Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (22 page)

To be a Narsey in Suva in the 1960s and '70s was to live a rarefied life: to be a big fish, albeit in a tiny pond. Every housewife in the city knew your surname, had bought a yard of cloth or a plastic hanger or a handkerchief from one of your uncles, cousins, or employees. At the town's major retail intersection, your family name stood in tall yellow letters, facing off smartly with the white-run department stores whose corporate headquarters were in Australia or New Zealand. The latest goods came through your shop, and you could satisfy any passion from audiocassettes to zoom lenses.

By day you were a boss; by evening you drank—Ranchhod was old enough now—at the Merchants Club. There, your account was always open, your father's photograph was on the wall, and someone you knew was always ready to share a round of whiskey, poker, and gossip. Ratanji, one of the club's five founding members in 1952, was president in 1967; his main feat was arranging for a giant refrigerator from America to hold sufficient quantities of beer, juice, and soda. The club was exclusively for Gujarati men, merchants, who were excluded from the white bars and did not want to drink in the native Fijian ones. On Christmas Day they opened it to wives and children for an annual party. Ratanji and his dear friends Narotam and Kalyaan cooked the goat stew.

With the duty-free boom and the income from Hazrat Trading, for the first time it was both possible and profitable for Narseys to consider a capital investment. Ratanji's ambition for the company could now take more concrete form—literally. Fiji's first concrete factory had opened, and with it the potential to build a real, modern department store.

Narseys occupied two prime pieces of real estate, dominating the intersection of Renwick and Ellery streets in downtown Suva. On one corner were Ranchhod's offices and the duty-free store, along with a few tenant-shopkeepers. That building had been erected of Oregon timber in the early 1900s to house the original presses of the
Fiji Times,
back when Suva first became the capital of Fiji. It was sturdy enough for decades to come.

But across the corner, the clothing and housewares departments of Narseys filled up four narrow wooden structures on the plot where Motiram had originally set up his tailoring shop. The decades had taken their toll. In 1966, Ratanji commissioned architects to design a modern two-story building for the site.

Blueprints completed in July 1967 showed how construction would unfold in three phases, to allow business to continue unimpeded. Mango and other fruit trees would be cut down. On a vacant section of the land that had once served as a vegetable garden, a temporary wood-and-tin shed would be erected to house the retail operations during construction.

The new building was finished in October 1969. On the ground floor, glass doors opened into a broad, vinyl-tiled retail area with interior fittings imported from New Zealand, flexible enough for the changing needs of a modern department store. Out back, rolling aluminum shutters and a modern loading dock allowed for smooth daily deliveries. An elevator glided upstairs to spacious offices, storage areas lit by skylights, and a tearoom for the staff.

It was the perfect symbol of Ratanji's grand designs for an empire: a gleaming two-story edifice in a one-story town constructed of wood, iron, and tin. Where other buildings displayed their posts and pillars, the new Narseys was Fiji's first curtain-wall building, supported by concrete beams and columns hidden behind a "curtain" of glass and aluminum. Its piling went down seventy feet into the earth—a foundation that could accommodate growth up to seven floors.

After its completion Ratanji went on an extended vacation. For the first time, he took his wife with him, perhaps hoping to satisfy a lifetime of complaints. The plan was to tour the Far East, where he had business contacts, visit their daughters in Toronto and London, and catch their son's doctoral graduation ceremony in Iowa City.

In Japan, they posed for photographs with geishas, ate bowls of noodles and strangely sticky rice, visited the zoo. At the Tokyo airport, they checked their baggage, weighed down with gifts for their children and grandchildren, for the flight to Toronto.

In the waiting area, Ratanji clutched his chest, gasped, and collapsed. Perhaps stress had taken a toll on his health, or perhaps it was simply his time. At age sixty-two, he was dead of a sudden, massive heart attack.

***

Only once in their lives did all eight of Ratanji's children gather in one place: at his funeral. As the body was flown in from the east, his far-flung children, whom he had planned to visit, flew in from the west: Kamu from London, Lila from Toronto, my father from Iowa. The others were already in Fiji.

