Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (6 page)

In 1908, a member of Motiram's caste went to ply his skills as a tailor.

A year later, Motiram followed.

To pay for his passage, he mortgaged the ancestral land. He left two brothers, his mother, his wife, and two sons at home. The year was 1909, and he was not afraid.

Or: He was desperate. His father and three of his brothers had already died; he was the man of the house; he had to do something.

Or: They had not yet died; he was carefree. He was young and did not think of his own death.

Or: He thought of dying far from home. When he took his family's leave, none of them dared hope to see each other again.

Or: They planned to meet in two years. He would work and make some money and come home.

Or: He might never come home.

He would come home only once.

From the dirt roads of lower Gujarat, Motiram would have crossed the subcontinent by train, a three-day journey to the great eastern seaport. Once in Calcutta, perhaps he sought out the ancient shrine of Kali, the fierce goddess for whom the city was named, to pray for safekeeping. Waiting for a ship, he might have stayed a few days in "Black Town"—the Indian section of the city, described by one visiting reporter as "anxiously thrust away from sight by the aristocratic and splendid metropolis, like a dirty garment under a gaudy silk robe." Eventually he would have made his way to the "coolie" depots and docks.

There, throngs of men and some women gathered under the watchful eyes of recruiters. Ships laden with hundreds of emigrants each were sailing for Malaysia, Mauritius, Guyana, Surinam, South Africa, Trinidad, Jamaica—and Fiji.

With his life savings and a bundle of spare clothes, Motiram climbed aboard and joined the great migration.

Shipside, conditions had improved since indenture's dawn, when "coolies" were accommodated scarcely better than the slaves who had occupied their berths only a few years before. Public outcry in Britain and India had led to reforms in the terms and conditions of travel. Still, abolitionists continued to decry the "new system of slavery," while capitalists sought to paint a picture of opportunity and prosperity. Both sides had a portion of the truth.

By the winter of 1909, when Motiram boarded a ship, a typical cargo to Fiji consisted of 750 to 1,200 indentured Indians. A contemporary contract shows the British government of Fiji paying the firm of James Nourse Ltd. five pounds and fifteen shillings sterling "for each adult Indian (male or female) of the age of ten years and over landed alive."

The final condition was necessary; the journey took eleven to eighteen weeks by steamer, long enough for at least a few of the indentured to die of suicide or meningitis, the fiercest of the diseases that spread on the crowded ship. The paying Indian passengers—rare—were accommodated no differently from other "coolies"; everyone shared the same floor space for their bedrolls, the same communally cooked food, the same rationed water.

Steaming in toward Fiji, perhaps the sojourners glimpsed the Union Jack hoisted at their arrival. But the ship veered to the outlying island of Nukulau, white quarantine buildings stark against green jungle. From there they could catch a first leisurely view of the mainland curving around the bay where a famous Fijian king had killed his first man in a fierce canoe battle and where, in mythical times, the Fijian shark god slew the great sea serpent. In the harbor, the masts of ships from Sydney, London, Auckland rose like anachronistic telephone poles, triangle sails slicing upward against the flat sea and sky.

The quarantine island was a temporary holding site for those entering Fiji, as Ellis Island and Angel Island were for newcomers to the United States. Immigrants to Fiji—the vast majority of them Indians—spent a week or two in what amounted to a large barn as they were processed and deemed disease-free. One contemporary arrival complained, "When we arrived in Fiji we were herded into a punt like pigs and taken to Nukulau where we stayed for a fortnight. We were given rice that was full of worms. We were kept and fed like animals..."

At last, several months after leaving home, Motiram disembarked at Fiji's harbor capital, Suva.

Suva was all water, a revelation of blues and greens. The blue of distance; the green of abundance. The wharf was a long tongue lapping toward the opposite shore, whose dramatic volcanic peaks framed the bay. Turning toward land, Motiram would have passed under the palm trees that graced the waterfront, and walked uphill. The city was edged by jungle, sea, and swamp. If the day was dry, his feet tramped on red soil padded over coral that had been harvested from nearby reefs. If it was rainy, he slogged through streams of red mud.

