Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  At 6 A.M. Ganda opened the shop, and let the staff take over as he went to bathe and have his own morning tea. Soon the workday began in earnest, the shop filling with tea drinkers and then emptying again just in time for the lunch crowd. After lunch he took off his apron and lay down for a nap, then at 3 P.M. called it a day in order to do what he termed his community work. By the 1960s he served in leadership roles in several community institutions: the social Gujarati Mandal, the religious Divine Life Society of South Africa, and the Surat Hindu Association, of which he was vice chairman for ten years. Many of the Khatris belonged to this latter organization; they were social and civic-minded, and raised money for the occasional disaster in India. They did not engage in politics, and they had nothing to do with Africans. Their main activities were holiday feasts and a year-round Gujarati school, where the community's children gathered in the late afternoons and weekends to study the mother tongue and the religion of their ancestors.

  At 6 P.M. came evening prayer, then dinner; unlike other shopkeepers, who sometimes ate in family shifts (men first, women later), Ganda had a policy that the family must sit together at dinnertime. Each meal was preceded by the gayatri mantra again, chanted three times.

  At 7 P.M. the shop closed, and he made his after-dinner rounds, traveling to West Street to place orders for the next day or two, perhaps buying a toy now and then for his grandchildren. Then he went to bed, only to start again in a few hours.

  On another day, Ganda's grandchildren took me to visit a Kapitan cousin who, they said, had been active in the anti-apartheid movement. I was eager to meet him, since most of the Khatri community members I had encountered were decidedly ambivalent about the onset of black majority rule, as Ganda would have been.

  The cousin greeted us from behind the counter of a small video-rental store that he was running with his wife, in what was once a working-class Indian neighborhood but was becoming, post-segregation, racially mixed. One of his eyes was slightly off-center, out of sync with the other, as if he were seeing something else entirely. And indeed, his perspective was different from that of other Gujaratis, many of whom continue to view black Africans as a savage threat.

  "I have seen our own people shoot a man for stealing a loaf of bread—I have seen it," he told me, grief written in the lines of his face. From a long habit of secrecy, he declined to be referred to by name; let us call him, then, Raman.

  As a child in the 1950s, Raman kicked a soccer ball around with a racially mixed group of teenagers in his neighborhood, which was not yet strictly segregated. In the volatile protest years that followed, many young people were radicalized; some of the older boys joined up with the activist African National Congress and brought him along to meetings. As a teenager he too enlisted, and by his twenties he was traveling regularly into the townships, the immense, semi-urban ghettos to which most Africans were confined, to organize and bring relief.

  As Ganda was serving up bunny chows and endless cups of tea to the Indian community and its leaders, Raman and other activists were walking the muddy alleys of the townships, their feet learning the textures of the bitter red soil. As Ganda raised funds for and organized functions at the Gujarati school, Raman and his comrades were organizing student walkouts and protests and dreaming of a new South Africa.

  By the late 1970s, the ANC was a banned organization, with most of its leaders in prison or in exile; it began to organize a military wing decamped just outside South Africa's borders. In this environment, everyone was a potential government spy or collaborator. Raman married, kept up appearances, and hid his activities even from his wife. Many of his comrades were arrested; some were killed. It was simply safer for her not to know. Maintaining a low profile, he managed both to resist and to survive.

  ***

  Survival and resistance, in those years, meant something different to everyone. Ganda's grandchildren see his entire bearing, his posture and immaculate attire, as resistance: a statement that whatever laws were passed, he carried his dignity with him. He wore pressed shirts, carefully creased pants, suspenders, and, often, a topcoat and smart black Nehru cap. He was rotund but never sloppy, his mustache neatly combed, his shoes shined. And amidst the uncertainty of his times, he cooked.

  One grandson recalls the bakery delivering a thousand loaves of bread on peak days. During festivals marking the Hindu and Muslim holy days, business was so brisk that the family and staff did not have time to sort coins into the cash register but instead stuffed them into large garbage sacks and weighed them, to estimate the take. Hundreds or thousands of sweets, samosas, and of course bunny chows left the kitchen each week. Everyone in the family worked in shifts, girls and boys alike. The upstairs flat, with its open courtyard, became an annex to the restaurant: Amba and her daughter-in-law and granddaughters chopped onions and tomatoes, washed buckets of beans, shaped thousands of sweets with hands that knew the exact weight and size of a laddoo or a pendo.

  With the consolidation of the apartheid government's power, from the 1950s onward, Indian and African neighborhoods were bulldozed, raided, terrorized; thousands and then hundreds of thousands were forced to move to new "locations," residential areas without running water, plumbing, sewage, or electricity. Thousands more were denied licenses to trade, even where they had been running businesses for generations. Grey Street was "frozen," with no new property acquisition or building allowed after 1957. Then in 1971 it was designated a strictly residential area, and all existing businesses were threatened with removal.

