Like Salim, Indar grew up on the East African coast. Born into a family of great wealth and local influence, Indar left Africa to attend a prestigious university in England. During his time abroad, Indar effectively became homeless. Not long after he left, an uprising on the coast devastated his community and dispersed his family. Indar felt more intensely dislocated than ever after graduating from university, at which point he realized that his education would not ensure him success in a world otherwise stacked against him. In the face of his worsening identity crisis, Indar pledged to forge his own path. Instead of lamenting the way the world is, he adapted to it by embracing his existential homelessness as a source of liberation. Indar reinvented himself by rejecting sentimentality about an idealized Indian past that never existed. Freed from his past, he took control of his status as “a man of two worlds” and became a globe-trotting lecturer who speaks on political and philosophical issues related to a newly modernizing Africa.

Salim and Indar reunite for the first time since they both left the coast when Indar comes to town for a lectureship at the Domain. At first Indar projects a strong image of confidence, which leaves Salim feeling jealous and defensive about his limited life progress. But as Indar introduces him to the world of the Domain, Salim sees that his old friend is wracked by depression and increasing cynicism about the state of African politics. Indar leaves in a melancholy and irritable mood and returns to his life abroad. As Salim learns later in the novel when he travels to London, Indar eventually fell from grace when his benefactors began to push him toward work he did not want to pursue. As a man who took special pride in feeling self-made and independent, it perturbed Indar not to be in control. Rather than remain under someone else’s thumb, Indar retreated from the world. This retreat from public life demonstrates his failure to survive in the world on his own terms, as he’d pledged to do many years prior. This failure also betokens the terrible difficulty of overcoming cultural dislocation, a task Salim himself has long tried and failed to achieve.