For Motiram the difference between the old and new lands was also in the tongue. Of the three thousand free Indians who lived in Suva in 1911, two dozen, at most, spoke Gujarati. The rest spoke a local version of Hindustani, quite distinct from any known in India. This linguistic innovation—and its sister tongues that were developing in Trinidad, Guyana, and other indenture colonies—was a uniquely diasporic phenomenon, born of necessity. Flung together in these foreign lands, people from various parts of India blended their languages and invented a new way of communicating across regional barriers.

Among the colonies, Fiji had been a latecomer both to the indenture scheme and to the British Empire itself. Its fierce coral reefs and fiercer inhabitants, with their reputation for eating missionaries, had staved off colonialism for decades. Not until the 1850s did American and British enclaves become well established; in 1870 Australians moved in. Conflicts ensued, with rogue pirates and official navies duking it out at sea. Each colonial power also demanded, tricked, or forced the native Fijians to yield more and more of their land.

After one skirmish, the Americans claimed that the Fijian king owed them compensation for damages. But Fiji was rich in tropical beauty, not in cash. As the "debt" mounted, the Americans threatened war if the king did not pay.

Unwilling to tax his people into starvation, the king gazed at the warships in the harbor and begged Britain to take over his lands and debts. This "tragic episode," as Leo Tolstoy called it in an essay against imperialism, ended in 1874 with Britain taking possession of the more than three hundred islands of Fiji.

It was an early British governor of Fiji who brought Indians to his tiny colony. He needed to show a profit quickly; empires are not built of charity, and every outpost had to be self-supporting. He would not conscript the native Fijians, who after all had voluntarily given their country to the Crown. Besides, the Fijians were considered poor workers: they were under the illusion that the land would provide, as it had for generations.

Fresh from postings in Trinidad and Mauritius, where Indian labor had converted tropical jungle to lucrative plantations, the governor decided to apply once again the magic formula of sugar plus indenture. In 1879, the first girmityas arrived in Fiji.

Thirty years later, Motiram arrived to an established Indian community. Despite the language barrier, its familiar sights and smells must have been a comfort. Parts of Suva resembled any Indian city: women in saris haggling over vegetables at the market, men in turbans and dhotis walking the streets, whites in their official ghettos sweating in the attire of the colonist. An English guidebook of the times advised visitors to wear knickerbocker suits with leather leggings as a protection against mosquitoes. Swamps, snakes, and the heat troubled the English, who believed that their Indian workers had an easier time laboring in the savage conditions.

By 1909, enough Indians had served out their indenture terms that they were settling where they wished, farming and building, transforming the colony. Along a pockmarked road that ringed the island's black mountain, Indian towns were rising. As always in the economy of plantations, workers outnumbered their masters. Indians made up nearly a third of the islands' population in 1911, owing both to continued immigration and to the fact that the native Fijian population was shrinking from measles and other new ailments. One in four Indians was Fiji-born.

In Suva, free Indian workers were busy at the docks, loading ships with crops grown by indentured Indians on the plantations. Sugar was the main commodity, with coconuts and bananas also profitable; exports had tripled since the first girmityas' arrival. Indian hawkers filled the city's markets with fresh vegetables and fruit, grown on their own patches of land in the countryside.

The year that Motiram arrived, Fiji opened its first library in Suva, a gift from Andrew Carnegie, stocked with 4,200 books. The Grand Hotel was under construction, soon to become one of the finest establishments in the Pacific, where European guests could take saltwater baths and be "served in truly oriental style by white-turbaned waiters," as one guidebook promised. Government buildings stood white and majestic on the site of the old native village. Suva boasted a grand town hall, a museum, and streetlamps lit each evening by "coolies" bearing ladders and kerosene. The governor's plan was working.

