Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Soon Narotam expanded his wholesale business to other islands. Visa stamps from Western Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga filled his passport from 1959 to 1964. Prince Tungi of Tonga became a friend, staying in the Suva bungalow when he visited Fiji. Benkor and Rukhmani would cook massive quantities of food for the prince, who was so large that he could not sit on the floor and dine with the rest of the family. After some searching, they found a chair he would not break.

  From his travels, Narotam brought back not only orders but also luxury items: frozen lamb chops and lamb brains from New Zealand, American delicacies that his children adored—Planters peanuts, Doublemint chewing gum, shoestring potato chips. Despite his newfound prosperity, he continued to use the skills he had learned in jail, knitting and crocheting, to relax. In the cool air of morning he would practice yoga on the veranda, concluding with a ten-minute headstand; one friend from the time describes him as a "health freak." Then he would sit in his chair on the porch and drink a cup of chaa, perhaps reading the English newspaper slowly, line by line. Grandchildren came, and he practiced nonviolence on them; "Give him a drink of water," he would say of a misbehaving youngster, calming him down in a time when strappings were a more common form of discipline.

  After one's children are grown, a Hindu can enter the final two phases of life: retirement and renunciation. In retirement, a man has a chance to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the knowledge that his children are self-sufficient. Next comes renunciation, when he sheds the world's pleasures and obligations for a concentrated period of spiritual study. Sometimes this means making a pilgrimage, sometimes merely devoting more time to praying, singing hymns, studying scriptures, practicing yoga, or simply meditating. In the old days, it might have meant retreating into a forest ashram to pursue a wholly meditative life.

  But just as Narotam's brahmachaarin period was abbreviated by poverty, financial worries plagued his retirement as well. His high-cholesterol weekends caught up with him; he suffered two heart attacks and by 1964 was no longer able to travel. Kalyaan, his brother, was more interested in the retail store than the import-export business, so they hired a partner to take up the traveling. But the partner turned out to be either a swindler or an extraordinarily poor salesman; he returned from his travels with copious expenses and few orders.

  Then disaster struck. They were leasing the retail space, and the landlord was a competitor. When the lease expired, he refused to renew it. Their shop closed, opening again in a few days with the other man's goods.

  Suddenly the cash flow to the household stopped. Narotam and Kalyaan tried to keep the business running in a smaller store, renting space in the Narsey's building, but the income was not enough to meet two families' expenses. The brothers began to quarrel.

  Alcohol, by releasing one from inhibitions, makes a man more who he is. Narotam was a quiet man and a quieter drunk; after several rounds of whiskey and beer, he preferred to stumble home and into bed, where he would not stir till morning. But Kalyaan was hardheaded and abrasive. Drunk, he was loud, argumentative, even abusive.

  Walking home with Narotam from the club, Kalyaan shouted at his elder brother over how they were dividing the proceeds or who had failed to pay the bills on time. Bitter about not having children of his own, he accused Narotam of draining the business to spend money on his children and their families.

  Indeed, Narotam's children did need his help. He had sent his only son, Champak, to study in America in 1963. At the time, business had been good; now, only a couple of years later, it was difficult to keep up with the tuition. As for his daughters, two of them had husbands who seemed unable to provide enough to feed and clothe the children. Narotam slipped them cash when he could, but the last time one of them had asked for money, he had had to refuse. Furious, she had stopped speaking to him.

  One morning in 1965, Narotam rose from his mattress on the open-air, slatted veranda where he preferred to sleep, and stumbled. Bhanu, who was seventeen and the only child still at home, heard the noise and woke her mother. It was about 2 A.M., and raining. From their own bedroom the women could make out his silhouette, staggering and weaving from his cot toward the steps. Thinking he was still drunk and disoriented, Benkor rose to help him toward the bathroom, which required a few yards' journey around the outside of the house.

