Free No New Land by M.G. Vassanji

influence.
    One night, however, he received a phone call from a colleague warning him that a request for permission of his arrest was circulating in certain circles. Jamal did not wait to find out what, if anything, he had said or done. He fled overnight, at about the time the Lalanis were trying to obtain their Canadian visas. Jamal flew to Cuba, an attractive place for idealistic young men in those days. International politics intervened, however; he was not allowed to stay. He went to Brazil then, where he sold rugs for a year – in effect becoming a shopkeeper – and learned Portuguese, until his visa to go to Canada arrived.
    By the time Jamal returned from the tuck-shop with his black briefcase now relieved of its oily contents, seated at the foot of the goddess, holding a mug of coffee and reading a magazine, would be Nanji, aformer classmate. “What, reading the
Sun
?” Jamal would comment with a wide grin, and Nanji would look up with a smile from reading material far more serious. “So, what brief did you carry today?” would be his sarcastic reply.
    Unlike Jamal’s erratic and somewhat precarious academic career, Nanji’s had been straightforward. School had conferred upon him also an identity based on his surname. Brilliant throughout, he had won a scholarship to a prestigious American university. Another brilliant career, it seemed, spawned at the same school by the same shopkeeper community. But the world had caught the community dreaming and ill-prepared as it now found its youth. From all the possible disciplines he could have chosen, Nanji picked a branch of linguistics in which there were not many jobs. So he taught an evening course at Woodsworth College and whiled away the rest of his time talking and reading.
    His looks reflected his anxious nature. Tall, with a high forehead, sunken eyes, face marked with the remains of youthful acne, always in ill-fitting clothes. When the two former classmates met in Toronto after seven years, an instant friendship developed where once there had been contempt on one side and suspicion on the other. Jamal, outgoing, full of mischief, now waiting for a place in a Canadian law school while looking for women to take to bed, and tall, stern Nanji, with all the moral weight of the world on his shoulders, reading the existentialists and despairing.
    “You know,” Nanji told Jamal, in all earnestness,the first week they met, “the only choice,
real
choice, man has in the world is whether to go on living … or to commit suicide, end this absurd existence. Have you thought of that? Compared to this, all other questions are trivial, frivolous, irrelevant.”
    “Bana! Wow! You’ve hit me between the eyes, man. Who else could have thought of that!”
    “It’s not my original idea, I assure you,” Nanji protested in embarrassment. Jamal, without the benefit of a liberal arts education, showed a naïveté sometimes that was simply unsettling, as unsettling as his commonsensical to-the-point reasoning.
    “But suppose I use my free will to decide to go
on
with this absurd existence, as you call it.… ”
    “Well, if you really
choose
that … to go on living … then you live with that choice facing you every moment of your life. You are truly
alive
. Most people go on mindlessly of course, they don’t choose to live. That’s because they do what they are told or made to do.… And think of this: when death comes unasked, when it takes you by surprise, it will rob you of even this free choice, because when you thought you were choosing to live,
it
was only letting you live. The only way you can exercise free will, defeating
it
, is by taking your own life.”
    All this in utmost seriousness.
    Jamal grinned. “My friend, you don’t see many philosophers exercising their free will!”
    Nanji smiled. “Well, they say that the body has a greater desire to live than the mind to perish.”
    “Wow!”
    Questions of morality and ethics, of good faith and