Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Narotam after his release from prison for participating in Gandhi's salt march, July 1930.

  Ratanji, Kalyaan, and Narotam (third, fourth, and fifth from left), and others drinking in the backyard—a typical Sunday activity in Suva, Fiji, in the 1960s.

  Ratanji Narsey, my grandfather, who migrated to Fiji at age 14 after the death of his father, Motiram, and then headed the Narseys enterprise. This is a handpainted colorization of a photograph, ca. 1940s.

  Thakor ("Tom"), standing, with his father, Ratanji, in the Narseys office in Fiji, ca. 1960s.

  The Narsey family in Suva, 1962 or 1963. The unmarried sons are wearing printed Fijian "bula" shirts (back row: Bhupendra, second from left, and Manhar, third from right). The married sons and the sons-in-law are wearing suits (back row: Ranchhod, third from left, holding baby, next to his wife, Manjula; second row: Chiman, third from right). Ratanji and Kaashi are at center.

  The Narseys Building in 2001: still a downtown Suva landmark, but the family business has been shuttered for two decades.

  My mother, Bhanu (left), with school friends in Fiji, ca. 1960.

  My father, Bhupendra, being seen off by his mother at the docks, 1963.

  ABOVE: Bhupendra and Champak sightseeing upon their arrival in San Francisco, 1963.

  RIGHT: Bhupendra graduated with a master's degree in 1965. His father made multiple copies of this photo and sent it to all the family.

  Part Three: Citizens

  1984

  Estimated size of the Indian diaspora: 4,599,063

  Countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin: 33

  1. South Africa

  2. England and Wales

  3. Guyana

  4. Trinidad and Tobago

  5. USA

  6. Fiji

  7. United Arab Emirates

  8. Canada

  9. Singapore

  10. Surinam

  11. Saudi Arabia

  12. Oman

  13. Netherlands

  14. Yemen (PDR)

  15. Kenya

  16. Kuwait

  17. Tanganyika

  18. Qatar

  19. Bahrain

  20. Muskat/Muscat

  21. Iraq

  22. Zambia

  23. Mozambique

  24. Iran

  25. Indonesia

  26. Thailand

  27. Australia

  28. Nigeria

  29. Germany (FRG)

  30. Hong Kong

  31. Jordan

  32. New Zealand

  33. Libya

  6. Brains

  We have built universities, technological institutions, and national science laboratories but they are emptier than before because they are constantly being drained ... Indeed, our entire educational system has become a big liaison and passport office.

  —"India," paper presented at an international conference on the "brain drain," August 1967

  IN THE SUMMER of 1963, my mother and father stood a few feet apart on the same dock, gazing up at the same ship. The Oriana was a gleaming white ocean liner about to embark for the western coast of North America, thousands of miles across the pure blue thrash of the Pacific.

  They did not know each other, yet.

  My father, Bhupendra, twenty-one years old, was traveling from Fiji to the New World to study. My mother, Bhanu, age sixteen, was at the dock to see her brother off. The two young men were the first of their community to go to the United States for education. Their fathers were friends and drinking buddies; over casual conversation, each had made the decision—despite some reservations—to buy his son one-way passage. And both mothers were on the verge of weeping.

  As the families said their farewells, only a tiny hint of the future could be heard, a stage whisper from my mother's elder sister to their brother:—Keep an eye on that young man; I think he will be good for Bhanu.

  And so my mother glanced at my father for the first time.

  She noticed his loose-fitting pants, how he kept calling to his mother, pointing out to her various features of the ship:—Ma, look at this, he said,—and this, Ma, and this.

  —Isn't he nice-looking, my mother's sister said, nudging her.

  —Maa! Maa! my mother mocked, bleating like a sheep. She was still in high school, a popular girl, star student, and basketball center; her mind was not on marriage. As she watched her brother and her father's friend's son disappear up the gangplank, she had no idea that this stranger would become the most important man in her life.