  As they reached the bottom step, Narotam could not hold back. He vomited into the rain, a large pool that Benkor would have to clean up in the morning. Then suddenly he squatted on the lawn. Benkor went back inside, retrieved an umbrella, and held it over him as he created a second large pool, this one diarrheal. She helped him back to his bed on the veranda, then slept a few more precious hours till dawn.

  ***

  A Fiji morning is loud with roosters and dogs, a household's ablutions, cacophony of steel and aluminum pots as women prepare tea, breakfast, and lunch. Benkor rose, made tea, and woke her daughter for school, asking her to wake Narotam as well. When Bhanu went out to the veranda, though, she let out a shout—then raced to telephone the doctor.

  Narotam's tongue lolled from the corner of his open mouth. His daughter had just learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation, so after calling the doctor she tried the only thing she could think of that might help. Stripping away the bedcovers, she placed her hands on either side of his sternum, and put her lips over his mouth. As she blew air into his lungs, she pressed down on his ribs, hoping to restart the rhythm of his heart.

  In a few minutes the doctor arrived, and the women had to step back as he pulled a long needle from his bag, then thrust it into Narotam's chest: Adrenalin, a last-ditch effort to make the heart kick alive.

  Then there was nothing more to do.

  Narotam's immediate cause of death was a massive 2 A.M. heart attack, accompanied in the typical manner by a sudden loss of bowel control and a slow ticking down of his heartbeat. Among the possible larger causes were financial stress, genetics, karma, and a lifetime of whiskey, cigarettes, and high-cholesterol meals. He never reached the final period of spiritual study, renunciation. A day later, they scattered his ashes in the Pacific Ocean.

  At the funeral, his friends drank and drank.

  Today, Dandi, where Narotam and Gandhi picked up their first fistfuls of salt, is barely a town—so unremarkable that on at least one modern map of Gujarat, it is mislocated some fifty kilometers north up the coast. Named for an ancient lighthouse (diva daandi in Gujarati means "stick of light"), it is the dusty endpoint of a main road, with a few ramshackle buildings: restaurant, corner store, and several shacks selling liquor to tourists from the neighboring "dry" districts of Gujarat, where Gandhi's prohibition campaign enjoys enduring legal success. In the main plaza, just before the beach, a man sells juice from freshly cut sugar cane, squeezing each long stalk through the teeth of a large steel machine set on the cobblestones. A memorial and museum are decaying near the town, showing Gandhi bending over in the famous salt-robbing pose.

  On the beach itself, racks of fish are strung to dry in the sun, filling the air with their pungent aroma. The day we visited in 1997, my brother and I dipped our toes in the sea and took pictures on the beach, and I thought about my Aajaa.

  His life is a complicated example for me, its moments of shining idealism and sad compromise illustrating the relentless ironies of diaspora. Born a British subject, he helped his countrymen gain their freedom, only to die a British subject in yet another colony. Born poor, he became wealthy but died poor again. A man of strong principles, by the time of my mother's memory he was weak, often drunk, patriarch of a clan of merchants and traders, plagued by swindlers and cheats.

  And yet that is not the whole story. One step out of India, he made the next possible. In Fiji his children went to missionary schools, where they studied the Bible and learned English. At home, they might sit on the floor and eat with their hands, but in school, they memorized how to set a table with two forks to the left, knife and spoon to the right. Decades later, armed with this knowledge, the two youngest would
come to America. And their own children would treasure that jailbird photograph taken decades ago, the one that hints at another kind of man: a young revolutionary infused with the light of belief.

  At the water's edge I stood alone for a few minutes, gazing at the orange sun sinking into the sea, trying to feel my Aajaa's spirit in the salt air. But spirits rarely come when called, and after a while, I turned back toward the darkening land.

  5. Story

  It is almost impossible to like the Indians of Fiji. They are suspicious, vengeful, whining, unassimilated, provocative ... Above all, they are surly and unpleasant.

