Innocence Project. But that is her story to tell, not mine.
Inspired by my daughter (Anu), I wrote this fictional story of injustice, alliance, and hope between two American men of color—one Black, one Indian—bound by a brutal encounter in Wrigley Field’s bleachers.
You have woven what feel like deeply personal threads into this story. How did you decide what to borrow from your own life and what to re-imagine in fiction?
“Deeply personal threads” is a lovely phrase. It reminds me of “Delicate Threads of a Tapestry,” which was the title of my review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts (Dove mi trovo in Italian). I mention this because just as Lahiri reimagined her time in Italy into her collection of stories, I have reimagined my Chicago experiences into my novel.
I learned from V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (set in in the English countryside of Wiltshire where Naipaul lived out his later years) how to leverage physical spaces I’ve actually inhabited to inspire the novel’s world-building; in so many ways, Double Play on the Red Line is a love letter to the Chicago I grew up in from 1969 to 1986. As for reimagined characters, I was influenced by Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies; just as that novel is peopled by “real” characters who have actual Wiki pages, my novel includes cameos by well-known humans. That said, the wholly imagined characters are fictional amalgamations of people I have known; I have simply blended physical traits and idiosyncratic personalities to create what I hope are complex and believable individuals: some flat, some rounded, all a product of my imagination.
At last month’s West Coast book launch of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, I asked Kiran Desai about autofiction. Her response: “Isn’t all fiction autobiographical?”
My answer: I believe that to some extent all writing—fiction and nonfiction—is autobiographical.
—Girija Sankar
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