Ratanji left two wills, one in Fiji, one in India. The latter, typewritten in Gujarati, was registered earlier that year in India "because I have reached an advanced age and whether I live or die is in God's hands." The rest was matter-of-fact, describing each beneficiary in legal terms. Ranchhod, for instance, was "my son Ranchhod, occupation shopkeeper, from Navsari, living in Suva ... Khatri by caste." Cash and company shares were divided among the children. The two youngest sons, my father and his brother, inherited two houses in India. The youngest son was to live in the family house in Fiji, on the condition that he care for his mother there for the rest of her life.

But Ratanji left no written instructions for stewardship of the company. Uncle Magan had died a few years earlier, during the construction of the building; his shares had been divided among his own children, with no one gaining a decisive majority. After the thirteen-day period of mourning for Ratanji, the board of directors met to decide the company's fate.

The Narseys board was not accustomed to meeting. It had expanded from its original size, five members with five hundred shares each, to thirteen cousins and uncles holding more than one hundred thousand shares among them. Minutes were filed regularly, in accordance with the law; they listed members present, members who sent apologies for their absence, decisions made, topics discussed. And they were pure fiction.

The truth was that Ratanji had made the decisions; Chiman, as company secretary and his father's protégé, had recorded them; and everyone else went along. Ranchhod was not the only shareholder who had been instructed, for many years, to keep silent.

So the official minutes of the meeting of May 16, 1970, provide little clue as to the discussion that took place. Three members lived in India; presumably the other ten were present. Ranchhod's version is that his brother Chiman simply proclaimed himself head of the company.

Ranchhod was galled. By now he had learned to keep his temper largely under wraps, at least around his elders, so he waited for someone else to speak up. Thakor ("Tom") was the living person with the most shares, and had been co-director with Ratanji; surely he would say something.

But Tom was nodding in agreement.

At last Ranchhod, summoning all the calm he could muster, said,—Brother, not like that. The board should decide. This seat is empty, who should it be? And if there is more than one person, we should have an election, do it properly.

But no one in the family had any experience with debate, disagreement, or voting. There was a shocked silence.

—No, no, said Tom at last.—Everything is fine; there is no need to do all that.

The minutes, as filed in the Narseys Ltd. folder at the Registrar of Companies in downtown Suva, state simply, "It was resolved and agreed that Mr. Chimanlal R. Narsey be appointed as a Director to fill the vacancy created by the death of Mr. R. M. Narsey."

Ranchhod might have hoped, but he would have been naïve to think, that a different decision could have been reached. Chiman had started in the company at age nineteen, risen through all of the departments, and learned the inner workings of management. He was in the number-two job before his father died. Everyone knew that Ratanji was grooming Chiman as his replacement, and no records indicate that Chiman's performance was anything but exemplary.

But Ranchhod would always believe that things should have been different. Word had come to him, he maintained years later, that his father was about to depose Chiman. A business associate in Hong Kong had told Ranchhod that his father was planning the move as soon as he returned to Fiji. Ratanji, the man said, intended to put Ranchhod in Chiman's seat instead.

What interests me about this rumor is less its veracity—a tale older than I am, regarding a company now dismembered—than the light in my uncle's eyes as he told me of it. Sixty-six years old, suffering from a rare and terminal lung disease that left him weak and coughing like a much older man, suddenly he seemed to me a mere boy. Still wanting, and working desperately to convince himself of, his father's love.

And as I write these lines I am aware of a great anxiety in me. Do I really want to revive the story of these disputes—reigniting, perhaps, a second-generation rivalry among several sets of cousins over whose father deserved to run the company? It can hardly make a difference now. But the hard feelings persist; in interview after interview, my father's relatives dig out old grudges like favorite scabs. A storyteller among storytellers, I listen; then I write, despite my doubts as to whether or not I have the right. For I, too, have inherited the family traits: stubbornness, quick temper, the bearing of grudges, and perhaps a deep desire to understand. We tell one another these stories over and over, as if the telling has some value, is itself part of the mesh that holds our family together, even if the content is of being torn apart. And from time to time we vow to stop telling certain tales, or to cut ties and step back into more distant relationships, or to put an end to the gossip and the quarreling altogether.

