Although the satyagrahis were in prison for breaking laws, once behind bars they were among the most disciplined inmates. Gandhi encouraged them to follow the rules, except when those rules were "contrary to human dignity"; if the food was rotten, for example, they were to refuse it, but if it was merely tasteless, they were not to complain. They were to insist on what they needed to fulfill religious vows, such as spinning khaadi; but otherwise they were not to seek special privileges, such as books and newspapers.
Free of the obligations of family and finances, in the company of other civil resisters, Narotam learned to knit, crochet, meditate, and practice yoga. Needles and other implements might pose a danger in the hands of a violent prisoner, but in the hands of one sworn to nonviolence, they were strictly domestic. It was a time he would look back on with pride, telling his children decades later, "See, I wouldn't know how to knit if I hadn't gone to jail."
During the three months Narotam spent behind bars, the salt campaign intensified dangerously. Eventually all of the movement's leaders were imprisoned, spinning khaadi several hours a day and forbidden to write on political matters; but new leaders and new followers arose. And the government did not fail to respond. By one estimate, sixty thousand people were jailed across India for gathering, making, or rallying around salt.
Gujarat remained the campaign's epicenter. Waves of spontaneously organized, resolutely nonviolent volunteers from all over India traveled to the coast of Gujarat to make salt from the ocean or take it from the British company's salt pans. Government police, frustrated by the volunteers' unvarying tactic of walking forward unarmed, shifted from clubbing their heads to storming them with horses to "rendering ... unconscious by squeezing their privates," according to a report by the freedom movement's secretary in Gujarat. Over one three-week period, the secretary counted 1,333 wounded, out of 2,640 volunteers. Four men died.
As Gandhi had hoped, the salt campaign was a turning point in swaying international opinion in favor of the Indian cause. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote, "This sort of thing filled every decent English person with a sense of intolerable shame, far greater than would have been felt if the Indian resistance had been of a military character."
At home, the brutality helped make the volunteers into heroes. When Narotam was released, the whole town of Gandevi turned out for a parade in his honor. Such celebrations were held all over Gujarat; the satyagrahis were treated like soldiers returning from a just war. The salt movement had shaken the Raj, and many Indians believed independence was imminent, thanks to men like Narotam who had sacrificed for the good of all.
To Narotam's father, however, his son was not so much a hero as a young rebel about to go astray. The movement's dangers had become all too clear, and Narotam's father had a plan.
Narotam's older brother and a cousin were already working as tailors in Fiji. To finance the trip, the women of the family had had to pawn all of their meager jewelry. Even Benkor, who had waited so long for her silver dowry anklets, had sold them.
Now, the eldest son had sent some money back, and Narotam's father wanted to use it to send his second son to the colony as well—away from the dangers of radical politics, and where he could help support the family.
Narotam could no longer indulge in his brahmachaarin stage; he was launched, according to tradition, into the "householder" stage of life. Here the spiritual lessons learned in youth are not abandoned. Rather, a householder must learn to apply them in a more complicated environment. He must learn his dharma.
Dharma has a dual meaning: religion and duty. In the second stage of life, a Hindu confronts this duality, learning to reconcile his spiritual life with familial duties.
For Narotam it must have been a difficult transition. He had just experienced his first chance to study his own soul. Then, just as quickly, he was forced to become a man of responsibility. Did his obligations to a network of kin—parents, brothers, sisters with wedding expenses, a wife and child—weigh heavily on him? Surely he must have felt some sorrow at leaving his comrades in the movement. Yet perhaps it was tempered by the stoicism that is the nature of our people. We are not ones to rail against the gods—or, as in Narotam's case, against our fathers' wishes. Narotam began to make preparations. He would leave Benkor and baby Sarasvati with his parents, and set out alone.
