You’d think that a book like Out of Africa might really do it for me then.

It also explains why I’m making notes for a memoir about how living abroad changed my life-research that’s much easier to do when I’m once again on foreign soil. I don’t know what any of this means, really, to me or to you, but it does help explain why I keep reading about people who are shaped by more than one culture-in some ways it is inside those stories that I feel most at home. But then, I have to convince myself, perhaps a greater and conscious discipline and the practice of writing mitigate that danger.” – MG Vassanji “It has occurred to me-how can it not?-that my picture of the past could well have, like the stories of my grandfather, acquired the patina of nostalgia, become idealized. And anyway, the Chile and Poland I knew are quite different I’m sure than what they are now even without accounting for the ways the act of remembering those places has shaped them in my mind. As a result, I often feel like I don’t quite fit in Seattle (or in Chile or Poland or anywhere). But my experiences living abroad have stretched and changed who I am in ways I cannot explain. My ethnicity means that physically I blend in just fine with my home town in Idaho and my adopted home of Seattle. “Even now, here in this Canadian wilderness, I cannot help but say my namaskars, or salaams, to the icons I carry faithfully with me, not quite understanding what they mean to me.” – MG Vassanji

To add to that feeling of statelessness, the story is told from later in Vikram’s life when he is hiding out in Canada. And because the Indian town his ancestors come from is ceded to Pakistan, there is no going “home” again. This protagonist is a third generation Kenyan, but as the grandson of a man who came over from Punjab to help build the railroad, his ethnicity means he will never blend with his homeland. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Vikram Lall’s life is actually like mine. “y fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in.” – MG Vassanji Instead, I found a story much more similar to my own life, a story of a man living away from his ancestral home and trying to figure out who that makes him. So when I picked up The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji as part of the great India book grab, thinking that because the author’s name sounded Indian, it must be about India, I was making an assumption that shows how much I want life to fit into identifiable little boxes. How many book reviews can I write about diaspora? Maybe a lot because the feeling of not knowing where or what home is is something I struggle with.

Nostalgia vassanji