Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (29 page)

One day Kaashi discovered them, and she was outraged. In a screaming fit she made her displeasure clear. Perhaps it was as if all her fears about the corrupting influence of the arts had come true; he was misusing a gift that should be used, if at all, only for religious images, not for such filth.

Somehow that summer passed, and in December 1962, Bhupendra—frivolous or not, lusty or pious—made both of his parents proud. He became one of only five from his original class of twenty-five to graduate.

Once again Ratanji was in India, this time to escort his most educated son to Fiji. There, Bhupendra was at last to be taken into the fold of the family business. Kaashi thought it was high time her son married; at twenty, he was more than ready by the standards of the community. His "art," along with his habit of acquiring female pen pals, must have been in the back of her mind; on a rare family vacation in the hill station of Pune, he had shocked everyone by hopping on the back of a motorcycle driven by a strange girl, who turned out to be one of his correspondents. A big biscuit-manufacturing family had a daughter the right age and would have welcomed an educated son-in-law in their extensive commercial concerns, but Bhupendra said no. He never saw the girl; he simply was not ready to marry, he said.

His father did not force the matter, instead taking him on the scenic route to Fiji. First, Ratanji shepherded him through the rounds. At the Civil Hospital in Surat, Bhupendra was vaccinated against smallpox and cholera, to meet Fiji's requirements for anyone coming from India. In Bombay, he obtained his first passport, containing handwritten permission from the government of India to visit Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, and Fiji.

In Singapore his passport was stamped with a landing pass, good only for the few days that the ship was in port. There Bhupendra was introduced to, and declined, another prospect fancied by his parents. In Sydney, he met a pen pal who showed him around the city. As they entered a department store, he bragged to her,—My father has a store just like this in Fiji. Of course, Bhupendra had not yet been to Suva, and had no way of knowing that the towering glass and steel department stores of Australia were skyscrapers compared with the row of street-level wooden shop-fronts that were the Narseys empire. He entered Fiji on September 6, 1962—by coincidence, the day Bhanu was celebrating her sixteenth birthday.

***

Bhanu had passed the tenth-grade exam, but with a B.

As her classmates began eleventh grade, Bhanu resigned herself to not going to school. By the terms of her deal with her father, she would stay home, learn to cook and clean, and become educated in the ways of being a good adult woman. A cousin was to be married in Tavua, on the other side of the island, and Bhanu was dispatched with her aunt to help out a week before the wedding.

But while she was gone, the high school principal paid a visit to Narotam at the shop. She wanted to know why Bhanu had not started the school year with her class. The next day a teacher who had taught Bhanu history and Hindi stopped by.—Send her back to school, the teacher begged;—she is a smart girl, she should study. And by the end of the week Narotam telephoned the relatives in Tavua.—Her teachers are driving me crazy, he said (in Gujarati,
maaru maathu khaai jataa chhe,
they are eating my head).—Send her back.

With this reprieve, Bhanu started working her way through eleventh grade as her brother was finishing twelfth. Champak, who had earned top marks in his Catholic high school, had somehow gotten it in his head that he wanted to go to America to study. He had already applied to a Catholic university recommended by his principal, located somewhere named Iowa; had shown his father the admissions letter; and had asked, and asked, and asked. Narotam's standard reply was,—We'll see.

So Champak waited. But he was not waiting idly.

Unknown to his parents, Champak had started dating an Indo-Fijian girl from the nearby town of Vatuvanga who was a class ahead of Bhanu. In his senior year, Champak had taken to meeting Sita nearly every afternoon.

One day sometime in the spring of 1963, shortly after graduation, the amorous young couple were ambushed. Acting on a tip, his uncle Kalyaan had followed Champak to the meeting place, caught him with the girl, and dragged him home. There, he faced his parents' wrath and tears.

Champak was Narotam and Benkor's only son, and the only male descendant of his paternal grandfather; all the others of his generation were girls. Only he could carry on the family lineage, and its honor. He had to, just had to, marry a Khatri girl, his parents told him. Or else.

