Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (19 page)

Kaashi raised eight children almost as a single parent, saddled with all of the responsibility but little authority. Nor did she have companionship from her own kin; her three brothers had all migrated to South Africa. Her mother-in-law, Maaji, lived just around the corner, close enough to criticize and to claim the privilege of making all significant family decisions. When it came to power, Kaashi could exercise it only over her own children—and not always then.

Jayanti and Ranchhod were hellions, prone to practical jokes. Walking behind a fisherwoman with a basket on her head, fish mouths and tails wagging from its brim calling to be liberated, Ranchhod would sneak up behind her and knock it down. As the shiny fish were sent slipping and swimming through the dirt, he would run away, laughing. Navsari was small enough that everyone knew whose child he was, and within a half-hour the woman came complaining:—See what your son did! Kaashi had to pay for the ruined basket of fish and, worse, endure the humiliation of being berated by a lower-caste fishwife. To rein in her troublesome middle sons, she felt her only recourse was the belt.

In a narrow street with open windows, people could hear her children screaming. More than once, a beating went on so long that a neighbor had to come to Ranchhod's rescue, urging calm while counseling Kaashi not to hit the children so much. "She was a child abuser," one of her children would say later, without judgment or sorrow, but perhaps a bit of pity for the frustration that drove her to such ends.

Despite his antics, Ranchhod was a good student. His math scores were so high that he was chosen for a special program in which four boys from the local secondary school were sent during school hours to earn an accounting certificate in the nearby city of Surat. But because he and Jayanti were militantly anti-British throughout the 1940s, they refused to learn English.

Against their protests, an uncle—who in their father's absence served as guardian and decision maker—placed them in a school where the education was reputed to be better. There, English was a required subject. In the end-of-year exams, Ranchhod passed history, geography, Gujarati, science, and mathematics—and failed English, turning in a blank paper.

The headmaster understood the nature of the protest, and promoted Ranchhod to the next year anyway. Jayanti eventually consented to learn a little English, but Ranchhod would not yield. In the second year he failed English again, but was promoted again. He realized that if he did not want to attend an English school, he would have to take more drastic measures. In the third year, he made sure to fail not only English but also history, geography, and—most painfully—math.

The headmaster called him into the office.

— I understand why you are failing English, he said.—But math is your top subject. Why fail?

— I just don't want to study here, Ranchhod said. He was fourteen years old, unable to articulate more. The independence battle was over, and India had won. All official boycotts and protests were finished. Still, Ranchhod could not wrap his tongue around the foreign language.

At that, the headmaster hit him with a cane, again and again. Every few strokes he paused:—Are you going to study or not?

— No, Ranchhod said.

The caning went on, but Ranchhod's will did not break. Stubbornness was a family trait. The headmaster gave up, and reported him to his uncle.

At home, Ranchhod showed the uncle his accounting certificate and said he would practice that trade. But the uncle, furious at the boy's disobedience, ripped up the certificate, suspended Ranchhod by his wrists from a hook in the ceiling, and administered another beating with a belt. Again, it was to no avail. At last the uncle threw up his hands, and wrote to Ranchhod's father in Fiji.

It seemed to Ranchhod that he had won the battle.

Years later, Ranchhod's beatings were transformed into funny stories, nostalgic tales of the wild old days. He believed he had survived his father's absence and his elders' discipline unscathed. He grew ever more willful, his spirit more fiery, apparently impervious to their efforts.

Could this toughness itself have been a form of scarring, a kind of thickening over the wound? Such a question could not have been raised within the narrative of his childhood. Instead he was said to have inherited the family temperament, the stubborn streak of the Narsey clan.

The Narsey temper, alive to this day, is legendary, dramatic, and public. One of the last Narsey weddings I attended erupted in a shouting match, complete with people storming out of the wedding dinner, over a series of conflicts obliquely related to a decade-old unpaid debt and a lifetime's worth of perceived slights. From time to time this fury seems to possess us all, men and women, boys and girls, old and young alike.

