With the hot-button issue of immigration on everyone’s lips, a novel built around how immigrants try to cope with a drastic change in culture is especially timely.

“Stealing Nasreen,” a new novel by author Farzana Doctor, examines the internal and external clashes immigrants face when trying to negotiate the cultural and sexual boundaries of new surroundings.

Doctor, who is queer and Indian, set her novel in Toronto, a veritable melting pot of cultures.

“I think it’s kind of this building effect,” she said of what draws people of different cultures to the city. “New immigrants will come to Toronto and then they’ll sponsor their family and often, new immigrants are really interested in being in centers where there’s a lot of services and stores that will meet their needs where other people are going to speak their same language.

Toronto is such a diverse city. They’re saying that 52 percent of the population is people of color.”

The novel’s plot revolves around three main characters — Shaffiq, his wife Salma and Nasreen — who struggle, in varying degrees, with how to live their lives transplanted from their native India into this new environment.

Doctor explained that Nasreen, being Indian and a proud lesbian, eventually becomes a symbol of change for the other two main characters for different reasons.

“Shaffiq observes Nasreen a little bit and she becomes a real focus for him. He develops this kind of fascination with her that’s really about his worries about who his children could become. Could they end up turning out to be someone like her, who has lived in Canada a long time, who’s a lesbian and someone he doesn’t recognize as being from home? Part of what his concerns are, is that he worries the he’s made a mistake. He was the person in the family that urged everyone to move, so he worries a lot that perhaps he’s made a grave error. He worries about his children becoming too Westernized and something that he might not recognize.”

For Salma, Nasreen represents unresolved issues from her past.

“Salma character had a past relationship in India where she had an affair with a woman and that relationship ended badly,” Doctor said. “Coincidentally, she ends up meeting Nasreen who is one of her Gujarati [Indian language] students. Through Nasreen, she also starts questioning a lot of things. She starts to remember her attraction to this woman in the past and she also starts to question what some of her choices were because her choice was to end that relationship because she couldn’t live in a secret kind of way and she didn’t have any reference points for having a successful relationship with a woman in India. She starts to grapple with that because she sees Nasreen as someone who can be an out and proud lesbian in Canada.”

Farzana Doctor

Doctor, who came to Toronto as an infant and has lived there most of her life, added that she keeps up with the state of GLBT affairs in India.

“I have quite a lot of family who still live there, but I’ve never lived there,” she said. “I’ve always been a visitor. I think they’re moving along there as in many countries. Particularly in the cities, there are very active queer groups. All of the big cities have a social support or recreational group for GLBT people. What I heard activists from there talk about is, they’re kind of in a place where Canada and the U.S. was 15 years ago. Not that they’re modeling their process after us. They have their own unique culturally specific way of doing that kind of organizing. But they are forging changes in the same ways that we have as well here.”

Doctor is somewhat hesitant to speculate how her sexuality would be perceived in India, known for its male dominated and rigid class social structure.

“I can’t really represent that experience because I don’t live there. I try to speak about that tentatively because I don’t live there,” she said. “If I were in touch some of these [GLBT] groups, I would have some support but I think mainstream society would still be struggling with it and have less exposure to the issues than they do here.”

Farzana Doctor appears in Philadelphia on July 13 with a reading at 5:30 p.m. at Giovanni’s Room, 345 S. 12th St.; (215) 923-2960, and at 7:30 p.m. at Wooden Shoe Books, 508 S. Fifth St.; (215) 413-0999.

For more information, visit www.farzanadoctor.com, www.giovannisroom.com or www.woodenshoebooks.com.