  I imagine the very beginning of each of my parents' lives, long before they converge: egg and sperm meeting, dividing, differentiating, a bundle of human tissue hurtling toward human being. In the third week after conception, before either of my grandmothers even knows she is pregnant, a certain layer of cells known as the ectoderm begins to thicken. This is the beginning of neural development: what will become the brain.

  My father's brain, my mother's brain. By the time of birth, eight and a half months later, it is doing everything it will ever do—controlling bodily functions, taking in sensations, learning. According to the Enlightenment philosophers of Europe, it is a tabula rasa: a blank slate awaiting mathematics, morality, language; a repository of free will. In the Hindu understanding, it is the reincarnation of an ancient karmic stream already destined to grow, migrate, and make me.

  As Bhanu and Bhupendra grew up, their brains became more than their individual organs. Among the most educated young people ever produced by their community, they migrated in their twenties from the Third World to the First. The leap was momentous, not only for them and their future children, but also because it was part of a worldwide pattern so remarkable that it developed its own experts and statistics, its own terminology: the brain drain.

  Coined in 1962 to describe the large-scale migration of skilled technocrats from Britain to the United States, the term was quickly co-opted to describe a related, even more dramatic phenomenon: the movement of educated professionals from developing countries, particularly India and China, to developed nations, particularly the United States. Critics saw the brain drain as a large-scale theft by the world's wealthiest nations of the intangible assets of countries that could ill afford to lose their brightest young people. Apologists defended what they saw as merely the free market at work. "Brains go where money is," argued one, while, in the version preferred by Science magazine in 1965, "Brains go where brains are ... where there is a challenge ... where brains are valued." Thousands of articles and books, hundreds of thousands of academic and conference hours, and even several rounds of hearings before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations were devoted to various aspects of the brain drain: solutions to the problem, if it was a problem; analysis of the statistics, laced with regret that better statistics were not available; and purported calculations of the lost value to its native country of each "drained" brain (estimates ranged from $20,000 to $75,000). My parents' brains, and those of millions of others who migrated during the 1960s and '70s, were no longer their individual properties alone; they were commodities for the West.

  At root, the experts wanted to know what I, child of such migrants, also wonder: How did these men and women, crème de la crème, come to travel from one world to the next? And why—despite their deeply rooted histories, despite the difficulties of exile, and even sometimes despite themselves—did they stay?

  When my mother speaks of her childhood, it is a rush of sensory details, tastes, smells, sounds, flowers and plants and weather patterns of her beloved Fiji, where she was born and, except for a few childhood years in India, raised. I grew up in Michigan knowing that Fiji tasted of tamarind plucked fresh from the tree, climbed by her, a fearless girl in a school skirt, throwing the stiff brown pods with their dark, sweet-sour meat down to her friends, who were all afraid to climb. I felt the wet heat of daily five-minute rain showers, drying off in just minutes in the tropical sea air. I dream-ate mangoes every way they came: green, sour, tart, sliced with salt; or pic
kled in chili oil, sugar, salt, fenugreek; or sliced ripe and orange; or smoothed into soup. I knew the pleasure of her childhood mischief, running easily away from an arthritic-kneed mother; or of mixing yogurt, salt, mustard seed, chili, and cucumber into raita and eating the whole bowlful atop the tin roof alone as she read her schoolbooks. Of playing basketball: organizing the first girls' intramural team at the Indian school, designing uniforms (short, sleeveless dresses with pleated skirts and green trim), running and dribbling and leaping across the courts at the botanical gardens, losing almost every game to teams of Fijian girls who seemed twice as tall. Shopping for luxurious dress fabrics at the Narseys store, where she once saw the governor's wife shop, and where her father in flush times would tell the "uncle" behind the counter,—Give Bhanu whatever she wants. Begging her parents, futilely, to let her learn swimming after school, to take Saturday music lessons, to go to New Zealand to study. Watching her father drink all weekend with his friends; fleeing to the movies whenever she could. Hearing her uncle Kalyaan drink, fight, and curse in the next bedroom through the thin walls, raging at her aunt till he passed out, night after night after tropical night.