  —James Michener, Return to Paradise, 1951

  IF MY MOTHER'S PEOPLE are quiet and humble, my father's are loud and brash—a clan of taletellers. For most of my life, the other descendants of Motiram Narsey have been strangers to me, with familiar faces (their resemblance to my father is strong) but unfamiliar temperaments. Far away in Fiji, they presided over the rise of a business that made our family's name so well known that even now it carries currency there, though all but a few have emigrated and more than a decade has passed since the Narseys department store shuttered its doors. Of the Narsey clan, the one I came to know best, through a few extended visits, was my uncle Ranchhod: my father's brother, and one of Motiram Narsey's grandsons.

  He had a story for any occasion. Speaking of spirits, he might start up, one time on a deserted jungle road in Papua New Guinea, we met two men. We were staying at the army base—they didn't have any hotels for nonwhites then—and we were just walking back from town. It was almost night. My friend had decided we should take the shortcut. I didn't want to, but he insisted. Suddenly two men appeared on the road. They were dressed all in white.

  Here he would pause, just long enough to let the listener absorb the significance of this detail: they were dressed all in white.

  Then one of them asked for a cigarette. I knew what he was, so I gave him my whole pack! And my matches, too.

  — Where are you going? the ghost asked us.

  —Just to the base.

  — Go back the other way.

  —But this is a shortcut.

  —Sometime—here my uncle's voice would drop ominously, the ghost still speaking in his own Indian-English accent—shortcut never make it.

  We were so scared! We turned around and went back the long way. It was dark now. When we finally got to our room, I stopped my friend from going in. I got some water and I said a prayer over it, and I sprinkled it on us. Like this.

  And only then did I let him go in, and I went in myself, and thanked god for saving us from who knows what.

  It is business that gives diasporas their strength and vibrancy, according to some economists: tight networks of kin across several continents are uniquely qualified to move goods and ideas, allowing ethnic diasporas to thrive in a global economy. But as any grandmother knows, it is story that truly holds a people together. When I asked my uncle Ranchhod what exactly his business entailed, he gave me a story.

  It was hard to keep five thousand cartons of tinned salmon a secret, but Ranchhod was trying. The tins sat on the main dock of the Fiji Islands with his name on them, the key to his future success. The year was 1957, and the middle son of the Narsey family was embarking on an age-old Gujarati tradition called "middling": serving at the junction between producer and customer.

  He had never tasted the pink fish from Canada. But he had come to know that Fijians savored it, so Gujarati shopkeepers all over the islands stocked it, each year importing the maximum allowed under the rules of the British Commonwealth—that final shadow of empire, whose regulations were carefully designed to maintain a delicate balance of trade between its nations and territories. A single white-owned company held a monopoly on importing salmon into the colony of Fiji. Now, Ranchhod was planning to ambush it and capture the trade. He was twenty-two years old, and motivated by debt.

  He owed £150 to the family firm, which had just paid for his wedding trip back home to India and for his and his bride's passage to Fiji. He had a newly outfitted office with his name on the door: HAZRAT TRADING Co. Its ledger opened with £500 in its "Debts" column, start-up capital from the parent company, which he was required to pay back within a year. His salary was £30 a month. It did not take an accounting certificate, which he had, to calculate that he needed to make money quickly.

  His assets were these: Business skills he had picked up during a prior six-year sojourn in Fiji, where he had arrived from India at the age of fifteen. A friend who suggested the salmon deal and told him which government official to bribe. Ambition. Youthful arrogance, perhaps even recklessness. A certain capacity to charm. And the five thousand cartons, which, he hoped, would pay off his debts, prove his mettle as a businessman, and earn him the praise of his father and uncles.

  What he did not have was a truck to transport the salmon or a warehouse in which to store it. His conversational English, the lingua franca of business in Fiji, was minimal; on principle, he had refused to learn the language of India's oppressors. He had no financial reserves. And because this was not exactly the sort of business his elders had in mind—he was supposed to be a salesman, not an importer—he could not go to them for help. He wanted the deal to be a surprise. Once the profits were in, he reasoned, no one would carp over the details.

