Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (13 page)

In the back room of G.C. Kapitan & Son Vegetarian Restaurant, from time to time a clandestine political meeting took place. To an outsider, it looked like a group of "coolie" traders slurping curry in a "coolie" eatery. Only a select few knew their real business: perhaps discussing the latest disappearances and arrests, perhaps formulating a strategy for joint action with other nonwhite communities.

Among the Indians, these men and others continued to organize themselves racially. But alongside and even within the old Gandhian institutions, a new vision was coming into focus. Gandhi had pushed the Indians to have pride in themselves as
subjects
of the empire, entitled to equal rights on that basis. Apartheid radicalized a generation of activists who began to conceive of themselves as, at last,
citizens.

Some were outspoken, such as Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo, leaders of the Natal Indian Congress. Dadoo was the author of such seditious pamphlets as "Facts About the Ghetto Act" (1946) and "South Africa—On the Road to Fascism" (1948), and an organizer of massive Indian protests against apartheid. He, Naicker, and other activists could be seen at G.C. Kapitan's from time to time, though never in large enough numbers to draw too much attention.

Unlike their predecessors, these activists did not see themselves as Indians who merely lived in South Africa. Instead, they were South Africans who happened to be Indian: sons of the soil, as much as any other. The distinction between noun and adjective was crucial. They initiated coalitions with black Africans—casting their lot at last, as Nehru had recommended, with the natives of their land. Solidarity was perhaps the Indians' best hope for escaping the pitfalls of pariah capitalism.

In Durban, I stayed with Ganda's grandson's family in the old Grey Street apartment with its sunny courtyard, balcony, and close-up view of the mosque. One day I ventured to the city's local-history museum. In the United States such museums are filled with busts of the city's founding fathers, early baby carriages and wagon wheels, fragments of newspaper. But here, the local history is apartheid. If I was lucky, I thought, I might discover some useful facts about Durban that would put my great-great-uncle's story in a larger context.

The museum is housed in an elegant old building that was once the city's Native Affairs Department. Here, black and brown South Africans stood in endless queues to appeal to white bureaucrats for passes, permits, all the bits of paper that upheld the apartheid regime. Wandering through the rooms, I ended up in what had been the segregated post office, next to the old ricksha licensing department. Several displays detailed the rise of the city's segregated neighborhoods. In a back corner I began reading about Durban's "Little India," the Grey Street area. Photographs showed Indian cinema halls, markets, and evidence that this ethnic clustering was not consensual: three white men in suits, squinting against the sun, were identified by a caption as the "three-man committee of the Group Areas Board," charged with implementing complete segregation of the city in 1969.

As I scanned the photos, I saw a face I recognized: my host, standing in front of the restaurant his grandfather had started. Others showed Ganda himself; there he was in the restaurant in 1947, celebrating India's independence. A glass case nearby displayed receipts and stationery from his restaurant, and a plaque on the wall gave a brief history of Ganda's professional life.

He had opened the restaurant in 1912, and counted among his customers "working class people as well as prominent figures ... Indira Gandhi, Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, Ahmed Deldat and footballer, Bruce Grobelaar." The eatery was notable for its strict vegetarianism and was known as "a place where one could get a good meal at a reasonable price." The plaque credited Ganda with inventing the "beans bunny."

At home, over a meal and a pile of old photographs, I asked my cousins about their grandfather's life. The eldest daughter insisted again and again, "Grandfather was a real rags-to-riches story, you must say it:
rags to riches.
" Crowding around with their memories, they told me what they knew, recalling a routine that seems almost mythic:

At 2
A.M.
Ganda rose to start the wood fires.

At 4
A.M.
the staff arrived, quietly making their way upstairs to change into uniforms and aprons before going downstairs where the stoves and ovens were hot and ready for work.

At 5
A.M.
Ganda presided over prayer hour, when the family and staff greeted the day by gathering around a sacred fire to chant ancient Hindu hymns, including the auspicious
gayatri
mantra: "O Giver of Life, Remover of pain and sorrow, Bestower of happiness, O Creator of the Universe: May we receive Thy supreme sin-destroying light, may Thou guide our intellect in the right direction." Together they offered food and flowers to the gods, along with an appeal for blessings to begin the day.

At 6
A.M.
Ganda opened the shop, and let the staff take over as he went to bathe and have his own morning tea. Soon the workday began in earnest, the shop filling with tea drinkers and then emptying again just in time for the lunch crowd. After lunch he took off his apron and lay down for a nap, then at 3
P.M.
called it a day in order to do what he termed his community work. By the 1960s he served in leadership roles in several community institutions: the social Gujarati Mandal, the religious Divine Life Society of South Africa, and the Surat Hindu Association, of which he was vice chairman for ten years. Many of the Khatris belonged to this latter organization; they were social and civic-minded, and raised money for the occasional disaster in India. They did not engage in politics, and they had nothing to do with Africans. Their main activities were holiday feasts and a year-round Gujarati school, where the community's children gathered in the late afternoons and weekends to study the mother tongue and the religion of their ancestors.

At 6
P.M.
came evening prayer, then dinner; unlike other shopkeepers, who sometimes ate in family shifts (men first, women later), Ganda had a policy that the family must sit together at dinnertime. Each meal was preceded by the gayatri mantra again, chanted three times.

At 7
P.M.
the shop closed, and he made his after-dinner rounds, traveling to West Street to place orders for the next day or two, perhaps buying a toy now and then for his grandchildren. Then he went to bed, only to start again in a few hours.

On another day, Ganda's grandchildren took me to visit a Kapitan cousin who, they said, had been active in the anti-apartheid movement. I was eager to meet him, since most of the Khatri community members I had encountered were decidedly ambivalent about the onset of black majority rule, as Ganda would have been.

