Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (42 page)

Sometimes my mother's voice fills with the wonder of a child from a small, small place, who feeds her imagination with
Life
magazine, never thinking she might see with her own eyes the fantastic, almost unbelievable lands depicted there. She and my father have embarked on a project to put all of their photographs into albums, a project that is reminding her, she says, of a lifetime's worth of travels. The only place she has not been that she read about in
Life
in the 1960s is the moon.

"Perhaps one day," she muses, "when they take passengers there." She is barely sixty. After all that my parents have seen, it seems possible.

Joje, haahu maarhe!
Watch it, or your mother-in-law will beat you!
—Traditional saying used to warn young girls to behave

"
F
OR TEN YEARS
I cried.
"

In the dark of my apartment, my cousin Mala's words come through the tape recorder, strong and clear over a white noise that reminds me of rivers, though I know it to be highway traffic; it murmurs, this second voice, like the sound of time passing. I interviewed her on the road, driving up Interstate 5 from her home in Los Angeles toward mine in San Francisco. Our mothers are sisters, but Mala and I grew up on separate landmasses: she in Fiji, I in the United States. With a twelve-year age gap between us, I hardly knew her, though I had heard whispers and rumors that made me curious. Other relatives spoke of her past with a mixture of pity and admiration, and I hoped to learn why as we talked. We had six uninterrupted hours as we traveled toward a ceremony that would celebrate the first pregnancy of my brother's wife.

Every married woman bearing a child in our community undergoes this ritual, a day of prayers and special foods: the
srimant,
the rite by which the father's family seeks the blessings of the household goddess for the birth. During the ritual, our family would ask the goddess to accept the unborn child, and future children from this stranger's womb, into the clan.

It seems a beautiful sentiment, to arrange divine reception of the child before its birth, linking the reincarnating soul to its worldly home. But if the child is a girl, this acceptance is only temporary. When she marries, the family and its goddess will release her; the ritual will be repeated, and this time her groom's family goddess will be propitiated. For a married woman no longer belongs to her own father's lineage; she is not written into the family tree or counted with the ancestors in that line, nor is she to return to her childhood home as a family member, but only as a guest. And in every generation, some women more than others bear the burden of this shift in status, this alienation from parents and siblings, this journey to become a stranger-daughter in another's home.

As Mala's sons played with their Game Boys in the back seat and the golden fields of California's heartland rolled past, I turned on my tape recorder, and she began to tell, for the record, the story of her life.

Mala was the oldest girl. Both of her parents were born and mostly raised in Fiji; both had spent a few childhood years in India. Her mother, Tara, was seventeen when her marriage was arranged to Dhiraj, a tailor who was almost seven years older than she and who turned out to have little luck in business. They lived in a small shack behind his tailoring stall, and they got by because Tara's parents sometimes sent rice or other staples to help them make ends meet. Poor but prolific, Tara and Dhiraj were married in 1957 and had a son in 1958, Mala in 1959, another girl the next year, and another boy the next. This second son had a hole in his heart, however, and did not survive long after the miracle of birth. Mala's first memory is thus of female suffering: her mother weeping at the funeral, a deep and terrifying sadness. And then, the necessity of life going on: within a year, another girl was born.

Dhiraj decided to shift his growing brood from Suva, where numerous Indian tailors competed for customers and living expenses were high, to a backwater town on Fiji's northern coast. They would live in Tara's childhood home, where her father—Narotam, Mala's and my grandfather—had settled when he first arrived in Fiji three decades earlier. There, Dhiraj hoped, he could raise his family in peace and prosperity.

The town of Tavua lies somewhat inland, near a hill under which surveyors discovered gold back in the 1920s. The most beautiful local feature is a river that flows wide and dark blue through banks dense with taro plants, whose broad leaves bear a fecundity of green that perhaps only a woman who has given birth many times can truly understand. Our grandmother, who washed clothes and pots in the Tavua River and carried water to and from its banks, was such a woman; so was her middle daughter, Mala's mother; and so would be Mala herself. The taro grows, its roots and leaves are dug up for food, and somehow it grows again and is never lessened.

Despite the river's beauty, Tavua lacks ocean vistas, so its tourist trade has always been nonexistent. Business in Mala's childhood was most brisk on payday, when the gold miners came to town to cash and spend their paychecks. One spending place was a small shop on the dusty main road where Dhiraj and Tara stocked such goods as cotton dresses, imported blue jeans, thin polyester shirts, leather sandals made in India, canvas sneakers from Hong Kong, and rolls of printed fabrics in cotton and polyester. The mine workers sometimes paid in nuggets of pure gold, slipped from the island's depths into their pocket depths, and these Mala's father or mother would inspect and weigh on a jeweler's scale kept for that purpose behind a glass counter filled with necklace-and-earring sets and neatly folded packets of underwear. With such earnings, D. Haris & Co.—for that was the shop's name—eked out a living for a family of seven.

But the clapboard house was showing its age. What with the constant maintenance it required, childbirthing, and householding, Mala's mother had enough work for two or three of herself. When Mala was ten years old, her mother suffered a nasty kitchen burn that left her temporarily disabled on one side, shortly after bearing another girl. It fell to Mala to care for the baby, Pratibha. Mala also became responsible for much of the daily maintenance of home and family: cleaning, cooking, bathing, feeding, fetching, changing diapers, and walking her siblings to the three hours of school they had each day.

