Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (17 page)

More than fifteen years had passed since Benkor had put on silver anklets and a modest but freshly pressed sari and walked to her in-laws' house. The daughter she had left there was nearly grown. In the new land, Benkor had borne two more girls. She was married to a good man, and though they were working hard, they were no longer at the edge of poverty. Her days were filled with raising the children, tending chickens and goats, cooking three meals a day on a woodstove, grinding her own grain in a hand-cranked mill, carrying clothes and dishes to the river to wash them, and filling the kerosene lamps at dusk.

What she wanted now was what, twice, had eluded her. Twice, a son had slipped from her womb and failed to survive: one a miscarriage, one stillborn. Narotam's brothers had no sons, either; the family name could die out in one generation. Though Benkor lived far from her in-laws and the land where she grew up, she had brought with her at least some of the old ways. Her deepest desire now was for a baby boy.

So she prayed to the family goddess. Benkor made a vow, a kind of bargain that is common among our people: If You grant me a son, I will not indulge in new clothes for him for one year.

The goddess responded. Narotam and Benkor named their only son Champak, after the frangipani tree with its fragrant yellow flowers that grew in both the soil of Gujarat and the soil of Fiji. Though he was the child of a tailor, nursed to the clickety-clack of sewing machines, Champak did not wear new clothes until his first birthday.

Narotam and Benkor's last child, Bhanu, my mother, was born in 1946. A year later, the independence for which my grandparents and millions of other Indians had struggled and prayed came to India at last.

On the subcontinent, two nations were being carved from the empire, and the parturition was bloody. Riots, mass rapes, and mob murders took place as Hindus and Muslims crossed the lines—Hindus into the new India, Muslims into the new Pakistan—that had looked so neat and tidy on the maps approved in England. Independence and the trauma of partition would launch a new wave of diaspora, as people from the new borderlands fled to third countries as refugees.

News of the violence did not reach the colonies until a day or two later. So the mood among overseas Indians on Independence Day—August 15, 1947—was one of pure celebration. In South Africa, Grey Street was festooned with ribbons and banners; restaurants hosted parties or put up sales on sweets, while activists looked hopefully toward a new strategy that involved negotiations between two sovereign nations. The final British count of their Indian subjects' diaspora showed 1,157,728 Indians living throughout the empire. One in four was in South Africa; one in ten lived in Fiji.

In Tavua, Narotam sewed satin dresses in the new country's colors for his middle daughters. They marched proudly down Tavua's main street, a parade of shopkeepers and farmhands and children chanting "Jai Hind!" ("Long live India!"), waving the three-striped flag of the new nation: saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for peace and truth, and green for faith and chivalry. In the center of the white stripe, in dark blue, symbolizing the hope of the masses, was the spinning wheel.

Within months, Narotam took his family home.

In Gandevi the family settled, like most villagers, into a house made of mud and reinforced with cow dung. In January 1948, Sarasvati's marriage was arranged—and Gandhi was assassinated. Relatives remember Narotam listening to the radio news at his daughter's wedding, and weeping.

Independence alone could not fix the problems of rural India's economy: poverty, drought, chronic unemployment. The forces sweeping the sons of Gujarat out to the colonies were as strong as ever, and in 1951 Narotam returned to Fiji with his young son, Champak.

Narotam's younger brother, Kalyaan, and his wife, Rukhmani, were still there, without children of their own. Rukhmani took care of the boy, who was a handful. Soon business was good enough that Narotam gave up the clapboard house in Tavua and bought half of a British-style bungalow in the big city, Suva. They all moved in, and he sent for his wife and three younger daughters. And his fortunes began to change.

The new house was uphill from the main part of town, across the street from a Catholic church. It had hardwood floors and luxuries unknown in either Tavua or Gandevi: indoor plumbing, electricity, a refrigerator. Narotam's family kept one bedroom, Kalyaan and Rukhmani—still childless—the other. The house was divided, like a modern duplex; the other half was owned by a fellow Gujarati, who was also the landlord of their business space downtown. There, Kalyaan minded a new retail shop while Narotam started a wholesale business. From Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, samples of cloth and clothing came to Suva. Narotam carried them to Gujarati tailors and retailers throughout Fiji, taking and filling orders. He learned enough English to befriend useful contacts in the government import and licensing offices, banks, and other commercial concerns.

