Oblivious to the strides I was taking in learning to be happy in my own skin, Baba would think up an alternative profession for me nearly every week. He and I both saw quite clearly by now that I hadn’t the brains to study engineering or medicine, I wasn’t gritty enough for the armed forces, nor well informed enough for the Administrative Service. That exhausted almost every possibility that then existed for a young man to plan his future around. In desperation Baba would then talk of the Foreign Service or law (‘you are a good debater so...’) then the police (Shah Mamu had recently become a
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