For my grandmother Benkor, it was another separation from the husband she had barely had time to know. She understood the need; the men of her own family were also on the move, following the trend noted that year by the special census of Gandevi. Benkor's uncle had traveled to Kenya to try his luck. Within a few years, her brother and cousins would follow him and settle there. By 1933, so many Indian entrepreneurs were living abroad that the most ambitious of them formed the Imperial Indian Citizenship Association, whose published directory estimated a total of 2.5 million Indians living abroad in the British colonies and Commonwealth countries.
Among these were all of Benkor's male relatives. She would not see them again until she was an old woman, after each of them had lived a whole lifetime in the colonies. Now her husband, too, would join the great tide of emigration. His destination, tiny Fiji, with 77,000 Indians, was fifth on the list of countries with a substantial Indian population.
In the passport office of the empire, in Bombay, Narotam had his picture taken for the second time in his life. His national status was listed as "British subject by birth," his occupation as "tailor," his height as five feet. On August 8, 1931, he boarded a ship called the Ganges in Calcutta. On September 3, Fiji's afternoon newspaper reported its arrival at Suva harbor.
The same newspaper carried ads for goods imported by the ship (mustard oil, Rangoon rice, Genuine Indian Brassware), an advertisement for M. Narsey & Co. (Printed Chiffons, Numerous Patterns to Choose From, Absolute Bedrock Prices—Call Early), and a news item: "Mahatma Gandhi, Dressed in Loincloth, Sailed for England." Gandhi had been re-leased from prison in order to attend an imperial conference, where he hoped to raise for the first time in London the formal prospect of India's independence. As Narotam reached Fiji, Gandhi was aboard the S.S. Rajputana, telling the Associated Press that he was "hoping against hope" for freedom.
In Fiji, Narotam found a country far different from the land of opportunity that had welcomed Motiram Narsey. Because of the worldwide depression, the capital was no longer a bustling port. Three years earlier, Suva had shipped 121,000 tons of sugar around the world; in 1931, the market could support only 68,000 tons.
Narotam worked for a while as a tailor with his brother, who eventually retired to India because his health was poor. Once on his own, Narotam decided to risk moving to the only section of the island that was thriving: the town of Tavua, on the northern coast, where surveyors had recently discovered gold. He went north, setting up a tailoring shop to serve those rushing to exploit the gold and, soon, silver buried in the island. He sewed women's clothes and saved money to send home.
The Gujaratis of Fiji mostly kept apart from native people, except as business demanded. Many of my relatives say they were afraid at first of the tall, strong people who seemed as fierce as their historical reputation for cannibalism suggested. Natives and whites tended to see the Indians as clannish and separatist—but the Indians were in fact divided among themselves. While indentured Indian immigrants had quickly dropped many distinctions of caste and region, the Gujaratis who came later had the money to travel home frequently. They maintained strong ties to home and rarely married outside their castes. They owned a large proportion of the retail stores and generally imported relatives as assistants, rather than hiring local Indians. Some Gujaratis even acted as loan sharks, extending credit at unfavorable terms against future paychecks. In 1937, two hundred Indo-Fijians signed a petition urging limits on further immigration:
There are certain undesirable types of Immigrants; Fiji is full with such. These men refuse to admit in their social circle which in itself creates bad feeling; there is nothing but these traders refuse to e
mploy local borns in services; they refuse to teach them any form of trade; they refuse to spend in Fiji; their God is money.
They were talking about the Gujaratis.
In the decade of Narotam's arrival, Fiji took a series of steps to discourage young Gujarati men from coming and going strictly for the purpose of making money. It began charging the hefty fee of £50 for each immigration permit and giving preference to those who were accompanied by wives. M. Narsey & Co. spearheaded a protest letter, which received a courteous but unyielding reply from the colonial secretary in London. He acknowledged the contributions of the "Bombay community" but encouraged the Gujaratis to promote family migration.
Narotam sent for his wife in 1937. Benkor left behind their six-year-old daughter to be raised by Narotam's parents in India. Narotam's younger brother, Kalyaan, also came to Fiji with a young wife. Together the brothers expanded from tailoring to retail, opening a ready-made clothing shop in Tavua. They sold T-shirts and dress shirts, trousers, dresses, and the native attire, a kind of wraparound skirt called the sulu, to Fijians and local Indians.
