Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (10 page)

And he had graduated from his early protest tactics, filing petitions and writing pointed letters to the editor, to taking the initiative—by staging mass actions. In one dramatic moment in 1906, Gandhi had gathered hundreds of Indians who together vowed, before God, to resist draconian regulations that required all Indians to be registered and fingerprinted like criminals and that allowed police officers to search houses and demand domicile certificates at any time, on punishment of deportation. They burned their certificates on a massive pyre. It became "shameful," Gandhi wrote, to refer to such nonviolent resistance using English words. His newspaper held a contest, and the technique was renamed
satyagraha,
"force which is born of Truth and Love," or "soul force."

South Africa's Indians were trying out and developing the strategies that would become Gandhi's legacy to the world: peaceful defiance of unjust laws, long marches on foot, mass meetings, fasting, political oaths before God, and deliberate courting of arrest. They won small victories, suffered greater defeats; time and again, Gandhi turned to his core supporters, the Gujarati merchants of Durban's Grey Street and of Johannesburg, to help bankroll the movement.

Three generations later, every Gujarati in Durban claims a Gandhi connection, swears that the Great Soul once patronized his ancestor's family establishment. It is likely that Ganda saw and even met Gandhi, but unlikely that the restaurant fed him; by this time Gandhi was subsisting mainly on a diet of fruit and nuts, eschewing cooked foods. Whether or not the two men ever exchanged words or broke bread, what is certain is that all of the major events of the community passed by Ganda's front door. And because South Africa's was no ordinary Indian community, with no ordinary leader, Ganda's small fast-food stall turned out to be a front seat to history.

The marriage ruling led to two years of a massive satyagraha campaign. After thousands of arrests, strikes, police crackdowns, and even some deaths, the government and the protesters reached a compromise: the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which restored some rights. Gandhi sailed back to India on the winds of victory, carrying with him a new methodology of passive resistance. In Durban he was a homegrown hero; in India he was not yet the Mahatma, the Great One, but a young lawyer who, having spent twenty-one years fighting for justice in the diaspora, had managed to cause the empire some embarrassment.

But the price of victory for Indians in South Africa was high: an absolutely closed door to Indians outside. There would be no new immigration for any reason: no siblings or ailing parents; no entrepreneurs or laborers or students; no grooms, no brides. South Africa's Indian sons and daughters would marry, from now on, within South Africa. As it turned out, Amba was one of the last brides from India.

The closed door created an unintended side effect, entrenching the Indian population even more and solidifying its position as a population not of immigrants but of South Africans born and bred. By the 1920s, Indians in South Africa were no longer an expatriate population. Three in five were born in the new country. Among these were two new Kapitans: Ganda and Amba's daughter, Parvati, born in 1918, and their son, Dalpat, six years later.

As the family grew, the neighborhood was changing. A few blocks from the mosque, a flourishing nightlife district pulsated with jazz joints, billiards clubs, and ballrooms for dancing. Men of all races brushed elbows to bet on boxing and horses, and by the time Parvati and Dalpat were in primary school, at least a dozen Indian-owned cinemas were showing Hollywood films. Grey Street was no longer the swampy outskirts of the city; it was a busy sector in its own right, its shacks and horse stalls slowly giving way to modern buildings, paved roads, motorcars. In keeping with the times, the façade enclosing the mosque was completely rebuilt in 1930. A two-story structure rose up all around like a fortress: shops on the ground floor, apartments upstairs, the mosque itself hidden mostly within, like a secret treasure. Amid the material pursuits of street-side, its minarets were the only sign of its reaching toward the heavens.

Soon the owner of 154 Grey Street decided to remake his side of the block, too. Ganda was on good terms with his landlord, who agreed to renovate the humble thirty-year-old eatery with its outdoor kitchen into a wholly modern structure—part of the new, grand Aboobaker Mansions, named for the very first Gujarati in Durban, whose son owned the property.

