Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (21 page)

Ranchhod turned down the train job, and prepared to sail back to Fiji with his wife.

His parents, still in India, wanted Ranchhod to leave his wife in Navsari to bring her child to term. Ranchhod refused; he didn't want to subject her to his mother's erratic temper, to the drama of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law that he had observed taking place with his brothers' wives. He and his father began another war of wills.

When Ranchhod went to the local travel agency, he found that Ratanji had forbidden the agent to sell him a ticket. No one in Navsari would help him procure passports and passage, for fear of his father's wrath. At length he and Manjula traveled to Bombay, applied directly to the passport and visa offices, and took the £150 bank draft to the P&O Shipping Co. As a result of the ad-hoc nature of the arrangements, they were given separate spaces on the same boat, one in first class and one in second class.

As they prepared to sail, Ratanji realized that his son had won a round. He came to see the young couple off, and even gave Ranchhod five pounds for the journey.

On board they managed to trade roommates so that husband and wife could share a cabin. In Sydney, Australia, the five pounds paid for a couple of nights in a room, with shared bathroom, at a place known as the People Palace, where passengers from India stayed in transit while waiting for a connection to New Zealand or Fiji. The outfit was run by a father-and-son team who treated the Indians well, lent money to those who needed it until they reached their destination, and even spoke a little Hindi. Ranchhod and Manjula caught the flight to Fiji and began their new life. It was 1957, and Ranchhod launched Hazrat Trading Co. with the great salmon caper.

Once Magan recovered from the shock of his nephew's salmon profit, he set about calling the bank and the collection agency, verifying the amount. It checked out. Ranchhod smiled.

— My debt is paid, right?

—Yes, Hazrat Trading Co.'s £500 is paid.

— And the £150?

—No, said Magan,—that is your personal debt to Narseys.

—No problem, Ranchhod said,—take it out of my company's account and pay it to Narseys.

Magan shook his head.—This company is not yours, it belongs to Narseys Limited. And you also work for Narseys.

That was how Ranchhod realized he was still a servant of the company, one who owed five months' salary.

Despite that disappointment, Ranchhod threw himself into business with a passion. While the salmon deal did not erase his debts, it did give him more clout within the family. He became a signatory on Narseys bank accounts and was given freer rein to run Hazrat Trading Co. as he saw fit.

And it gave him a chance to compete for his elders' respect, love, and attention. To be taken seriously, he vowed to make money—serious money, not for himself but for the company. He went about this in the systematic manner of a driven man.

First he went to the bank manager who had been so kind, and asked to learn everything about the business of money. For several months, two hours each afternoon, Ranchhod sat with the man as he closed out the day's accounts and imparted whatever practical knowledge he could to a student who knew very little English but had a head for numbers and a hunger for knowledge.

Second, Ranchhod set about making Hazrat Trading Co. a cash cow. Its opening represented another step of expansion for Narseys, into a business known as "indenting."

From the same root as "indenture," the word referred to an ancient method of writing contracts in duplicate, then laying the two papers or parchments together and cutting a notched line (
in-dentis,
Latin, "to make jagged like a row of teeth") so that they would match if reunited.
To indent
became the formal business term for "to request or order goods from, to make an order for (goods)." In other words, Ranchhod was a manufacturers' agent.

No longer did he live behind the store; now that he had a wife, he needed proper accommodations. They lived with Chiman and his wife, in a new complex just built by the family: sixteen apartments around a central courtyard. Ratanji's dream was that all of his relations would live there as one big happy family, a mini-Khatriville in the heart of Suva. Colorful laundry hung from the railings, women called to one another with the day's news, children ran up and down the central staircase shouting and playing—and squabbles broke out regularly, with great displays of shouting and door slamming.

Settling into this new milieu, Manjula experienced the physical changes of pregnancy and motherhood, as well as the emotional changes of being in a new place and in a new family. And she faced them largely alone, for Ranchhod's mind and time were fully occupied by business.

Late one night in 1961, Ranchhod sat in his office with the day's correspondence spread before him. He was twenty-six years old, married, a father of two—their first child was a girl, the second a boy—and a man of business. His office light often burned late, like the Fiji night sounds bright around him, dogs barking, jungle insects rubbing their wings. With him was a distant cousin, Kanti, whom he counted as a close friend. Ranchhod was an established presence within Fiji's Gujarati business community, though he remained small fry within the family: not the company director that his father and uncle were, nor the secretary that his eldest brother was. Now he had a problem, and he and Kanti were going to figure it out.

On his desk were the day's letters, typed in English and ready to be mailed out: orders, payments, instructions for merchandise delivery. Kanti picked up the first one and read the company name aloud, and Ranchhod told him what the letter inside should say.

—But it doesn't say that at all, Kanti said. Letter after letter, the whole stack was wrong.