The shop had a small room in the back where they kept their files and, when business was slow, retired to drink tea. A shady path led to the kitchen, and down another path was the single bedroom. Just beyond that was the outhouse. For bathing, water had to be brought from the river; a bucket sat in a small tiled area next to the store, with ropes strung around it so that temporary walls of cloth could be drawn for privacy. In the yard, chickens clucked and pecked at the dry soil, and sometimes a goat grazed, waiting to grace the family's dinner table. Benkor bore a second girl in 1939, and a third in 1942.
After his adventures in the movement, the life of an entrepreneur and family man in Fiji would have been quite a contrast for Narotam. His days were filled with practical details, far from the continuing and dramatic battles of the independence movement and the ideals he cherished. But perhaps he took solace in the Bhagavad Geeta, a religious text whose passages on dharma Gandhi urged his followers to memorize. "Better is one's own duty, though devoid of merit, than the duty of another well performed," the god Krishna tells the hero Arjuna in the Geeta. "Therefore, always perform your work, without attachment, which has to be done; for a man who works without attachment attains the Supreme."
Narotam earned a reputation for helping others in the tightly knit Khatri community of Fiji. In a typical instance, a young man knocked on his door well after midnight. He owed so much money, he said, that his creditors were coming to beat him the next morning. Would Narotam hide him for the night?
Narotam did, and in the morning he negotiated with the merchants, buying the man some time by paying a percentage of the loans. Through such acts Narotam found his role in the community, reconciling the obligations of a businessman with the Gandhian philosophy of service.
World War II sharpened the division between the native Fijians and the Indians, who were by now about half and half on the island. One out of every three native Fijian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty volunteered to fight on behalf of the empire. But the Fiji Indians balked. First they demanded the same rate of pay as white soldiers, and were refused; then they argued that growing sugar and other economic activity was their contribution to the war effort. Then, in 1943, a strike by Indian cane workers over low prices left most of the harvest to rot in Fiji's fields. The Indians were labeled disloyal, and their status as citizens of Fiji was further diminished.
July 24, 1945, was the day my grandmother had been waiting for, in some ways her whole life long. Fiji's internal politics were volatile, and World War II was about to end, but neither of these was the reason for her prayers or sighs of Raam, Raam. She was going into labor.
More than fifteen years had passed since Benkor had put on silver anklets and a modest but freshly pressed sari and walked to her in-laws' house. The daughter she had left there was nearly grown. In the new land, Benkor had borne two more girls. She was married to a good man, and though they were working hard, they were no longer at the edge of poverty. Her days were filled with raising the children, tending chickens and goats, cooking three meals a day on a woodstove, grinding her own grain in a hand-cranked mill, carrying clothes and dishes to the river to wash them, and filling the kerosene lamps at dusk.
What she wanted now was what, twice, had eluded her. Twice, a son had slipped from her womb and failed to survive: one a miscarriage, one stillborn. Narotam's brothers had no sons, either; the family name could die out in one generation. Though Benkor lived far from her in-laws and the land where she grew up, she had brought with her at least some of the old ways. Her deepest desire now was for a baby boy.
So she prayed to the family goddess. Benkor made a vow, a kind of bargain that is common among our people: If You grant me a son, I will not indulge in new clothes for him for one year.
The goddess responded. Narotam and Benkor named their only son Champak, after the frangipani tree with its fragrant yellow flowers that grew in both the soil of Gujarat and the soil of Fiji. Though he was the child of a tailor, nursed to the clickety-clack of sewing machines, Champak did not wear new clothes until his first birthday.
Narotam and Benkor's last child, Bhanu, my mother, was born in 1946. A year later, the independence for which my grandparents and millions of other Indians had struggled and prayed came to India at last.