For longtime tenants, units were built to specification. Ganda worked out a design for his ideal shop, then watched it take shape: a front room with glass windows for displaying wares and letting in sunlight, and long tables and wooden chairs for seating a few dozen customers. A full indoor kitchen with industrial-size stoves and ovens. A courtyard out back where firewood for the ovens could be piled neatly along a wall. Two storage rooms downstairs: a cold room for vegetables and perishables, and a granary filled with flour, rice, and daals. Two more storage rooms upstairs, for stocks of Chiclets, candy, cigarettes, and other easy over-the-counter sales. Also upstairs was a two-bedroom apartment where Ganda moved his family, reducing his commute by a block.

After their one-room existence, the apartment in Aboobaker Mansions was, if not a mansion in the modern sense, expansive. Inside, it opened onto an Indian-style courtyard where children played in the stairways and adults called across the railings, women visiting to borrow a cup of flour, to swap recipes and news, to catch up on the latest gossip. Inside, Ganda and Amba had their own room for the first time since Parvati's birth seventeen years before. The two teenagers shared another room, and the hallway in between led to a balcony that faced the mosque, where Amba hung her laundry. An inner courtyard led to a kitchen, toilet, and bath. Just below was the newly renovated store. The year was 1935, and Dalpat was eleven years old, the age that his father had been when he came to South Africa. The new sign proudly proclaimed the boy's inheritance and destiny: G. C. K
APITAN
& S
ON
V
EGETARIAN
R
ESTAURANT.

Around Grey Street, factories were springing up: shoes, clothing, leather. The owners were mostly white and Indian; the workers, mostly African. As black Africans entered the city in larger numbers, Grey Street shop windows took to displaying traditional African clothing and modern Western clothes alongside saris and salwar kameez. In such a stratified society even food had a color, yet the colors were beginning to blend; Indians could be seen eating "mealies," or boiled corn, and Africans developed a taste for curry.

***

The whites might have liked some of the new flavors, but the large populations of black and brown people who produced them were a grave problem. Seeking always to keep the races as separate as possible, and to keep crowds of black or brown South Africans from "swamping" the white cities, they produced a series of racial zoning proposals; a 1944 planning map, for example, shows an ideal Durban divided into zones for "Europeans," "Asiatics," "Natives," and "Coloureds." As officials considered the feasibility of various versions of such plans, they also enforced a steady stream of race-restrictive regulations. Some targeted business, that old sticking point between Gujaratis and whites. Others targeted black Africans, who were barred from entering the cities without passes, being on the streets after certain hours, and—most significantly for Ganda—eating in restaurants.

The date of this change is uncertain; it may have been a strictly local ordinance, or an old regulation being freshly enforced during one of many periodic attempts at shepherding the unwieldy mix of populations. Whenever it occurred, its impact was significant, for by this time a substantial portion of the curry houses' clientele was African.

Ganda and other restaurateurs, thinking quickly, realized they must begin to sell "take-aways." In search of a cheap container, in the age before Styrofoam, they hit upon the humble bread loaf. They invented what became known as the bunny chow.

To make a bunny chow, you need a loaf of bread and a scoopful of vegetable, meat, or bean curry. Cut off the end of the bread and hollow it out, reserving the soft innards. Fill it with curry. Serve.

To eat it is another trick altogether. If you just bite in, everything spills out—a steaming, spicy mess, dripping all over your lap. With experience, you learn to nibble gently at the outer crust; to cradle the loaf in one hand and gently scoop out curry with the other, using the extra bread that was pulled out earlier, or your fingers, so that nothing spills; to savor the complementary tastes of rich spices and soothing, yeasty bread. When the loaf is no longer overflowing, you grasp it with both hands and lift it to your mouth. Bite carefully, taking both curry and bread in each bite. Continue eating until entire loaf and all curry is consumed. Lick fingers and wipe mouth, chin, et cetera.

At a modern bunny chow joint, Africans of all colors can be seen chowing down. Watching them, black, brown, and white, it is easy to forget that the bunny chow was born of segregation—South Africa's extreme and relentless version of it.

