Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Alone among my relatives, my uncle Ranchhod—after listening to my carefully rehearsed, pre-interview spiel about how this book would be public, how he should tell me if he wanted to keep anything off the record—shook his head impatiently. That's your job, he told me; I trust you, dikraa. Dear; daughter. Perhaps he knew he would not survive to read or vet these words; perhaps he knew that each storyteller makes his or her own version, and that the stories themselves belong to no one. And if any further justification or absolution is needed for telling this story, perhaps it is the weight and light of that trust.

  I do not believe that merely airing a story heals it; but perhaps it can be a kind of honoring, of all the pain.

  ***

  Over the next decade and a half, Narseys continued to grow under Chiman's leadership. Suva's duty-free business faded as other ports learned how to compete, but other enterprises sprang up. Narseys diversified into manufacturing, led by an energetic young cousin of Ranchhod's who had seen his first glimpse of the world while the two traveled together on a buying trip in 1977. Within a few years the cousin, eager to bring Narseys into the age of industrial progress, persuaded Chiman to let him start a plastics factory. At its peak in the 1980s, Narseys consisted of the plastics factory, the glass-front department store, Hazrat Trading, the Ratan shoe factory (named for Motiram's mother), a retail shoe store, an audiovisual outfit run by Chiman's eldest son, a wholesale liquor division, some rental real estate, a store that sold sewing machines, and major stakes in a flour mill and a sanitary-napkin factory.

  Though Ranchhod had never managed to separate himself from his father's firm, he wanted a different fate for his children. He borrowed money to send his eldest son to study accounting in India, and incurred another loan to pay for his older daughter's wedding. In 1983, when both sons were old enough, they decided to buy a small tailoring firm. Each time, Ranchhod turned to the "bank of Gujarat," the informal network of Gujarati shopkeepers and businessmen who financed one another's ventures as a way of helping loyal friends, as well as investing their own profits for a percentage return.

  This debt came on top of the regular loans from Narseys that virtually all of the partners were taking, and which ultimately were part of the company's downfall. By the 1980s, Narseys wages were too low to sustain the lifestyle that family members felt they deserved. The company financed cars, mortgages, "world tour" vacations, even extraordinary household expenses for almost all of its dozen shareholders. Some were under the impression that they were merely taking advances on their salaries; accounts were kept in the office, but no scheme of repayment was introduced, and most had no idea how much they or anyone else owed. As "loans to company directors" made up a greater and greater portion of the bottom line, regular minutes and annual reports were filed in the official books for meetings that never took place and spreadsheets never seen or discussed by the shareholders.

  This hidden story was deeply out of sync with the official one and, as always in such cases, taboo to discuss. When someone tried to raise an issue, as Ranchhod occasionally did, he was immediately admonished; decrying his cousins and uncles as "a bunch of yes-men" hardly helped his cause. One cousin would later describe the company as a "gravy train" whose seemingly limitless supply no one wanted to interrupt with dissent. The chief executive, Chiman, was hardly in a position to rein in the spending or introduce fiscal austerity; his own debt was among the highest.

  To outsiders, and as far as most of the families knew, Narseys was riding high. Stylish mannequins and the latest electronics sparkled from glass storefronts downtown, and virtually every year a new venture was announced, each financed by a bank loan. Ratanji's legacy, the stately building of glass and concrete, turned out to be a dual one. In retrospect, the mortgage undertaken to build it seems to have set off a corporate habit of borrowing on a large scale.

  As business conditions in Fiji changed, it was hard for the tradition-minded company to shift gears completely. The retail side became less and less profitable, but creative bookkeeping rearranged the manufacturing and indenting/wholesaling profits to show a positive bottom line in all departments. Then Chiman decided to close Hazrat Trading, combining its activities with the Narseys wholesale department. Ranchhod found himself without a unit to run.

  After years of relative autonomy, it was a bitter pill. Ranchhod found himself assigned trivial duties: chaperoning his divorcée sister on a pilgrimage to India, working as backup for Jayanti in the retail department.

  Yet Narseys continued to expand, the story of its prosperity embellished even as each new venture added to the scaffolding of debt and creative bookkeeping. The company took out loans not only for capital investment but also for operating expenses. At the end it would be dismantled bit by bit, revealing that much of what had held it up was air.

  Two events triggered the collapse: a coup and a death.

  In May 1987, native Fijians staged a military coup whose stated aim was to end Indian domination of the island's economy. Looting, violence, and another coup four months later set off a panic. By now the pattern was familiar to Gujaratis, who typically had relatives or networks that extended to other countries where they had become victims of just such an economic backlash. Most Fiji Gujaratis who could afford it—especially those whose businesses and wealth were prime targets for looters—began looking for a way out.

  The men of Narseys leveraged their business and political contacts to emigrate. Ranchhod's brother Jayanti fled to America, where he had a married daughter. Through a tailoring client, Ranchhod's sons managed to obtain hastily procured visas to New Zealand. Ranchhod and Manjula followed. Eventually they would all resettle near the Gold Coast of Australia, where his elder daughter sponsored them, and where the weather was warm and familiar.

