Introduction M.G. Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, narrated by the protagonist Vikram Lall, the novel depicts how his community, East African Asians, had complicated the colonial scenario of a white-black racial clash with their “in-betweenness.” Vassanji formulates a first-person narrative in a dialogical structure: the “in-between” protagonist Vikram is constantly impelled to undergo numerous modes of negotiations between different temporalities and localities, in Kenya and Canada. By representing the lives of the “in-between” East African Asians in modern Kenya, Vassanji succeeds in “spanning the literary record” of the Mau Mau rebellion. This paper will explore to the extent Vasanji has accentuated this “in-betweenness” of Lall. Synopsis M.G. Vassanji’s novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, covering fifty years of Kenyan history, focuses on neocolonial difference and the elaborate postcolonial re-evaluation of cultures. At the beginning of the text, the Kenyan people are on the lowest rung of the social ladder with whites and Indians in power. In 1965 after Kenya assumed political independence and Jomo Kenyatta became president of the new nation, an elaborate repositioning of the classes occurred. This tumultuous period contributed to chaos that fed lawless activities, realigning individuals in Western nations with Kenyan politicians and private citizens in the extortion that harmed the Kenyan people yet again. Vassanji’s elaborate novel depicts an international racketeering allowing some individuals like the protagonist to get very rich. The novel begins with a confession: “My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country’s treasury in recent years. I head my country” (Vasanji 3). As an Indian child growing up in 1950s Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the center of two warring worlds — one of childhood innocence, the other ‘a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood’ in which the innocent often meet with the cruelest of fates. He passes his early days playing with his sister, Deepa, their neighborhood friend Njoroge, and English expatriates Annie and Bill Bruce. Though he is a third-generation African, he understands that Njoroge is somehow more African than he or his family will ever be. The British police regularly raid Nakuru looking for Mau Mau rebels, who are terrorists in the eyes of Europeans, but freedom fighters to native Kenyans; one-day tragedy strikes the Lall family’s English friends. Haunted by a grisly description of the crime scene, the Lalls eventually pick up and move to Nairobi. Fast-forward to 1965, when Kenya has achieved independence and Mau Mau sympathizer Jomo Kenyatta is now the president of the nation. Njoroge, who worshipped Jomo from an early age, becomes a rising star in the new government. He tracks down the Lalls in Nairobi and begins an innocent courtship of Deepa, much to her parent’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Vikram continues to allow his memory of young Annie to define his life and, as a result, makes some morally ambiguous judgments when he lands a position in the new government. Telling his story from Canada, where he fled after getting top billing on Ke