The etymology of "bunny chow" is as uncertain as the identity of its inventor. Descendants of the pioneering Grey Street restaurateurs battle it out valiantly on both counts, without any expectation of settling the question at this late date. Ganda, a lifelong vegetarian, does seem to be the undisputed creator of the "beans bunny," the version in which the loaf is stuffed with a rich, spicy stew of tomatoes and fava beans.

As for the mysterious name, some see, Rorschach-like, the shape of a rabbit in the steaming loaf. Others hear it as a combination of
bun
and
aachaar,
a kind of Indian pickle that is not actually part of the dish. Ganda's grandchildren say "bunny" comes from
bania,
the British pronunciation of
vaaniyaa,
the name of the merchant caste in Gujarat—which in South Africa came to mean any Indian shopkeeper, regardless of caste or language. And "chow," they say, means simply food.

The precise date of the bunny chow's explosion onto the culinary scene was not, alas, recorded by any of its inventors or consumers. But a clue lies in the story of bread itself.

For even as the South African government was harassing Indian entrepreneurs and African customers, it was propping up other segments of the economy. To aid white family farms, the government had been heavily subsidizing local wheat and controlling wheat imports since 1917. Over the next few decades, the effort intensified so that, during the worldwide Great Depression, wheat growing was the most profitable branch of farming in South Africa. During World War II, to keep the consumption of wheat steady despite higher wartime production costs, the South African government began subsidizing bread. In 1941 the "standard loaf," a regulation-size loaf of brown bread, was introduced.

Subsidized and sold at the low, uniform price of five shillings a loaf, bread soon became a staple for all classes of South Africans. And this subsidy may well have been the tipping point that made loaves cheaper than rotli, cheap enough to be used on a large scale.

Rice, eaten mostly by Indians, and corn, eaten mostly by black Africans, were not subsidized. Shortages of other commodities persisted.

But bread became cheap, dirt cheap. As cheap as rhetoric.

"Vote for white bread and a white South Africa," urged the campaign signs of South Africa's newly formed National Party. The year was 1948, and the party's candidate for prime minister was a man named D. F. Malan, a seventy-four-year-old Afrikaner. Back in 1912, when Ganda was stirring his first pots of curry for the masses, Malan had made the pages of the
Indian Opinion
as a young politician representing South Africa at an imperial conference. The treatment of Indians throughout the British Empire was the conference's central issue. Restricting Indians, he had told the assembled leaders frankly, was simply "self-preservation for the Europeans."

More than three decades later, Malan was the leader of a party espousing a new policy that it claimed would solve South Africa's racial problem once and for all:
apartheid,
or total segregation. To keep South Africa as a white man's land, it was necessary to banish Africans to "homelands," except those who were needed to work for whites, and to send the Indians back to India.

Malan was a statesman, able to read his constituency's desires. The ultimate aim of all anti-Indian legislation over the years had remained consistent: to induce Indians to leave South Africa altogether. Although more than eighty percent of the Indian population was by this time born in South Africa, Afrikaners and their elected representatives continued to speak wistfully of repatriation, not peaceful cohabitation, as the final solution to the "Indian problem." Various governments had introduced schemes offering free passage and cash bonuses to those who agreed to go back to India and stay there.

A few went back for other reasons, like Ganda's daughter, Parvati; her marriage was arranged in India, where she had never lived but would stay the rest of her life. But for most of South Africa's Indians, established for generations—especially the shopkeepers and small landowners, those whom the whites most wanted to get rid of—life in India held little appeal. Ganda's business was thriving; his son had married, joined the family business, and made Ganda a grandfather. Three generations lived together in the Grey Street apartment. It was a good life—better than the one he could have had in impoverished India.

White South African propaganda made much of this. One brochure published by the Durban City Council in 1947 proclaimed that Natal was an "economic paradise" for Indians. The glossy twenty-eight-page mini-magazine featured photographs of large Indian mansions, Indian children in art class, Indian men playing golf. "Is there any country in the world where Indians are better treated than they are in South Africa?" it asked. "Why was it that so few of them were willing to accept a free passage back to their own country?"