  The New Zealand and Australia that accepted Ranchhod's family in the late 1980s were far friendlier than they had been only a short time before. Almost since its inception as a British colony, Oceania's largest continent had determined to be a "white Australia." Its early settlers squeezed the Aboriginal population into ever-smaller areas, then imported "coloured" labor from nearby islands as well as China and India. At one point Chinese made up twenty percent of the male population of the mining province of Victoria. But the backlash came swiftly, and typically. A race riot by white vigilantes in 1857 was followed by anti-Chinese restrictions, which paved the way for xenophobic legislation that sought to restrict all Asian and other nonwhite immigration. As in South Africa, the British refused to sanction overtly racist laws, and this became an impetus for Australians to seek independence. One of the first legislative acts of the autonomous federation of Australian states was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. It introduced the infamous dictation test, widely copied around the world, whose primary goal was to keep out nonwhites. The "white Australia" policy was articulated as one of survival, a cornerstone of the national identity. The country's powerful agreed that they needed a growing settler population, but only of a certain stripe. Not until 1958 was the dictation test dropped, and Australia began accepting part-Asians and light-skinned Asians (such as the Dutch of Indonesia and the "burghers" of Sri Lanka), as long as they did not look "to be less than 75 percent European in appearance." White citizens' "coloured" spouses were still being deported, and white Europeans were actively recruited and given economic stipends and bonuses if they migrated to Australia.

  Still, a momentum for change was building. During the 1960s, thanks to the civil rights and anticolonial movements, ideals of racial nondiscrimination took hold among First World policymakers and their constituents. In 1965, the United States repealed its ban on Asian immigration, using instead a system of quotas for each nation. In 1966, Australia began allowing nonwhites with technical or professional skills to enter, and several thousand Asians filtered in. At last, in 1973, the 1901 act was fully repealed.

  Then Australia opted for an even more progressive system than the United States had, one that would not discriminate on the basis
of race, color, or national origin. Instead, each potential immigrant would be evaluated on a "points" system, earning a score based on such factors as education, technical or professional training, and relatives already in Australia. "White Australia" was dead. Under this system, a handful of Fiji Khatris had made their way there well before the coup, including Ranchhod's older daughter, whose husband qualified by virtue of his accounting credentials.

  In New Zealand, change had come more slowly—only a year before the coup, just in time for the Fiji Indians. New Zealand was an inward-looking, isolationist sort of place, with more sheep than people and glad to keep it so. But it was also polite, civil, and liberal: New Zealanders did not like to think of themselves as racists. They were certainly not like the barbarous whites of South Africa, for example. Besides, in the early 1980s New Zealand was suffering a population decline so drastic that newspaper cartoons joked, "Last one out, turn the lights off." Self-deprecating humor masked a national anxiety and an economic crisis in the making. The country was experiencing its own miniature "brain drain" as educated and skilled young New Zealanders left for better work opportunities abroad, in Europe and America. Something had to be done to boost the country's educated elite. In 1986 New Zealand allowed its doors to swing both ways. For Ranchhod's family, emigrating after the 1987 coup, it was the luckiest of timing.

  And then, in May 1988, Chiman died.

  Back in Fiji for the funeral, Ranchhod attended another emergency board meeting. The irony did not escape him: his chance to run the company had come too late. Retired, committed to staying with his family in Australia, he tried to give advice to whoever would listen. When he left Fiji again, cousins took control and worked to keep the firm running.

  But there were new challenges, never faced in Narseys' eight decades in business. Fiji's economy was in crisis as its major trading partners, Australia and New Zealand, instituted economic sanctions, hoping to pressure the coup leaders into restoring a legitimate government. Indian emigration was draining the country of its skilled professionals, business owners, and workers; nearly forty thousand people left Fiji in the three years after the coup, more than in the entire decade up to that point. Tourism was nonexistent. Manufacturing slowed as skilled workers and managers emigrated. Exports and imports were cut off. In every possible sense, business was bad.

  And Narseys was vulnerable. With three strong partners gone and no system in place for nurturing leadership, the company felt at times rudderless. Infighting erupted; everyone had his own theory about what was going wrong.

  —It was Chiman who ran the company into the ground.—No! Chiman was a saint, a good man who helped everyone.—Too nice, he never said no.—He liked to play the big man, giving out cash that wasn't his own.—Everyone was used to the company being a gravy train. They killed the golden egg goose.—It wasn't his fault; there were too many dead dummies who didn't work hard, who never thought of the good of the company, only themselves.—Who are you calling a dead dummy!?—And by the way, you owed money to my father, and I intend to collect!—You cheated us in that deal.—I don't know why he never liked me, us.—How they treated us when we were young ... when we were old ... when we were poor ... when we worked so hard ...

  The elders blamed the younger generation for abandoning traditional ways; the younger men blamed those who failed to adapt with the times. Cousins overseas blamed mismanagement by those who remained; those who stayed blamed the emigrants, who sought to cash out their company shares to start new lives. Did migration accelerate the decline of the business, or did the dismal economic climate precipitate migration? Whatever the case, years of bickering and turmoil culminated in a board meeting on the evening of May 7, 1992, shortly after the workday ended. According to the official minutes, ten shareholders were present. Ranchhod was not among them. The meeting began at 5:40 P.M.; the men talked for an hour and twenty minutes. The minutes recorded simply, "It was finally resolved to liquidate the assets of Narseys Limited."