  So he learned to wheel and deal. In exchange for a bottle of fine whiskey, a petty government official handed over the list of shopkeepers who had applied to buy salmon for the year. Ranchhod went to visit them one by one, persuading them to sign over their licenses to him as their receiving agent—a fellow Indian rather than a goriyaa, a white man. He wheedled a bank manager into advancing payment to the Canadians. He paid a white-owned agency to deliver the cartons to each shopkeeper and, though the agents did not normally do so, to collect payments as they went.

  When the salmon reached its various destinations around Fiji and the checks started to come in, Ranchhod did not tally or record them; he took them directly to the bank. After some days, the bank manager called him:—What would you like me to do with the money?

  —It's yours, said Ranchhod,—you take it.

  —No, I took mine already. Your loan is paid, this is your profit.

  —Oh!

  He ordered the profit put into the Hazrat Trading Co. account, and went to report back to his uncle.—On five thousand cartons, he said, explaining the deal,—I have made a profit of £2,000.

  —Impossible, said Uncle Magan.—Bullshit!

  ***

  By the time Ranchhod told me the story almost fifty years later, it had been refined and perfected. The important thing was not the salmon and profits but the bragging rights: the story of the salmon and profits, the staging of the secret and its revelation for maximum effect and drama, both in the moment and ever after. The anecdote had become a kathaa: story, epic, ritual.

  In its most formal incarnation, a kathaa is a ritualized recitation of a religious tale, extolling the feats or virtues of a particular god or goddess before an audience of the devout. But kathaa is also the everyday word for story, of various sorts: panchaati, gossip; samaachaar, news; raavan-kathaa, complaints of epic proportions; and raam-kathaa, a tale of heroic deeds. My uncle was a prodigious and entertaining storyteller, and in almost every story he told, he was the hero—which says something about either his character or his capacity for embellishment, or both.

  The kathaa of the Narseys business, of which Ranchhod's tale was but a small piece, had been mostly a success story despite the death of its founder, Motiram, in 1918. Motiram's brothers had run M. Narsey & Company ably. They opened a grocery section briefly, then closed it to focus on the growing demand for their tailoring skills. They won a major government contract to sew police and military uniforms. Their biggest competitor, Walter Horne & Co., where the founder had gotten his start, closed down. And they brought their sons and nephews over from India to work for them.

  Motiram's eldest son, Ratanji, had been just eleven y
ears old when his father died, leaving his widowed mother, our Maaji, to manage the household. Maaji sent Ratanji to Fiji to work for his uncles when he turned fourteen. His two brothers soon followed. Upon coming of age, each of the boys went back to India to marry and then sojourned to Fiji again to work, leaving his bride in Maaji's care. In 1928, Ratanji's wife bore their first child. By the end of the decade, the company's profits were sustaining several households back in India.

  By 1936, Gujaratis, who had started arriving in Fiji only three decades earlier, numbered 2,500, or three percent of the islands' total Indian population. As the Narseys and other Khatris came to dominate tailoring in Suva, a few men began bringing their wives and children to Fiji. They were making the shift from a bachelor society to one that included families, caste-based societies, and regular social and religious gatherings. In 1931, Ratanji's wife, Kaashi, came to Fiji, leaving their daughter at home in India with Maaji.

  More children followed. Ranchhod, his parents' fifth child, was born in Suva on New Year's Day, 1935. His father, at twenty-eight years old, had already spent half his life in Fiji. But Kaashi never took to island life; four childbirths later, she wanted to go home. And Ratanji agreed, perhaps swayed by the fact that his earnings would go further in India, with its lower cost of living and the favorable exchange rate. Ranchhod was still in diapers when mother and children moved back to the village of Navsari.