When he was home, the house became a center for parties; the whiskey started flowing on Saturday afternoon and did not stop until early Monday, with breaks in between for barbecued lamb, garlicky chicken, rice and daal. His friend Ratanji Narsey, one of Motiram's sons, was a regular guest. At Khatri community events, several times a year, the two men often took charge of cooking giant pots of curried goat stew outdoors. For a special treat, they skimmed the fat from the top of the goat stew and mixed it with Johnnie Walker, their favorite brand of whiskey. With a twist of lime, the strong soup served as a perfect appetizer-cocktail.

In 1956 and 1957, Narotam's two middle daughters married. Their weddings were lavish affairs; hundreds of guests drank and dined in the house and the large adjoining yard. A whole room was set aside for the white guests—bankers, government officials, and their families—who sat at tables instead of the floor, and ate from ceramic plates instead of paper. Fans circulated the hot tropical air, glass ashtrays collected their cigarettes, and young nephews were dispatched to keep their plates and glasses full. Narotam shook their hands awkwardly, used his self-taught English to thank them for coming, to accept their congratulations and compliments on the food. Their presence was a sign that his family had truly arrived.

Soon Narotam expanded his wholesale business to other islands. Visa stamps from Western Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga filled his passport from 1959 to 1964. Prince Tungi of Tonga became a friend, staying in the Suva bungalow when he visited Fiji. Benkor and Rukhmani would cook massive quantities of food for the prince, who was so large that he could not sit on the floor and dine with the rest of the family. After some searching, they found a chair he would not break.

From his travels, Narotam brought back not only orders but also luxury items: frozen lamb chops and lamb brains from New Zealand, American delicacies that his children adored—Planters peanuts, Doublemint chewing gum, shoestring potato chips. Despite his newfound prosperity, he continued to use the skills he had learned in jail, knitting and crocheting, to relax. In the cool air of morning he would practice yoga on the veranda, concluding with a ten-minute headstand; one friend from the time describes him as a "health freak." Then he would sit in his chair on the porch and drink a cup of chaa, perhaps reading the English newspaper slowly, line by line. Grandchildren came, and he practiced nonviolence on them; "Give him a drink of water," he would say of a misbehaving youngster, calming him down in a time when strappings were a more common form of discipline.

After one's children are grown, a Hindu can enter the final two phases of life: retirement and renunciation. In retirement, a man has a chance to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the knowledge that his children are self-sufficient. Next comes renunciation, when he sheds the world's pleasures and obligations for a concentrated period of spiritual study. Sometimes this means making a pilgrimage, sometimes merely devoting more time to praying, singing hymns, studying scriptures, practicing yoga, or simply meditating. In the old days, it might have meant retreating into a forest ashram to pursue a wholly meditative life.

But just as Narotam's brahmachaarin period was abbreviated by poverty, financial worries plagued his retirement as well. His high-cholesterol weekends caught up with him; he suffered two heart attacks and by 1964 was no longer able to travel. Kalyaan, his brother, was more interested in the retail store than the import-export business, so they hired a partner to take up the traveling. But the partner turned out to be either a swindler or an extraordinarily poor salesman; he returned from his travels with copious expenses and few orders.

Then disaster struck. They were leasing the retail space, and the landlord was a competitor. When the lease expired, he refused to renew it. Their shop closed, opening again in a few days with the other man's goods.

Suddenly the cash flow to the household stopped. Narotam and Kalyaan tried to keep the business running in a smaller store, renting space in the Narsey's building, but the income was not enough to meet two families' expenses. The brothers began to quarrel.

