I had planned to return to Lahore to join the college as an English student of MA. But something happened which changed my course. I chanced to meet a Professor who said I should migrate to Allahabad University where I could do both MA and Law in a period of two years. My father-in-law had some relatives in Agra who helped me to get admission in a college there.

The visits to Cairo (Illinois) totally transformed my life. I made my decision on the bus leaving there that I would commit my life to the movement of social justice and Black rights. I knew I would use whatever I learned at college for the struggle of black equality and black liberation.

He studied at Cambridge University’s Catherine College and became barrister from the Inner Temple of London. He could not complete his parents’ dream of appearing for ICS examination due to severe bout of illness. When he returned to India, he began practicing law in the Lahore High Court in 1928. In October that year, his father took him to Guwahati in Assam to take care of some paternal property, which included a few hundred acres of land in and around Guwahati. Thus the Ahmed family connection to Assam, which had been severed abruptly by his father’s posting to the northwest many years ago was restored... and two years later he returned in 1931 to become a primary member of the Congress, a move which greatly influenced his future development. **In: p. 49

America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes... My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch.

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend — about what, I don’t recall — and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

When I first went there I discovered an entirely new approach of looking at life. It was as if I had sudden awakened from deep slumber.

“I wanted to be in a place where I can start a new life, I needed to start a new life in a place where I’ve never experienced what I’ve experienced. At that time, it was for me to start a new life, through a journey of healing. Leaving Rwanda was easy for me because of the trauma experiences I have had. So I felt like I needed to be in a different place. It happened to be that I came to America because my cousin was here.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

The centre of the town was swathed in red flags. It was my first demonstration and one that I remember to this day. The city was Lahore, which for many centuries had been a much envied metropolis in Northern India. Then the last conquerors had departed, leaving behind a divided subcontinent. The old town had become part of a new country – Pakistan. The founder of this state, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, an agnostic, had cynically used religion to create a 'Muslim nation'. Jinnah had expressed the hope that Pakistan would, despite everything, remain a secular state, but the logic of history had proved fatal. All the Hindu and Sikh families in Lahore had fled across confessional frontiers. Little ‘Lahores’ had sprung up in Delhi.

…what happened outside the courthouse that day was the turning point in my life.

On 9/11 I was a college student. Those attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and in the skies reoriented the trajectory of my life- and the lives of an entire generation.

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.

Two years ago (1998) I was a student in high school. I never thought I'm going to go on a plane, leave Lagos and leave my mom and dad.... It all happened all of a sudden.

He felt that he had his destiny in his grasp. He was more alive than he could ever remember having been; his mind and attention were pointed focused toward a goal. For the first time in his life he moved consciously between two sharply defined poles: he was moving away from the threatening penalty of death, from the death-like times that brought him that tightness and hotness in his chest; and he was moving toward that sense of fullness he had so often but inadequately felt in magazines and movies.