  Ganda must have been glad he was only a tenant, that he had never taken the step of owning property; his potential losses were limited. Protests were filed. Nothing changed. In the end perhaps two things saved Ganda and his neighbors from displacement. First, Grey Street was already segregated as an Indian area, thanks to the white merchants of Natal early in the century. Second, to stop Indians from coming to Grey Street, the mosque would have had to be demolished, an act that surely would have caused an international outcry. It dominated the skyline, solid, a mass that even a white infidel could not raze. Perhaps some things were sacred after all.

  As we drove through Durban one day, one of Ganda's grandsons pointed out the market areas: the African herb market, and the Indian "squatters" market where fruits and vegetables were sold by farmers from the countryside (who squatted next to their goods). The stalls were lined up on a steep concrete ramp that seemed to arc into nowhere.

  It was not an architectural illusion. The markets had once been at ground level, but the apartheid government wanted to keep Africans and Indians out of the city center. The stalls were evacuated, then demolished; the demolition was to make way for a highway, the government said. But only the ramp was built, climbing from nowhere to nowhere. And there it remained, evidence of race hate in massive concrete, a scar on the landscape; a memory.

  Perhaps it was during this time, through the years of struggle, that Ganda began to feel like a South African: to think, to act, to breathe as a South African.

  Motiram's roots in Fiji were scarcely a decade old when he died; Maaji, surely, felt Indian to the end. But Ganda lived sixty-seven of his seventy-eight years in Durban. Perhaps there was no precise moment, only a feeling that grew over time—when he first held the papers bearing his new name, when he hung this new name over the storefront, when he created his own version of the bunny chow, when he watched his grandchildren begin to toddle. Despite the white perceptions, despite even the habits of his own people, surely he was not a foreigner all that time. His hometown ties were strong, and when he made enough money, he donated some of it for a clinic in the village in India, then a school in his wife's name. But India became a foreign land, and he a visitor and tourist when he went there, always returning home to the segregated airports of South Africa, with their WHITES ONLY and NON WHITES ONLY signs.

  In 1972, at age seventy-eight, surrounded by his family in the apartment on Grey Street, Ganda died peacefully, of simple old age. His obituary was published in both o
f the city's white-run newspapers. In the Natal

  Mercury, it appeared on page 7 along with other ethno-specific items: an Indian wedding announcement, ads for Indian-only apartments, a Dale Carnegie course for Indians, an update on the squatters' market controversy that was then raging, and the doublespeak news that "Indian areas to the north of the city will be transformed into beautiful residential suburbs through town planning."

  His son, and then his son's children, would keep the restaurant open for twenty more years, serving up hundreds of thousands of beans bunnies. And the bunny chow itself would outlive apartheid, migrating to restaurants all over South Africa and then—as South African Indians migrated overseas—to Canada, England, and the World Wide Web.

  Was the bunny chow a subversive response to repression? Or was it accommodation, compliance, opportunism? A cynic would say its Indian inventors were merely ensuring their profits; a loyalist might argue they did the best they could under trying circumstances, and that they too were just struggling to survive. And perhaps a poet would find it a potent metaphor for how the first generation of our diaspora views itself: essentially Indian at the core, packaged in and adapted to the local mores only as much as is conducive to economic survival. Without quite knowing it, however, this melding of tastes and textures becomes our lives—neither wholly "authentic" from the Indian perspective, nor fully assimilated from the vantage point of a white-bread culture, but a new creation in itself.

  Long after Ganda's death, and a couple of years after the restaurant closed its doors—victim to a change of lease—the long, harsh day of apartheid came to a close. Overnight the revolutionaries became officials in charge of, among other things, writing a new history. And someone called cousin Raman.

  A local-history museum was being erected, telling the stories of all the peoples of Durban. Would Raman contribute his family's items for the section on Grey Street? Your family was important, and you were on our side, he was told; and so he gathered photographs and memorabilia. Among his prized possessions was a letter from Nelson Mandela to the family member who owned a restaurant in Johannesburg, thanking him for providing a safe place for anti-apartheid leaders to meet. One of Ganda's grandsons, a photography hobbyist, contributed several images. Raman's father, grandfather, and several of his uncles were restaurateurs; he turned their papers over to the museum, which made them part of the permanent display. And so the businessmen of the Kapitan family were given a tiny piece of immortality.

  Ganda's restaurant stood in a row of Indian businesses, any of which might have been chosen to represent the story of Grey Street. But history is never neutral, nor perhaps should it be. All histories are intimate, constructed by those with an interest in the stories they choose to tell—shaped, like bread, by the human hand.

  At the southernmost tip of Africa, a lighthouse rises from the shoals where two oceans meet. I have clambered among the rocks and sand, waded into the waves. One sea is browner, the other bluer, and it is not a trick of the light.

  To the west, the cool Atlantic swells up toward London, New York, and South Africa's most picturesque city, Cape Town. To the east, the Indian Ocean is several degrees warmer; it gives the coast of Africa from Durban to Mombasa a tropical climate profitable for sugar and tourism, almost homelike for the more than a million Indians who have lived there for generations. This confluence of oceans is a rare coincidence of political and natural geography, where the act of naming does not create an arbitrary border, but gives voice to a natural one.