Narotam shared his woes with his friend Ratanji Narsey—who, remarkably, offered a solution. Ratanji was sending his son Bhupendra to America in a few days' time. Perhaps a ticket could still be purchased.

Narotam did not have much money to spare, but given the emergency, he scraped some together. Did Narotam recall his own youthful love affair, in his case with the movement, and his own father's formula of migration as discipline, migration as correction? Just as he had been sent to Fiji to keep from becoming "lost" to Gandhi's political movement, he would now send his only son to America. He told Champak to pack his things.

Less than a week later, Bhanu found herself at the Suva dock, waving goodbye to her closest sibling and only brother as he disappeared up the gangplank.

Bhupendra had not expected to find himself bound for America, either.

Upon arrival in Fiji, Bhupendra was treated as an honored guest. Under his father's orders, his brothers refused to let him help in the store, since he was educated. There was no firm plan; Bhupendra had thought his father wanted him to open a pharmacy, as part of the department store, but the weeks and then months wore on with no talk of work. Whenever he asked, he was put off:—Yes, yes, soon.

By then his mother and younger siblings had moved to Fiji as well, leaving a distant cousin to occupy the homestead in Navsari. The family's migration was complete. But Bhupendra was growing bored. Amusements and outings with his nieces, nephews, and sisters-in-law wore thin; hanging around with the menfolk in the store, with no work to do himself, seemed absurd.

So he took up his favorite hobby. At the downtown bookstore, he bought a sketchpad, drawing pencils, and a set of watercolors. And he used his right thumbnail, grown a few millimeters long on purpose, for an invisible art.

As I look at his delicate etchings of 1963, it seems to me my father was dreaming my mother long before they met. The technique requires holding an image in one's mind, without benefit of sketch or tracing; the line of the thumbnail is the only tool. One image takes at least a week to make, painstakingly, touch by touch.

To see the images, one must be equally inventive. They have no color, only texture, so you must hold them up to the light at a favorable angle. Then a woman is revealed, leaning forward, her nipples erect. Or a face turns in profile, the curve of her cheekbone, eyelash, and jaw implying longing and desire. Or a girl walks into a canopy of leaves, nude except for her high heels. In the great tradition of Indian erotic art, the aesthetic and the moral are said to be merely different manifestations of the divine—yet it is easy to see why Kaashi objected to my father's portraits of girls, the frankly sensual arcs of their bodies, their gazes hinting at a romantic imagination that, surely, a Hindu mother does not want to know her favorite unmarried son possesses.

I do not think, though, that my father experienced a dualism in his mind between art and faith. I think he was simply an enthusiastic—the word in Gujarati,
hunsyaar,
can also mean intelligent, engaged, passionate—young man. He was absorbed in the process of drawing and painting, as in childhood he had been absorbed in the Sanskrit chants. In giving himself over to each with his full attention, he was performing what some might call the purest form of meditative practice. Perhaps he even experienced moments of grace, of touching the universal through the ordinary: newspaper photographs, pretty girls from his imagination, and wild hibiscus flowers that he tore from the trees in Suva and laid on the kitchen table, to render in delicate, meticulous still lifes.

My mother picked hibiscus to wear behind her ear, strung marigolds and carnations into garlands for doorways and deities, wove strands of jasmine into her braids. In Suva in 1963, as Bhupendra idled away months waiting for his life to begin, sixteen-year-old Bhanu was choreographing folk dances for local festivals and finishing high school, her future blank and uncertain before her. With girlfriends she mused over the ideal characteristics of a husband.

—He doesn't drink, said one.

—Or smoke, said another.

—He doesn't live with his mother, said Bhanu, and they laughed. To be a bride without a live-in mother-in-law would be a rare treat indeed; they all knew of the trials that could await one, the
dukh
—suffering—that a mother-in-law could impose.

For an example, they had to look no further than the matriarch of the prominent Narsey family, recently emigrated to Fiji from India. Why, Kaashi was known to be a witch—with the dual connotation that word held in both English and Gujarati. With her older sons' wives she quarreled relentlessly; one daughter-in-law was often seen running away from home, declaiming loudly of the suffering the old woman had levied upon her. Better to marry a man whose mother was dead or at least lived far away, Bhanu thought.