On the subcontinent, two nations were being carved from the empire, and the parturition was bloody. Riots, mass rapes, and mob murders took place as Hindus and Muslims crossed the lines—Hindus into the new India, Muslims into the new Pakistan—that had looked so neat and tidy on the maps approved in England. Independence and the trauma of partition would launch a new wave of diaspora, as people from the new borderlands fled to third countries as refugees.
News of the violence did not reach the colonies until a day or two later. So the mood among overseas Indians on Independence Day—August 15, 1947—was one of pure celebration. In South Africa, Grey Street was festooned with ribbons and banners; restaurants hosted parties or put up sales on sweets, while activists looked hopefully toward a new strategy that involved negotiations between two sovereign nations. The final British count of their Indian subjects' diaspora showed 1,157,728 Indians living throughout the empire. One in four was in South Africa; one in ten lived in Fiji.
In Tavua, Narotam sewed satin dresses in the new country's colors for his middle daughters. They marched proudly down Tavua's main street, a parade of shopkeepers and farmhands and children chanting "Jai Hind!" ("Long live India!"), waving the three-striped flag of the new nation: saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for peace and truth, and green for faith and chivalry. In the center of the white stripe, in dark blue, symbolizing the hope of the masses, was the spinning wheel.
Within months, Narotam took his family home.
In Gandevi the family settled, like most villagers, into a house made of mud and reinforced with cow dung. In January 1948, Sarasvati's marriage was arranged—and Gandhi was assassinated. Relatives remember Narotam listening to the radio news at his daughter's wedding, and weeping.
Independence alone could not fix the problems of rural India's economy: poverty, drought, chronic unemployment. The forces sweeping the sons of Gujarat out to the colonies were as strong as ever, and in 1951 Narotam returned to Fiji with his young son, Champak.
Narotam's younger brother, Kalyaan, and his wife, Rukhmani, were still there, without children of their own. Rukhmani took care of the boy, who was a handful. Soon business was good enough that Narotam gave up the clapboard house in Tavua and bought half of a British-style bungalow in the big city, Suva. They all moved in, and he sent for his wife and three younger daughters. And his fortunes began to change.
The new house was uphill from the main part of town, across the street from a Catholic church. It had hardwood floors and luxuries unknown in either Tavua or Gandevi: indoor plumbing, electricity, a refrigerator. Narotam's family kept one bedroom, Kalyaan and Rukhmani—still childless
—the other. The house was divided, like a modern duplex; the other half was owned by a fellow Gujarati, who was also the landlord of their business space downtown. There, Kalyaan minded a new retail shop while Narotam started a wholesale business. From Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, samples of cloth and clothing came to Suva. Narotam carried them to Gujarati tailors and retailers throughout Fiji, taking and filling orders. He learned enough English to befriend useful contacts in the government import and licensing offices, banks, and other commercial concerns.
When he was home, the house became a center for parties; the whiskey started flowing on Saturday afternoon and did not stop until early Monday, with breaks in between for barbecued lamb, garlicky chicken, rice and daal. His friend Ratanji Narsey, one of Motiram's sons, was a regular guest. At Khatri community events, several times a year, the two men often took charge of cooking giant pots of curried goat stew outdoors. For a special treat, they skimmed the fat from the top of the goat stew and mixed it with Johnnie Walker, their favorite brand of whiskey. With a twist of lime, the strong soup served as a perfect appetizer-cocktail.
In 1956 and 1957, Narotam's two middle daughters married. Their weddings were lavish affairs; hundreds of guests drank and dined in the house and the large adjoining yard. A whole room was set aside for the white guests—bankers, government officials, and their families—who sat at tables instead of the floor, and ate from ceramic plates instead of paper. Fans circulated the hot tropical air, glass ashtrays collected their cigarettes, and young nephews were dispatched to keep their plates and glasses full. Narotam shook their hands awkwardly, used his self-taught English to thank them for coming, to accept their congratulations and compliments on the food. Their presence was a sign that his family had truly arrived.
Leaving India Page 12