Tavua's one-room schoolhouse filled up in the mornings with farm children from the surrounding rural areas; afternoons were reserved for townies like Mala and her siblings. Many of the town children learned just enough to write out a receipt and calculate a bill, then dropped out of school. Mala loved her classes; she went as often as she could through her junior year of high school, when she failed the year-end exams. She would have liked to repeat the year and try again, but her father decided she was old enough to start helping out in the store.

By now Narotam's half-century-old house had been condemned, and the land was sold. Dhiraj moved his family to a newer home; the store was doing well enough. Behind the sales counter, Mala learned how to run the register while keeping one eye out for shoplifters; how to restock the inventory; how to measure and cut cloth. She had a way with the customers, deftly unrolling the long bolts of fabric they wanted, or could be persuaded to want, for shirts, dresses, salwar kameez, and curtains. She was sixteen, then seventeen years old, and the community had an eye on her future. Marriage proposals arrived as regularly as new shipments of goods.

But Dhiraj and Tara were in no hurry to marry off their loquacious eldest daughter. They were a close family, and she was both a good daughter and a good worker: solid and capable, the one to whom her siblings turned when they needed to borrow strength—or a laugh, for Mala's eyes often sparkled with secret humor, and when she chose to loose her tongue, her wit was sharp and quick. Her parents wanted to wait for a good home for her, preferably one that was nearby, prosperous, and suffused with kindness.

In Los Angeles one evening during my interviews with Mala, her husband came home and surprised me with a sheaf of four pages that he had composed during empty hours at his parking-lot job, headlined,
I MadhuKant born on 01-01-1956 and my History how I grew in Lautoka Town in Fiji Islands.

Madhukant's story is written in blue and black ballpoint, in neat cursive, the pen having pressed down so hard that the words of each page are written over impressions of the words from the page before, in capitalization as idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson's. It covers his education, the growth of his family's business ("Wholesale Bussiness by Buy Variety Goods such as Canned & Plastic Packet food items, Cotton and straw Hats & Caps, Ready Made Garments, Insenses and Kerosene Light Stoves, from Big Chinese Direct importers. We 40 to 50% percent profit and Travel in Station Wagon Car...")—and the most romantic story anyone in my family had told me.

"Once I went to Tavua Town to Sell goods to shop Name D. Haris & Co," he wrote. "There my eyes fall on his daughter name Mala."

Mala had her mother's sturdy build, large curves on a large frame. At 5'7", she was close to Madhukant's height, and if one were setting out to breed packhorses or steer, one would dream of making such a match. Her hair hung down to her waist and was thick as a mane; her face was a smooth, tan oval, and within it her light brown eyes sloped slightly downward, creating a softness that might lead a man to imagine great gentleness, as of a mare or a she-elephant.

"The owner told his daughter to get a cup of Tea for me. When she brought the Tea accidentally My Hands her hands. She looked at me and I looked at her and she smile than I fall in Love with her."

Madhukant told his parents, who agreed to send a go-between with a proposal. At first Mala's parents said no, as they had to all other offers; she was still only seventeen, there was plenty of time, and better suitors might yet come.

But as it turned out, this bid was different. The old lady who was playing matchmaker came again, singing the family's praises: their store was thriving, Lautoka was only an hour's drive away, and, most important, the boy was driving his parents mad with his stubbornness.

—He will not marry any other girl, the messenger said almost beseechingly.—You must say yes!

If you are a good daughter from a Khatri family, there is a moment in your life when compliance and softness are called for: the moment of the marketplace, when your marriage is to be arranged. This is what all of girlhood leads up to, and it is a time when lowering your eyes, bowing your head, wrapping yourself daintily but not vainly, maintaining a quiet interior smile and neutered expression that is neither bodacious nor sullen, keeping legs and lips pressed together—all of these qualities serve you well.

Later, toughness is the primary characteristic of female survival. The capacity to survive any and all of a husband's ways, a mother-in-law's whims; to do the cooking and cleaning of a whole household, without rest or complaint; to adapt to a new family, town, sometimes country; to bear, suckle, and keep twenty-four-hour watch over children, ensuring not only their physical safety and needs but also their moral character; to have tea and sweetmeats ready for whatever visitors may happen by; to pitch in at festivals and weddings for marathon cooking sessions that may begin as early as 4
A.M.
, or last all night, feeding hundreds—these are only some of the tasks of a woman. To say here "married woman" would be a tautology, since all women are married—it is part of the definition—unless they are not yet married, in which case they are girls, or unless they belong to some curious other gender which never marries, tragic and suspect. But why dwell on the exception, unspeakably rare? Mala did not know anyone who hadn't married, she herself was healthy and normal and good, so of course she would do as her parents wished; they knew best, and had only her happiness at heart.

She was a joyful girl who smiled merrily at all of the customers, just being friendly, favoring none; none had made any special overtures that she could recall. Which boy was it, then, who wanted her above all others?

—The one from Gosons who comes, said her parents.

Gosons was the name of the Lautoka store, a play on the father's name: Govind's sons.

—Which one? There are two who come.

—The younger.

—If you think it's right.

—Yes, but what do you think of this boy?

—Whatever you think...

And so they were engaged, in January 1977. The bride and groom, with their parents and two designated witnesses, went to the registration office. A magistrate asked each of them whether they consented. In the evening, Mala's family hosted a cocktail party for Madhukant's relatives.