Motiram would have settled in town among the free Indians, perhaps renting a room or a bed in a house with other men. He took his meals at one of the "lodges," cafeteria-style establishments where men without wives could buy cheap, hot plates of curry and rice. The commercial district contained everything to serve the needs of a small urban population: grocers, chemists, tailoring enterprises. Walter Horne & Co. Ltd. advertised:

OUR
TAILORING DEPARTMENT
WITH EXPERT CUTTERS and DESIGNERS
GUARANTEES
GOOD TAILORING
FOR
EVERY ORDER.
Those who are unable to attend personally may rely on
GOOD FIT by filling in one of our SPECIAL
MEASUREMENT FORMS, which will be supplied with
patterns on application.
STYLES—SMART
PRICES—LIGHT
SMART CLOTHS makes the MAN
IF
HORNE & Co. makes the CLOTHES.

Behind the scenes, Horne & Co. was a small factory, rows of treadle machines set up in a warehouse. It was here that Motiram learned the subtle dance of feet and hands, machine and cloth, that would give him—and his community—a foothold in Fiji. He became a tailor.

At home his ancestors were only weavers. "Only": those who made order from the chaos of clouds, the rough, soft bundles of raw cotton. Someone spun. Someone wove. To buy rice and grain, they wove every free hour of the day, men and women both, while there was light or while the fingers could feel the design.

That was in the old country.

In the new country the cloth came to him, woven elsewhere, by machine; he did not have to think about the weaving. About the weavers. Instead he learned to measure, to stitch. To kneel at the customer's feet, to raise one hand to the waist, to keep his eyes low, to remember the number: in inches, fractions of inches. To translate, silently, the English numerals to Gujarati in his mind.

To trace the patterns; to cut the fabric. To stitch. To thread the machine, to break the thread with his teeth, to pump the machine with his foot. To finish the seam. To cut the last thread.

To fit the customer. To kneel again. To adjust the hem.

***

He could not think about his ancestors the kings. He thought of his sons who would eat; who would come to the new country and learn to feed themselves; who would feed their wives and sons, and marry off their daughters.

Motiram sent some money home to his family, lived cheaply, and tried to save as much as he could. Horne & Co. offered a decent job, but wage labor was never the goal. His people believed that working for oneself, or in a family enterprise, was the only way to ensure long-term security. Taking a job in the white-run factory was only a means to learning the business, so that someday he could start his own tailoring shop.

Bent over a sewing machine ten hours a day, dreaming of a future when he could be his own boss, surely Motiram did not have hours to spend in sea-gazing. Still, from time to time he must have glanced out across the water, which in those days washed up to the center of town. The swells of ocean and river, the lush greens of taro, ferns, cane, palms, could not have been more different from the land Motiram had left behind.

Despite its natural abundance, though, Fiji presented obstacles: not only language but caste, culture, and perhaps simple homesickness. When Motiram strode a Navsari lane, everyone he met would know not only his thin frame but the weave of his clothing, his father's second sight, the genealogy he wore in his face, the waft of his mother's meat and spices, whatever family quarrels raged and were quelled.

In Fiji these were private knowings, comforts he carried only in his own body, mingling with the sweat of the wet tropics, the hot and daily rainfall. He had to learn to exist among strangers. At the factory he stitched and hemmed, and men knew only what they saw on him, a "coolie" body, or what he told them as he learned a smattering of English. If he spoke and worked carefully, if he measured his words and deeds as precisely as inseam, waist, waist-to-hem, then he would go back to mother, brothers, wife, sons, home, land—someday.

Someday
was meant to be two years, but in two years he had saved just enough to start a shop. Adopting his father's first name as his own last name, using the spelling someone gave him, he became Motiram Narsey. His tailoring shop, M. Narsey & Co., opened in 1911.

In a rented portion of a wooden building at the corner of Renwick Road and Ellery Street, in the main business section of town, Motiram began his new life as an entrepreneur. A hitching post stood just out front, for customers' horses; nearby were the post office, banks, and white-owned businesses. A few yards away ran a creek, and on its far side Chinese and Indian shops crowded together in congested alleyways. Down the street was the shop started by another Khatri, the one in whose footsteps Motiram had followed.