4 ideas
The novel follows one Gujarati household in Kampala, the patriarch Motibhai, his wife Jaya, their sons Pran and Vijay, and Pran's wife Asha, as they lose their business and home. Under the pressure of departure, secrets they had been keeping come out and damage their trust in one another before they rebuild in a cold, unwelcoming London. It is a concrete case of a prosperous, rooted family being turned into stateless refugees within weeks by one decree.
Families then try to move value into forms that can be hidden, such as jewellery, sewn-in cash or goods sent ahead. The cap forces them to decide what counts as worth saving, and some of those choices become secrets.
Under colonial rule, South Asians were placed between the British rulers and Black Africans, often as traders and shopkeepers. That made them the visible face of economic inequality without giving them real power. When independence politics needed a target, this in-between group was easy to expel: it was too prominent to ignore and too unprotected to resist. Its closeness to local people as employers and neighbours did not protect it and may even have increased the resentment.
In an expulsion, the documents people hold matter more than how long they have lived somewhere or how rooted they are. Some members of a single family may hold British passports while others hold Ugandan citizenship that is later rejected or never recognised, so they face different routes and deadlines. The same bureaucratic rules that expel people also split up families who had lived as one household.