Once when Ranchhod was a child, his mother asked him to retrieve some mangoes from the storage area, on the top floor of the house. He whined about having to climb so many stairs. One of his uncles, overhearing, was seized by a fit of anger so terrible he climbed the three flights himself, picked up the mangoes that lay spread all over the floor, and hurled them out the open window one by one.

The upper balcony provided one of Ranchhod's sisters with a place to scream and threaten to throw
herself
over the railing after one of her regular arguments with their mother, Kaashi. She was stopped only when Kaashi came up and shouted,—Do it, go ahead! Kaashi half pushed her, which called the bluff.

When Ratanji was home, he and Kaashi also feuded, seemingly at any provocation. Once he brought back from his travels an expensive bar of extra-dark chocolate. He shared it among the children, but they spat it out, unaccustomed to the bitter aftertaste. Then they cringed as he shouted at Kaashi,—What useless children you've raised!

What is remembered, what is passed on? Some of my cousins and I have wondered aloud why our parents, the eight Narsey siblings, have continued to argue fiercely all their lives. Neither age nor geographical dispersal seems to have dimmed their capacity for drama, which continues by fax and cell phone and e-mail, in broken English and transliterated Gujarati, sometimes unto the next generations. Is it nurture, nature, destiny? One cousin shared with me his theory: as children they had suffered, he thought, from being part of such a large, dispersed family. The boys were taken to Fiji at a young age, the girls married off, so that brothers and sisters did not grow up together, nor did they ever have the full attention of either parent. And as a result, none of them had been loved enough as children, or developed a solid bond with one another; they had virtually from birth entered into a fierce rivalry over their parents' attention, which somehow then continued on, decades after the parents were scattered ash, and which survived the further scatterings of geography, time, and migration.

It is, of course, just a theory; just one possible meta-story attempting to explain all the others.

When Ranchhod flunked out of school, Kaashi arranged an apprenticeship for him at a local tailoring shop. He worked for several months without pay, learning the trade. He was aware of the unofficial family policy: every boy who "finished" his education, in whatever manner, went to Fiji to join the family business. He did not know what exactly was in his uncle's letter to his father in Fiji, but he hoped Ratanji would make an exception.

But when his father's reply came, it did not praise Ranchhod's political stance or encourage his accounting ambitions.—Send the boy to Fiji, Ratanji wrote;—we can always use another pair of hands in the shop.

On August 15, 1950, India's third Independence Day, a ship landed in Fiji with one reluctant fifteen-year-old aboard. Early the next morning, Ranchhod was put to work as a salesclerk.
My father gave me a B.S.C. degree,
he would say later, with bitter humor:
Behind the Sales Counter.

The sales counter had improved since the early days, when Motiram Narsey had set up shop with a couple of sewing machines and a few bolts of trouser cloth. Now his descendants presided over a department store of sorts, with three divisions: an up-to-date tailoring shop with several sewing machines and a full staff; a menswear store selling ready-made clothes; and a haberdashery stocked with accessories such as handkerchiefs, ribbons, and undergarments. The customers were a broad mix of Indians, Fijians, and whites in search of affordable prices and high-quality brands. For a time, Narseys was proud to be the exclusive seller of Maidenform brassieres in Fiji.

But Ranchhod's English boycott was still going strong. When customers came in, whatever their race, he would greet them with the friendliest
How are you, how may I help you?
—in Gujarati. Most of them, of course, looked at him blankly.

A morning of this and Ranchhod was sent to the back room, to assemble coat hangers while the elders debated his future. The hangers came in two parts, the triangle and the hook; the two had to be united before they could be sold. After a few days of this mind-numbing work, Ranchhod was summoned for a reckoning with his father.

—What do
you
want to do? asked Ratanji.