  Liquidate: it was a fluid, poetic word for a process that many family members experienced as brutal. Over the three years it took to dissolve the company, the Narsey temper flared up again and again. Minutes were written and rewritten as participants objected to how their remarks had been characterized. Some who expected payouts for their shares were shocked to learn that they were deeply in debt to the firm, and said they had no way of paying. Some objected to the official audits and had their own audits conducted. Face to face and in transcontinental memos and faxes, they argued over prices, valuations, processes—until eventually every last building and business was bought by a family member, sold off to the highest bidder, or simply shut down.

  The day in 1994 that the Narseys store closed its doors for the last time, Ranchhod was in Brisbane, Australia. It was October: spring at the south of the world, the days beginning to grow long, hot, and bright.

  For once Ranchhod was glad not to be in Suva: not to have to walk past the empty glass display windows and darkened entryway, the permanent CLOSED sign indicating, in a way, the family's shared and humiliating failure. It would have broken his heart, it would have filled him with rage; in the Gujarati idiom, it caused his liver to ache. No one had sweated more than he had for the company, he felt; he had wandered night and day in the jungle, it had made him who he was.

  He was not a refugee but a kind of exile. Brisbane, on Australia's sunny Gold Coast, was pleasant enough; his four children and their families lived nearby, and with only a little imagination he could still feel and smell the warm breezes of the South Pacific. In the white man's land one could be comfortable; one might seize opportunities and make one's way. But one would never feel quite at home. Only for the sake of his sons had he migrated.

  But on closing day, he was grateful for each of the one thousand eight hundred miles of sea that separated him from the epicenter of his grief.

  Ranchhod would travel back to Fiji once more, for his younger daughter's wedding. While there, he would begin coughing uncontrollably—a condition that, upon his return to Australia, was diagnosed as a rare lung disease. Slowly, over a period of years, his lungs would turn rigid as bone. It was becoming more and more difficult to breathe.

  In 2003 his last two grandchildren were born: twin boys, to Ranchhod's younger daughter, who considered them a medical and divine miracle. Two sons, two daughters, with two children each.—Now my family is complete, Ranchhod told Manjula. He was now the oldest brother left, Jayanti having died in 1999 in California. Already Ranchhod was on oxygen twenty-four hours a day, in constant pain, unable to speak for more than a few minutes without coughing. A few months afterward, shortly after the New Year and his sixty-ninth birthday, he went into the hospital for the last time.

  A year before, he had asked his doctor how long he had to live. The doctor had looked at him with sympathy:—Every day that you wake up, Ranchhod, thank God for it.

  Now, with his family around him—including Chiman's widow and youngest son, who had also moved to Australia—he made his peace.

  —If you have hurt me, I forgive you, he told each of his loved ones.—And if I have injured you in any way, please, I beg your forgiveness.

  In a ritual act, he had each one place a teaspoonful of water in his mouth.

  Then he slipped off into a deep morphine sleep, a prayer to his favorite goddess on his lips.

  At the funeral, members of the local lawn-bowling club, of which Ranchhod had been an avid member and the first "black" president, came and sat among the gathered clan. Two granddaughters spoke, eloquent and openhearted and beautiful as only teenage girls can be, one barely able to make it through her sentences. My father and my uncle Manhar, the two surviving sons of Ratanji and Kaashi Narsey, were there to pay their respects. Arrayed around the coffin were wreaths and bouquets sent by Ranchhod's sisters and other kin all over the world: Toronto, London, California, New Zealand. And Fiji, where the youngest cousin was still running Narseys Plastics and where the Narseys name still stood on a wooden bu
ilding at a downtown corner, recently designated as a historic site. Someone else now looked out the second-story office window where Ranchhod had spent the good part of thirty years, those he had come to think of as his best. The boy who had once regarded the wild island as intolerable had grown, in exile, into an elder who came to see Fiji as a true paradise. If there was heaven on earth, surely it involved beaches and sunshine and one's own people all around; drinking buddies, feasts, people recognizing and respecting you when you walked down the street, listening to and laughing over your stories.

  The family tree drawn by my father ca. 1962 or 1963, with male names in Gujarati.

  RIGHT: Ratan Narsai, my great-great-grandmother. No picture exists of her husband, Narsai, the seer.

  LEFT: Motiram, my great-grandfather.

  Kaashi Motiram Narsey, my great-grandmother, whom everyone called Maaji (respected mother), with paan leaves, 1960s.

  G. C. Kapitan in front of his restaurant in Durban, South Africa.

  G. C. Kapitan (center) visiting Fiji in January 1965; left, Ratanji Narsey, G. C.'s nephew, my father's father.

  G. C.'s son Dalpat and family at the height of "petty apartheid" in South Africa, when all public places were being segregated; they are at the international airport en route to a family vacation in India, ca. 1960s.