Previous Next
You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. . . . You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground.

Indar speaks these words in Chapter 7, shortly after he arrives in the town to begin his lectureship at the Domain’s polytechnic institute. He has just explained to Salim that he had recently returned to the East African coast for the first time since he left to attend university in England. Indar recalls that the thought of going back initially filled him with anxiety because he worried that his memories of growing up there would weigh heavily on his heart when he saw how radically his old community had changed. Yet the experience proved less emotionally damaging than he’d expected, largely thanks to the speed of modern air travel. As he explains to Salim, flying allows you to arrive at your destination so swiftly that you have little time to wallow in grief. Indar further reflects that the more frequently he went home, the more he could habituate himself to the place in its new form. In this way he could abandon the illusions fostered by nostalgia and eventually quash all sentimental feelings for his lost home.

Indar’s closing image of the trampled garden functions as a preface to the account he’ll give to Salim in Chapter 9 of his experience in England. Just after the above quotation, Indar admits that the idea of destroying a beautiful and vibrant garden at first seems cruel and destructive, but he explains that eventually the trampled garden turns into solid ground. That is, the act of trampling isn’t merely destructive. It also transforms something decorative into something useful. Indar’s metaphor of a trampled garden turning into solid ground foreshadows the story he tells Salim about an epiphany he had in England. After finishing his university degree, Indar had no job prospects and felt increasingly alone and adrift. He realized that, as a perpetual outsider, the world was not designed to accommodate him, so he resolved to reinvent himself by rejecting his past and adapting to the world as it was. In this sense, he trampled the garden of his past, turning it into solid ground that provided the foundation for his future.

Previous section Important Quotes Explained Page 2 Next section Important Quotes Explained Page 4

Popular pages: A Bend in the River

Take a Study Break