But these vows are like the pale petals of a Japanese maple outside my writing window this late March: beautiful, fragile, impossible to keep.

With the passing of his father and his uncle Magan—his protector and comforter and mentor, the only man who really understood him—Ranchhod was truly an adult. Thirty-five years old, he would now have to navigate the swamp of family politics alone. Because of his act of outspokenness, Ranchhod believed that his brother saw him as a threat and held a grudge against him ever after. Over small details and a larger vision for the company, they butted heads until Ranchhod chose retreat, of a sort. He would be king of his own corner of Narseys, and increasingly confined to it.

At home, there were other stresses.

His youngest daughter was constantly sick, and no one knew what was wrong; later she would be diagnosed with scoliosis so severe it required corrective surgeries. Then Manjula became pregnant again. Their fifth child, a girl, lived only a few hours. They dressed her satin and lace, and placed her in the coffin with a milk bottle in her arms.

It had been a hard birth, and Manjula was confined to bed for months afterward. It became clear how much work she had done, in her steady and unassuming manner. The burden of caring for the younger children shifted to the eldest daughter, with help from Ranchhod's sister and sisters-in-law, who naturally resented the extra work. Ranchhod had no idea how to handle domestic quarrels; Manjula's calm temperament had shielded him from them. From his children, he demanded obedience of a kind unrealistic for even those of the quietest nature.

When they failed, he took out his belt. And used it, beating the flesh of his flesh until, one time, the buckle hit so hard it drew blood. The child was crying, shaking, trembling; twelve years old, on the verge of adulthood, but clearly no adult. And not the real target of his rage, not the real cause of his frustration.

Ranchhod put the belt away, and never used it again. The scar, which would last for decades, was inflicted around the same time that the company's reins were passing to Chiman. There was so little that Ranchhod could control.

Years later, my cousin would recall this last and worst beating by saying,
At this stage if someone said it they would call it abusing.
At the time, though, it was a father's prerogative—and an echo, perhaps, of many generations, many childhoods. For everyone in our family has an opinion or an anecdote of the family temperament, variously described as hot-tempered, quick to judge, stubborn,
jabri
(shrewish) for women,
garam
(hot) for men. Whether they speak of it or not, everyone also knows the underside of this temper falling on the children, for which the modern English word "abuse" is an uncomfortable fit. No one has yet found a framework that can hold the whole telling.

Alone among my relatives, my uncle Ranchhod—after listening to my carefully rehearsed, pre-interview spiel about how this book would be public, how he should tell me if he wanted to keep anything off the record—shook his head impatiently.
That's your job,
he told me;
I trust you, dikraa.
Dear; daughter. Perhaps he knew he would not survive to read or vet these words; perhaps he knew that each storyteller makes his or her own version, and that the stories themselves belong to no one. And if any further justification or absolution is needed for telling this story, perhaps it is the weight and light of that trust.

I do not believe that merely airing a story heals it; but perhaps it can be a kind of honoring, of all the pain.

***

Over the next decade and a half, Narseys continued to grow under Chiman's leadership. Suva's duty-free business faded as other ports learned how to compete, but other enterprises sprang up. Narseys diversified into manufacturing, led by an energetic young cousin of Ranchhod's who had seen his first glimpse of the world while the two traveled together on a buying trip in 1977. Within a few years the cousin, eager to bring Narseys into the age of industrial progress, persuaded Chiman to let him start a plastics factory. At its peak in the 1980s, Narseys consisted of the plastics factory, the glass-front department store, Hazrat Trading, the Ratan shoe factory (named for Motiram's mother), a retail shoe store, an audiovisual outfit run by Chiman's eldest son, a wholesale liquor division, some rental real estate, a store that sold sewing machines, and major stakes in a flour mill and a sanitary-napkin factory.