By now Ranchhod had a clear enough picture of life in Fiji. All the men lived behind the store, and every morning he was wakened at 5
A.M.
; if he lollygagged, an uncle kicked him till he got up. The workday ran from 6
A.M.
to 9
P.M.
, except on Sundays, when they worked a "half-day," 7
A.M.
to 4
P.M.
Meals were communal, cooked by a kitchen servant from India, on an unvarying weekly rotation of dishes; no individual choice was entertained. Ranchhod's desire was clear.

—I want to go back to India, he said.

That, however, was not an option, and Ratanji's anger flared. It seemed he and his son were too much alike to get along. With Ranchhod refusing to learn English and Ratanji refusing to send him home, they were at an impasse.

Finally Uncle Magan, known for his cool head, intervened and agreed to handle the youth. He arranged for Ranchhod to apprentice at a local Gujarati tailoring shop, where he would not have to deal with English customers.

Among Ranchhod's duties, the most pleasant was that each evening he was sent to see if the draft beer was flowing at the bar next door. There, the proprietress took a friendly interest in Ranchhod. Though he was only fifteen, she served him a daily half glass of beer. Fiji was still not home, but it began to have its benefits.

Two years later, a tidal wave hit Suva. It washed through the downtown, filling buildings with seawater, tearing rooftops off stores and homes, and completely destroying the shop where Ranchhod worked. He switched to another, where he worked several months, until an owner wrongly accused him of stealing from the till.

Furious—
boiling mad,
as he later described it—Ranchhod went after the man with a pair of scissors, cursing and shouting,—I'll kill you! After that it was difficult to find a place for him in town. Eighteen years old, he could no longer evade his destiny. He ended up back at Narseys.

The family company was in a phase of expansion under Ratanji, who as Motiram's eldest son had inherited leadership of the firm. He had taken over from his uncles in 1946, and in the 1950s he set out to grow the company, with the help of brothers and cousins and, as they came of age, sons and nephews.

His greatest advantage was the abundance of sons born to the Narsey clan. More sons meant more hands at the rainmaking, less need for outsiders or even sons-in-law to have their hands in the till, to meddle in family affairs. Motiram and his two brothers had produced among them six sons, who looked to Ratanji as their leader by virtue of seniority; the next generation, Ranchhod's, was twenty sons strong. All but a handful eventually entered the family business. Most spent their entire working lives at Narseys, as Ratanji wanted.

And so nearly every year in the 1950s saw a milestone of growth. In 1952, Ratanji entered a joint venture to distribute and sell shoes. In 1953, he applied for and received a liquor license, on one condition: legally, the license had to be held by a limited partnership. On July 31, 1953, Narseys Ltd. was formed, with five partners holding five hundred shares apiece: Ratanji, his brother Magan, a senior cousin, and their two uncles, who were retired in India. It was the first Indian firm allowed to sell liquor in Fiji, starting in 1954. That year Narseys also opened a radio and electrical goods department, under the leadership of Ranchhod's eldest brother, Chiman. Ratanji's empire was growing.

But if the extended family was a strength, it was also a major source of headaches—as Ranchhod seemed determined to prove.

Still refusing to speak English, Ranchhod was put to work in the wholesale department, supervised by his uncle Thakor.

Thakor, a younger cousin of Ratanji's, had first arrived in Fiji at age twelve. Now thirty, he was short, jolly, disproportionately proud of his typing skills, and so accommodating that he allowed Fijians and whites to call him Tom. Making things easy for the customer was his first rule of business, and he began to train Ranchhod as assistant salesman.

Uncle Tom's business was wholesaling to small stores in the countryside. Together he and Ranchhod circled Fiji's main island by bus, carrying six large suitcases filled with samples of cloth, clothing, and accessories. On the first trip Ranchhod couldn't bear the pit toilets, which were rank and far filthier than even the ones in rural India. But he loved the adventure of travel, and by his second trip he had adjusted.