  In many of these ways, my mother's childhood was typical for a girl of her community in those times. The youngest of five children, she was devoted to both of her parents. She learned household chores but was not above wriggling out of them, and spent her free time going to the movies, gossiping, and philosophizing with friends. They made their own adventures and discoveries: finding golf balls near the city course, cutting them open to make rubber bands for their hair; wading through rice paddies at recess, coming back to school with muddy knees. What set Bhanu apart from her giggling girlfriends, then and into adulthood, was education.

  From the beginning, Bhanu did well in school. She skipped grade two and then grade four, and ranked in the top ten students of her class most years. Some of this remarkable academic success was due to her love of her teachers, and some to her brother, Champak, who served as tutor, tormentor, and the competition to beat.

  Only a year apart—he was born in July 1945, she in September 1946—the two siblings were close. When Bhanu had to go to the dentist to get the last four of her baby teeth pulled, at age seven, it was Champak who took her by bus to the hospital's dental school, and who comforted her as best he could when blood dripped on her favorite pink satin dress. He was always challenging her to do better in school, nagging her to stay awake and study, asking her why she couldn't place number one in her class, as he did. All through primary school, she raced to keep up with his record.

  School was the Baal Mandir, literally the Children's Temple, set up by Indians in Suva to educate their own, although a few native Fijians also attended. Bhanu was smart and worked hard but was no bookworm. She was a ringleader among her friends, and always kept up with the latest fashions. She played the female lead, Sita, in a holiday play based on the epic Ramayana; she often fell asleep over her schoolbooks, and had little passion for reading or mathematics.

  Pictures and places, though, fired her imagination. In geography class, she pored over the atlas, spun the globe, and drew intricate, color-coded maps adorned with facts and figures: geological riches and natural resources, climate and annual rainfall, major imports and exports. Her geography notebook traveled the school, shown off by teachers in other classrooms as a specimen of exemplary work. Her imagination traveled, too: Europe, Australia, Antarctica. The climate and minerals of the islands. The history of the British Empire. The Seven Wonders of the World: she hoped she might one day see them all, though it was a remote wish—just as, when photos of the moon missions came out in Life magazine, she thought how wonderful it would be to go there.

  Meanwhile she went to school devotedly, doggedly, even on her sisters' wedding days when everyone said,—Just skip a day, what does it matter? They did not bother to state the obvious: that for a girl, education was nothing, and what Bhanu would learn at a wedding mattered more for her future than anything taught at school. In eighth grade she was chosen to be head of the class on Mondays, and led her team to earn points by cleaning the school, scouring the bathrooms, picking up trash. Such skills were reinforced by other classes, for which the students were bused to a local home economics school. The girls learned to make scones, set a table, knit, crochet, and bake a cake, while the boys studied carpentry.

  For the first seven grades, classes were in the Hindustani language, with one English lesson a day. In eighth grade, the school became serious about English. Bhanu and the other Indian students were able to pass written tests in English, despite having little conversational experience, but now, suddenly, they were required to speak English at all times. Those caught speaking another language anywhere on school grounds were fined a penny—which they had to wear on a chain around their neck for the whole day. The Fijian penny, with a hole in its center, lent itself well to such punishment.

  Eighth grade was also the year when school itself became serious. Bhanu had to focus on the year-end examination, a national set of qualifying tests for high school entrance. If she did well in all subjects, she could go to Dudley High, a Methodist institution that was considered the best girls' school on the island. Champak was already at the best boys' school, a Jesuit-run high school, and she wanted nothing less than her brother. She studied harder than she ever had in her life.

  At the time, not a single girl from the Khatri community in Fiji was in high school. Most did not even bother to take the qualifying exam, opting instead to drop out after the eighth grade, either to marry or to wait for marriage.

