Book Prologue
I was kicked out of Uganda in 1972 for being a brown-skinned Asian. This was the country I had lived in from the age of two until I was 21. In 1971, Idi Amin, a boxer turned soldier, promoted to major by the colonial British, overthrew Milton Obote, the first prime minister of Uganda, in a coup d'etat. Within a year, he ordered the expulsion of 80,000 Ugandan Asians, giving them ninety days to leave the country. They were forced to leave with no more than fifty British pounds in their pockets. Amin trampled my country into the ground for the next eight years.
I lost my home. My family—Shia Ismaili Muslims, the people of the Aga Khan—was forced apart and exiled to countries we had only heard of. Some of my friends went to different countries and continents, never to be heard from again. My country was no longer my own.
That was the first time I became a chameleon.
Thrust into the 1970s England of racial tensions, strikes, and skinheads, I buried myself in studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and, for the next two years, attempted to understand the land I had been exiled to. In Uganda I had been brought up to believe that the Brits were best, and anything that came from the UK had to be good. The more I learned about the British and their bloody Empire, the angrier and lonelier I became.
One night, at three a.m., drunk in the streets of London, I punched a British bobby harassing a non-English-speaking old Asian lady whose only crime was looking at job bulletins for menial work to pay the rent. My friends dragged me away and we ran for a taxi before he could call for help or chase us down.
Albion College in Michigan offered me a scholarship in the summer of 1974. I was on the plane within a week and never looked back. Now I was a chameleon for the second time. Less shocking this time.
Oriental spiritualism was one of the fads in America during the 1970s. The white suburbanites in Michigan wanted me to be their spiritual yogi. The black folks on the other side of the tracks thought I might be their Muslim brother from Africa. The American Indians from the Midwest adopted me as a kindred soul. Me? I just wanted to be free of all the categorical boxes that people caged me in to feel more comfortable around me. Unfortunately, the boxes followed me east and west, everywhere I went in America. So I ran away, south of the border, armed with Spanish language books. That was the third time I became a chameleon. Much easier now.
Overland from Mexico to Argentina, I searched for a place in the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan sun, void of time and space, where the brown campesinos would let me blend in as one more brown compañero looking for peace in the vast Andes. At first the boxes were only names
'Gringo' to 'Indio' to 'Hindu'; then they became ideological boxes—communista, revolucionario, hermano. In Peru, the day I was contemplating a permanent home in Ollantaytambo, the army tanks rolled into Cusco, three miles away, to crush the emerging Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) secessionist movement. I hid in the home of an American Peace Corps volunteer, shaved off my beard, and carried on south when it was safe to hit the road again.
That was when I realized I was doomed to be a global chameleon.
On Christmas Day, 1978, I received an invitation to join the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Thailand. I had three months to prepare. I replied that the pre-requisite American citizenship would take at least two years. They expedited my application in two months and sent me a diplomatic passport and an airplane ticket.
Would Asia give me the home that had eluded me so far? After all, India, where my father was born and bred, and whose people spoke my mother tongue, was just around the corner from Thailand. Would I be able to get rid of the boxes there? Weren't Thailand's neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia home to large populations of Muslims? Would I be able to live in those places some day? What new boxes and names would I have to adapt to this time? Would Thailand bring me a step closer to my quest to be rid of the boxes once and for all?