The cousin greeted us from behind the counter of a small video-rental store that he was running with his wife, in what was once a working-class Indian neighborhood but was becoming, post-segregation, racially mixed. One of his eyes was slightly off-center, out of sync with the other, as if he were seeing something else entirely. And indeed, his perspective was different from that of other Gujaratis, many of whom continue to view black Africans as a savage threat.

"I have seen our own people shoot a man for stealing a loaf of bread—I have seen it," he told me, grief written in the lines of his face. From a long habit of secrecy, he declined to be referred to by name; let us call him, then, Raman.

As a child in the 1950s, Raman kicked a soccer ball around with a racially mixed group of teenagers in his neighborhood, which was not yet strictly segregated. In the volatile protest years that followed, many young people were radicalized; some of the older boys joined up with the activist African National Congress and brought him along to meetings. As a teenager he too enlisted, and by his twenties he was traveling regularly into the townships, the immense, semi-urban ghettos to which most Africans were confined, to organize and bring relief.

As Ganda was serving up bunny chows and endless cups of tea to the Indian community and its leaders, Raman and other activists were walking the muddy alleys of the townships, their feet learning the textures of the bitter red soil. As Ganda raised funds for and organized functions at the Gujarati school, Raman and his comrades were organizing student walkouts and protests and dreaming of a new South Africa.

By the late 1970s, the ANC was a banned organization, with most of its leaders in prison or in exile; it began to organize a military wing decamped just outside South Africa's borders. In this environment, everyone was a potential government spy or collaborator. Raman married, kept up appearances, and hid his activities even from his wife. Many of his comrades were arrested; some were killed. It was simply safer for her not to know. Maintaining a low profile, he managed both to resist and to survive.

***

Survival and resistance, in those years, meant something different to everyone. Ganda's grandchildren see his entire bearing, his posture and immaculate attire, as resistance: a statement that whatever laws were passed, he carried his dignity with him. He wore pressed shirts, carefully creased pants, suspenders, and, often, a topcoat and smart black Nehru cap. He was rotund but never sloppy, his mustache neatly combed, his shoes shined. And amidst the uncertainty of his times, he cooked.

One grandson recalls the bakery delivering a thousand loaves of bread on peak days. During festivals marking the Hindu and Muslim holy days, business was so brisk that the family and staff did not have time to sort coins into the cash register but instead stuffed them into large garbage sacks and weighed them, to estimate the take. Hundreds or thousands of sweets, samosas, and of course bunny chows left the kitchen each week. Everyone in the family worked in shifts, girls and boys alike. The upstairs flat, with its open courtyard, became an annex to the restaurant: Amba and her daughter-in-law and granddaughters chopped onions and tomatoes, washed buckets of beans, shaped thousands of sweets with hands that knew the exact weight and size of a
laddoo
or a
pendo.

With the consolidation of the apartheid government's power, from the 1950s onward, Indian and African neighborhoods were bulldozed, raided, terrorized; thousands and then hundreds of thousands were forced to move to new "locations," residential areas without running water, plumbing, sewage, or electricity. Thousands more were denied licenses to trade, even where they had been running businesses for generations. Grey Street was "frozen," with no new property acquisition or building allowed after 1957. Then in 1971 it was designated a strictly residential area, and all existing businesses were threatened with removal.

Ganda must have been glad he was only a tenant, that he had never taken the step of owning property; his potential losses were limited. Protests were filed. Nothing changed. In the end perhaps two things saved Ganda and his neighbors from displacement. First, Grey Street was already segregated as an Indian area, thanks to the white merchants of Natal early in the century. Second, to stop Indians from coming to Grey Street, the mosque would have had to be demolished, an act that surely would have caused an international outcry. It dominated the skyline, solid, a mass that even a white infidel could not raze. Perhaps some things were sacred after all.

As we drove through Durban one day, one of Ganda's grandsons pointed out the market areas: the African herb market, and the Indian "squatters" market where fruits and vegetables were sold by farmers from the countryside (who squatted next to their goods). The stalls were lined up on a steep concrete ramp that seemed to arc into nowhere.

It was not an architectural illusion. The markets had once been at ground level, but the apartheid government wanted to keep Africans and Indians out of the city center. The stalls were evacuated, then demolished; the demolition was to make way for a highway, the government said. But only the ramp was built, climbing from nowhere to nowhere. And there it remained, evidence of race hate in massive concrete, a scar on the landscape; a memory.

Perhaps it was during this time, through the years of struggle, that Ganda began to feel like a South African: to think, to act, to breathe as a South African.

Motiram's roots in Fiji were scarcely a decade old when he died; Maaji, surely, felt Indian to the end. But Ganda lived sixty-seven of his seventy-eight years in Durban. Perhaps there was no precise moment, only a feeling that grew over time—when he first held the papers bearing his new name, when he hung this new name over the storefront, when he created his own version of the bunny chow, when he watched his grandchildren begin to toddle. Despite the white perceptions, despite even the habits of his own people, surely he was not a foreigner all that time. His hometown ties were strong, and when he made enough money, he donated some of it for a clinic in the village in India, then a school in his wife's name. But India became a foreign land, and he a visitor and tourist when he went there, always returning home to the segregated airports of South Africa, with their W
HITES
O
NLY
and N
ON
W
HITES
O
NLY
signs.

In 1972, at age seventy-eight, surrounded by his family in the apartment on Grey Street, Ganda died peacefully, of simple old age. His obituary was published in both of the city's white-run newspapers. In the
Natal

Mercury,
it appeared on page 7 along with other ethno-specific items: an Indian wedding announcement, ads for Indian-only apartments, a Dale Carnegie course for Indians, an update on the squatters' market controversy that was then raging, and the doublespeak news that "Indian areas to the north of the city will be transformed into beautiful residential suburbs through town planning."