Alcohol, by releasing one from inhibitions, makes a man more who he is. Narotam was a quiet man and a quieter drunk; after several rounds of whiskey and beer, he preferred to stumble home and into bed, where he would not stir till morning. But Kalyaan was hardheaded and abrasive. Drunk, he was loud, argumentative, even abusive.

Walking home with Narotam from the club, Kalyaan shouted at his elder brother over how they were dividing the proceeds or who had failed to pay the bills on time. Bitter about not having children of his own, he accused Narotam of draining the business to spend money on his children and their families.

Indeed, Narotam's children did need his help. He had sent his only son, Champak, to study in America in 1963. At the time, business had been good; now, only a couple of years later, it was difficult to keep up with the tuition. As for his daughters, two of them had husbands who seemed unable to provide enough to feed and clothe the children. Narotam slipped them cash when he could, but the last time one of them had asked for money, he had had to refuse. Furious, she had stopped speaking to him.

One morning in 1965, Narotam rose from his mattress on the open-air, slatted veranda where he preferred to sleep, and stumbled. Bhanu, who was seventeen and the only child still at home, heard the noise and woke her mother. It was about 2
A.M.
, and raining. From their own bedroom the women could make out his silhouette, staggering and weaving from his cot toward the steps. Thinking he was still drunk and disoriented, Benkor rose to help him toward the bathroom, which required a few yards' journey around the outside of the house.

As they reached the bottom step, Narotam could not hold back. He vomited into the rain, a large pool that Benkor would have to clean up in the morning. Then suddenly he squatted on the lawn. Benkor went back inside, retrieved an umbrella, and held it over him as he created a second large pool, this one diarrheal. She helped him back to his bed on the veranda, then slept a few more precious hours till dawn.

***

A Fiji morning is loud with roosters and dogs, a household's ablutions, cacophony of steel and aluminum pots as women prepare tea, breakfast, and lunch. Benkor rose, made tea, and woke her daughter for school, asking her to wake Narotam as well. When Bhanu went out to the veranda, though, she let out a shout—then raced to telephone the doctor.

Narotam's tongue lolled from the corner of his open mouth. His daughter had just learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation, so after calling the doctor she tried the only thing she could think of that might help. Stripping away the bedcovers, she placed her hands on either side of his sternum, and put her lips over his mouth. As she blew air into his lungs, she pressed down on his ribs, hoping to restart the rhythm of his heart.

In a few minutes the doctor arrived, and the women had to step back as he pulled a long needle from his bag, then thrust it into Narotam's chest: Adrenalin, a last-ditch effort to make the heart kick alive.

Then there was nothing more to do.

Narotam's immediate cause of death was a massive 2
A.M.
heart attack, accompanied in the typical manner by a sudden loss of bowel control and a slow ticking down of his heartbeat. Among the possible larger causes were financial stress, genetics, karma, and a lifetime of whiskey, cigarettes, and high-cholesterol meals. He never reached the final period of spiritual study, renunciation. A day later, they scattered his ashes in the Pacific Ocean.

At the funeral, his friends drank and drank.

Today, Dandi, where Narotam and Gandhi picked up their first fistfuls of salt, is barely a town—so unremarkable that on at least one modern map of Gujarat, it is mislocated some fifty kilometers north up the coast. Named for an ancient lighthouse (
diva daandi
in Gujarati means "stick of light"), it is the dusty endpoint of a main road, with a few ramshackle buildings: restaurant, corner store, and several shacks selling liquor to tourists from the neighboring "dry" districts of Gujarat, where Gandhi's prohibition campaign enjoys enduring legal success. In the main plaza, just before the beach, a man sells juice from freshly cut sugar cane, squeezing each long stalk through the teeth of a large steel machine set on the cobblestones. A memorial and museum are decaying near the town, showing Gandhi bending over in the famous salt-robbing pose.

On the beach itself, racks of fish are strung to dry in the sun, filling the air with their pungent aroma. The day we visited in 1997, my brother and I dipped our toes in the sea and took pictures on the beach, and I thought about my Aajaa.