  But Bhanu was determined, and her parents were indulgent. She felt especially close to her father, Narotam. As the youngest child, she had perhaps the most undivided time with him. They ate oatmeal together in the mornings, and Narotam allowed her to play sports and go to the movies with girlfriends—freedoms that her uncle and aunt, who lived in the same house and had no children of their own, thought unwise. When Bhanu did well in the eighth-grade examinations, earning a place at Dudley and her brother's grudging admiration at last, her mother was ill and could not attend the graduation ceremony. It was Narotam who beamed proudly from the audience as Bhanu accepted a prize for having the highest marks of any student in her class.

  Still, Narotam was a traditional man whose main priority for his daughters was marriage. Bhanu started ninth grade with Narotam saying,—All right, but this is the last year. When she begged to keep going, Narotam relented and allowed her one more year.

  At the end of tenth grade, another set of national tests came up. Narotam told her that she could continue only if she scored an A on the exam. She leaned into her studies as hard as she could, staying up late to cram as many facts and figures into her head as she could, driven by an ambition for which she had no female role models. How much of what we do at age fourteen or sixteen is a decision? And how much is a simpler drive for survival: an unspoken, interior understanding of what will help us to become ourselves, and the instinct to reach toward it—a tropism, like a plant that bends toward the sun?

  Sun on a concrete step, a mother's finger: these are among my father's earliest memories of his childhood in the village of Navsari, India. Growing up, my father had no American dream. America was Elvis Presley on the phonograph and the Voice of America on the radio, while India was Bhaarat Maataa, the nation as mother and goddess. Bhupendra was her son as surely as he was the sixth child of Ratanji and Kaashi Narsey.

  On cool winter mornings before school, Kaashi would bundle the children in sweaters and take them to a neighbor's sunny stoop to warm up. Then they walked to school together, Bhupendra holding his mother's finger all the way. They were good times, my father says now, an old sweetness in his eyes; the good old days.

  By his own telling, Bhupendra's childhood was idyllic. His very birth, in Navsari on April 8, 1942, was deemed auspicious: that week, his father, Ratanji, closed a deal on buying a property next door. Ratanji vowed that upon his death the house would go to the
baby who had brought such good luck.

  As a child Bhupendra was his mother's unabashed favorite; she fed him from his own special plate, which none of his siblings were allowed to touch. His nickname at home was Bhagwaan, the common word for god. His two older sisters, Kamu and Kanchan, helped raise him; along with Chiman, Ranchhod, and Jayanti, they made up the first set of siblings. Bhupendra was the oldest of the second set, which included Manhar, a year younger, and Lila, whose birth is his first memory.

  Just shy of four years old, he sat on the stairs overlooking the commotion downstairs, where his mother lay in labor as people came in and out of the house. Then the midwife left, and there was a baby to play with, and Bhupendra saw himself as her protector. Years later, when Lila enraged their mother by rolling rotli for dinner too slowly, it was Bhupendra who ran to the kitchen. As their mother hit Lila, screaming,—I'm going to kill you, he intervened with a knife.

  —Here, he told his mother calmly,—if you want to do it right. This brought their mother to her senses, and she stopped.

  But Kaashi never raised a hand against Bhupendra. In school he was favored as well: he spent only a week in kindergarten before the teacher sent him off to first grade, since he already knew his numbers and alphabet—taught by his older siblings and his mother, in spare moments. If intelligence is a product of early love and attention, surely Bhupendra began with a head start.

  The first lessons that the brain must process arrive through the body, and the heart. From birth or even before, pleasure is a need met, deeply satisfied; pain is deprivation. As infants, we know everything (taste of sustenance, comfort, love-hate) through the mother; then through the other bodies moving through our rooms, creating shifts of light, smell, and sound. Next we step outside. Strangers, streets, school; these too teach us. And when we begin to go farther, to learn things our families cannot teach us, we begin to grow up.