The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 120

Such a big judgement about a city I had just arrived in! But that
way of feeling was something I carried within myself. The older people in our
Asian-Indian community in Trinidad -- especially the poor ones, who could never
manage English or get used to the strange races -- looked back to an India that
became more and more golden in their memory. They were living in Trinidad and
were going to die there; but for them it was the wrong place. Something of that
feeling was passed down to me. I didn't look back to India, couldn't do so; my
ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a
similar feeling of wrongness. In Trinidad, feeling myself far away, I had held
myself back, as it were, for life at the centre of things. And there were
aspects of the physical setting of my childhood which positively encouraged that
mood of waiting and withdrawal.