  And yet it is the most fluid, the most porous of borders. East and west meet with a great force, a terrible frothing and crashing of waves. The whitecaps swirl, and as much as one tries to follow a dark wave, it curls under a paler one from the other side; as far as I can track a blue wave, it does not, of course, hold. Like the several great civilizations that have clashed and coexisted in southern Africa over the last two centuries, the waters cannot be segregated.

  And who can tell which wave is resisting, which collaborating? The sea reveals no moral; what moves the whole is a greater tide. Perhaps the currents of history are what they are, and we only choose—or think we choose—which side to view them from, and where to take a stand.

  Part Two: Subjects

  1945

  Estimated size of the Indian diaspora: 1,157,728

  Countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin: 10

  1. Mauritius

  2. South Africa

  3. Trinidad and Tobago

  4. British Guiana

  5. Fiji

  6. Kenya

  7. Tanganyika

  8. Uganda

  9. Jamaica

  10. Zanzibar

  4. Salt

  Instead of a common riot confined to one class of persons it was of the nature of a wide spread insurrection.

  —Account of the salt-tax riots of 1844, Surat, India

  MY MOTHER'S FAMILY is considered "small," meaning that it has had a scarcity of sons. Unlike my father's family tree, which branches again and again—seven sons, five sons—my mother's family tree is a straighter line: only a few boys per generation. From this slim history, her father, Narotam, emerged.

  The only grandparent I remember was my Aaji, his widow. We met for the first time when I was seven, shy and reeling from the shock of migration. My family had just moved from New Zealand, the only home I remembered, back to the United States. After stops in Fiji to visit too many relatives (my only memory is of a fish bone getting painfully stuck in my foot) and in California, we landed in Iowa to visit my mother's brother and his family. He had brought Aaji to live with him a few years earlier. When I was enjoined to hug her, I obeyed—and promptly broke into tears, at the strangeness of it all.

  From then on we saw her once or twice a year in Iowa. I learned to embrace her without sobbing, leaning into the softness of her sari and comfortable rolls of fat. But the combination of infrequent visits, strange old-lady smells, and the fact that she could never seem to pronounce my name correctly kept us strangers. I was distracted too, I suppose, by her odd habits. She sniffed something from a small tin that she kept hidden in her bosom, and when I asked my mother what it was, she said tamkhil—tobacco. I had never heard of snuff before, and filed this away in my mental folder of things old Indian ladies do. She was quiet, never saying much except to moan Raam, Raam, invoking the name of the Hindu god-king whenever she had to stand up or sit down, arthritic knees creaking. She drank, before dinner and sometimes before lunch, a shot of whiskey mixed with water, chased by a Guinness. My parents being teetotalers, I found this alarming as well. It never occurred to me to ask her about history—not even about my grandfather, my Aajaa.

  Aajaa. The word feels strange in my mouth, for I never had occasion to use it, missing him by six years and two continents. Growing up in New Zealand and then Michigan, away from other relatives, I knew little about Narotam Chhagan: that he died when my mother was still in school; that his death and the collapse of the family business left my mother and grandmother very poor; that he had met the prince of Tonga; and that he and his friends drank so much that my mother fled the house on weekends, seeking a few hours' respite at double-feature matinees, which is why even today she hates alcohol and adores Burt Reynolds.

  When I was eleven years old, it was a movie that showed me another side of my Aajaa's life: Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Today, I can critique the film for its historical distortions and Hollywood lens. But back in 1982, in suburban Michigan, it was a precious opportunity to see India and Indians on the big screen.

  First, however, we had to find a screen. In the conservative, middle-class suburb of Detroit where we lived, Gandhi was not a big release. The town's sole movie house, the Penn Theater, was an old-fashioned hall with red plush seats that showed such classics as Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. My family never went there, opting instead for James Bond flicks and E.T. at the sixplex in a nearby suburb's mall. I did not see the Hollywood classics until years later, in a uni
versity class on the history of film. By then, in the 1990s, the Penn Theater had changed; an enterprising Indo-American was renting the theater on Saturday mornings, showing Bombay musicals to packed houses, selling samosas and chai along with popcorn at the concession stand.

  But during my childhood, the Indian community in Michigan was still tiny, so we had to drive half an hour to the progressive university town of Ann Arbor to see Gandhi. It was screened in one of the university's auditoriums. We sat near the front, next to the center aisle, craning our necks throughout the three-hour epic.

  Halfway through, a pivotal scene occurs. Gandhi's followers have marched to the sea to protest a tax on salt. As they approach the saltworks, a row of police armed with lathis— five-foot clubs tipped with steel—stand ready to stop them. Gandhi's men, though, keep walking. When they are just a few inches away, the police officers strike: heads crack, faces split, ribs are smashed.

  But more men take their place, row after row advancing—peacefully, calmly, with determination but not violence. And as the police keep beating them down, the camera dissolves to "Walker," an American reporter played by Martin Sheen. He is at the phone, calling in his story. From the script:

  "They walked, with heads up, without music, or cheering, or any hope of escape from injury or death." (His voice is taut, harshly professional.) "It went on and on and on. Women carried the wounded bodies from the ditch until they dropped from exhaustion. But still it went on...