Where the Air Is Sweet
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 16, 2017 4:08 PM | Last Updated: April 7, 2017
Tasneem Jamal
In 1972, dictator Idi Amin expelled 80,000 South Asians from Uganda. Though many had lived in East Africa for generations, they were forced to flee in ninety days as their country descended into a surreal vortex of chaos and murder.
Spanning the years between 1921 and 1975, Where the Air Is Sweet tells the story of Raju, a young Indian man drawn to Africa by the human impulse to seek a better life, and three generations of his family, who carve a life for themselves in a racially stratified colonial and post-colonial society. Where the Air Is Sweet is the story of a family: their loves, their griefs and, finally, their sudden expulsion at the hands of one of the world's most terrifying tyrants. (From HarperCollins Publishers)
From the book
The earliest sensation Raju remembers, about the time he started attending school at age three, was an ache, a longing for something he could not yet imagine. By the time he completed primary school, this ache had been transformed into a belief that something essential was missing here in the Gujarati village of Malia, the land of his birth, the land of his ancestors. In the months before he married, before he prepared to embark on adulthood, he took to stepping outside his family's hardware shop and standing still in the middle of the gully, grains of fine, pale dust catching in the hairs inside his nose. He would look around him at the shops he could describe to their last detail, at the houses he had known since he knew anything. Then he would close his eyes. And he would see nothing.
From Where the Air Is Sweet by Tasneem Jamal ©2014. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.