When Ashif was a child, Mansoor found a magazine cut-out in the boy’s desk with the face of Colonel Sanders wearing thick glasses and that silly beard. Underneath, scribbled in Ashif’s babyish hand, he had written, “Dadabapa.” Mansoor was furious. His father was a distinguished man, and here his son thought he was an American man who fried chicken? Mansoor immediately instituted Saturday morning classes for which he marched his son into his office for a lesson in family history. Ashif would clamber onto his father’s office chair, his feet dangling high above the floor, as Mansoor told the story. “When your dadabapa arrived in Africa, he had nothing but two rupees to his name. Can you tell me how much that is?”

“Only enough to buy some bubblegum. But not the whole pack. Only one piece.”

“Exactly!” He patted his son’s shoulder. “Can you believe it? Your grandfather was a pauper from India. He was barely surviving—” he spun the globe on his desk and pointed at the state “—here in Gujarat. He worked in a quarry, toiling in the hot sun all day, breaking rocks, not to mention his back. And what for? To fill the coffers of other men.” He banged a fist on the desk. “No, sir!”

Ashif banged his fist on the desk, too. “No, sir!”

“Dadabapa was thirteen years old—that’s only seven years older than you, son—when he heard that many were building fortunes in Africa, men who were now owners of chain stores and underwriters to Arab, Indian, and Swahili entrepreneurs, whom stranded explorers came to for credit. Africa was their America. Dadabapa decided to take a chance. He saved enough money to buy a one-way ticket out of India and into the new world. He survived the wretched three-month dhow journey—the dysentery, the rats, and who knows what else—and arrived on the shores of Zanzibar in 1912. How long ago was that?” Lessons in math and science were always incorporated into each session.

Ashif reached for the calculator on his father’s desk; Mansoor slid it away. “No cheating.”

“Okay,” Ashif giggled. He scrawled sixty-five years on his notebook.

“Yes, very good! But there were already too many young men with similar dreams and ideas. So what did your dadabapa do? He was very, very smart, you see. He moved inland to seek his fortune. A new frontier: Uganda. There, he apprenticed under an Indian store owner, trading his labour for a space to sleep on the roof of the store and one meal of barazi and mumri, beans in coconut milk and fried bread, served at noon each day. He learned to read and write in Hindi and Gujarati, to balance the books, to negotiate with vendors, to upsell customers. He also learned many new languages: Swahili, English, Kikuyu, and Buganda. He even picked up Japanese after World War II. Imagine! The Japanese were keen on rebuilding their country—good for them. They offered unbeatable quality and prices, making it essential to do business with them. Your grandfather traded his chisel for a pen, his dhoti for a business suit, and became a new man. In a matter of a few years, he changed the course of thousands of years of family history, like turning a steel ship with his bare hands.”