But it was musing in the abstract. In reality, Bhanu did not intend to marry anytime soon. Although many of her classmates were already betrothed, and her sisters had been married at her age, Bhanu had her sights set on a possibility that was, for her time and gender, a radical thought: higher education.

The grand journey of Bhanu's life to this point had come when she was a child. Born in Fiji, she had been moved back to India as a baby with her mother and sisters. Then an uncle came back from Fiji bearing the news that her father had bought a grand bungalow there, with a newfangled electric icebox that could keep food cool for weeks at a time. The uncle bought her a pair of shoes, saying she would need them on the ship. And then she was traveling across the sea.

Six years old, Bhanu learned to work the ship's systems to her advantage. She kicked off her pinchy new shoes whenever she could, roaming barefoot, outwitting and outrunning the elderly cabin "boys" whose job it was to chase her down and enforce the rule against bare feet. Ship life was full of fearsome adventures. Bhanu had never used a sit-down toilet, so on her first try she climbed up and squatted with her feet on the rim, and nearly fell in. There were separate mealtimes for children and adults, as well as separate Indian lunches and dinners; she organized her days to attend as many meals as possible. In a Christmastime bobbing-for-apples contest, she won the top prize: a box of white chocolate.

Now, ten years later, emboldened by her brother's example and her own academic success, Bhanu was dreaming of a bigger prize.—I want to study to be a doctor, she told her father.—Send me to New Zealand.

Narotam gave his typical response:—We'll see.

Bhanu knew what that meant. A young Khatri girl in Fiji might sooner imagine herself in a space suit headed for the moon than to dream, even secretly, of study abroad. Her people did not send their daughters unchaperoned to the movies, let alone across the sea.

And then Bhanu became the first girl of her community in Fiji to finish high school.

It is difficult to describe how rare my parents' academic success was at the time. In the merchant families of our clan, the notion of going to school was not even a generation old. My grandfathers had attended only a few grades, my grandmothers none. When Bhupendra was five or six, an older boy whose family lived on the other side of the village well was about to become one of the first Khatris to finish high school. It was a phenomenon so unusual that the neighborhood children came around just to see. Keeping a respectable distance, understanding that they must stay quiet, Bhupendra and the others would form a loose circle around the two-foot-wide desk set up in the courtyard. Then they would simply watch the boy study.

In both India and Fiji in those years, the British system of education was in place. Each student had to pass end-of-year exams in every subject in order to advance to the next grade. Sooner or later, most sons of the community reached an exam they could not pass, at which point they went to join their fathers in the shop—whether that shop was in India, Fiji, South Africa, or one of a handful of other destinations where our diaspora had spread itself.

As for girls, those who failed were prepared to wed. Just as often, they were pulled out of school in order to be married. Most of Bhanu's sisters and girl cousins had dropped out somewhere in the elementary grades. Only one Khatri girl in memory, Bhanu's friend Padma, had made it to high school; but finding the Methodist rules too strict—she was not allowed to wear the traditional dot on her forehead, or bangles on her arms—she dropped out. Years later Padma would tell Bhanu this was the greatest mistake of her life.

But at the time, Bhanu's friend was simply following the norm of the community. Failing or dropping out was no shame, for either boys or girls; anyone who kept going in school was deemed a rare intellect. You could count on one hand the number of graduates in the community. They were automatically set apart.

And it was this setting apart that would become a marker of both my parents' lives. For my grandparents, the stakes were high. Suddenly the world was bigger and wider; it could swallow up their children as easily as it might embrace them with open arms. Migration was no longer a desperate measure, as it had been for them and their forebears, a solution to an economic problem; it was a choice their children were clamoring to make. And it was impossible to know the right decision in advance. As the doors to many countries swung open, one had to watch one's children walk through them, and trust in destiny to ensure that the lessons one had imparted would hold.