In the morning Ranchhod summoned his secretary, fired him, and determined—after a lifetime of resistance—to learn English. What the British Raj, his father and uncles and teachers, and his own ambition could not accomplish, his temper did. He wrote to Uncle Magan, temporarily in India, who gladly sent a book two inches thick:
The Universal Eng.-Guj. Practical Dictionary (containing many useful hints for study and for business).
The dictionary makers knew their market. Ranchhod began to read it, one page at a time. "A: The first letter of the English alphabet. One of the tunes in the European music. An indefinite article which means one or any one..."

In this choice of pedagogical method, he followed in the footsteps of his father. Ratanji had studied only a couple of grades in India; when he went to Fiji at age fourteen, he could barely read Gujarati. But business required dealings in English, so his uncle Jiwan gave him an English-Gujarati dictionary, the only book they had that could bridge the two languages.—Study this, Ratanji was told. The men lived behind the store in those days; there was no desk, no table lamp. Young Ratanji went out under the streetlight after the day's work was done and memorized the dictionary, one word at a time.

Now Ranchhod was doing the same, although he had the luxury of studying indoors. As he progressed, he started reading daily headlines in the
Fiji Times,
dictionary by his side.

To encourage him, Uncle Magan wrote to two British companies with whom Narseys had dealings, explaining that his nephew was learning English and would be writing the correspondence to them from now on, as practice, and that he would appreciate their help in his nephew's education. For the letters, Ranchhod painstakingly arranged English sentences using the dictionary, a process that guaranteed errors of grammar and syntax. His typist was under instructions to type the letters exactly as written, in duplicate: one for the British traders to keep, the other double-spaced for them to correct and send back.

After a few months Ranchhod also began working with a Hong Kong company run by Gujaratis. He told them about his informal lessons, and they offered to help by sending him not only a corrected version of his English letters but also a Gujarati translation of what he had written, so that he could better understand where his mistakes lay.

As his English improved, the company's lawyer—a family friend—suggested a next level: that Ranchhod read the
Royal Gazette,
in which Fiji's new laws and regulations were published, and explain them to Magan to the best of his understanding. His banker then suggested a book, building on their earlier lessons together:
How to Beat the Bank.
In this way Ranchhod slowly gained a practical education in business, banking, and law as he learned English.

His studies enabled him to work independently and to expand his ambition to the English-speaking world—or at least as much of it as could be accessed from Fiji. Armed with samples, typewriter, and carbon paper (the modern version of notching), he began traveling the South Pacific, hawking the wares of the world to Indian, Chinese, white, and indigenous shopkeepers. He brought back profits, and stories: braving ghosts and malaria in Papua New Guinea, swallowing terrible food (
only nuts and pig meat
) in Samoa, overcoming racism to get served a beer in Australia. His passport filled up with exotic stamps: Tonga, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Hong Kong, New Zealand.

The world began coming to Fiji, too. Long a favorite destination of cruise ships from Australia and New Zealand, Suva was the most developed among the tropical ports of the South Pacific—and the one that afforded tourists the most shopping opportunities, thanks largely to its Gujarati storekeepers. In 1963, Fiji hosted the South Pacific Games and launched a campaign to market itself as a "duty-free" shopping destination. When the government published a directory to guide visitors to the Games around Suva, Narseys purchased full-page advertisements on the inside front and back covers ("Now available in Fiji—Olympus Pen Range Cameras—Sole Distributor"). That year, 24,246 tourists came to Fiji. By the end of the decade, the annual number would more than quadruple.

Suddenly Chiman's pet project, importing electronics to Fiji, was paying off; it positioned Narseys to exploit the new trend. In addition to cameras, transistor radios had recently been invented, replacing the large, valve-style radios of previous years. Hi-fi sound systems, electric shavers and fans, and similar gadgets were just becoming affordable. Soon, consumer electronics became the cornerstone of an expanding economic bubble in Fiji. Virtually every Khatri shopkeeper posted blazing D
UTY
F
REE
banners in the windows and began stocking cassette players, radios, watches, pens, cigarette lighters, and other goods for the tourist market. Two or three times a week, a cruise ship would pull into the harbor at 6:30
A.M.
The brass band of the Fiji Royal Military Force welcomed the boatload of tourists, then led a two-block parade up to the main shopping area. Storefronts that had once featured clothing and household goods now sported the latest gadgets, each proclaiming with loud signs and sidewalk solicitors that its prices were the best. Even the owner of the eating lodge, whose family had served up meals to working Indian men since early in the century, converted his prime downtown space to a duty-free shop. Most tourists were from New Zealand and Australia, where taxes on electronics were high. Seduced by the low prices into a kind of consumerist trance, they carted away several radios each, half a dozen cassette recorders or cameras, as much as they could carry for themselves and to give away as gifts.

For the shopkeepers, retail was no longer a subsistence economy—it was a booming business. Narseys entered a partnership with another Khatri family firm to import Matsushita transistor radios from Japan on an exclusive basis for the entire South Pacific. The first year, Narhari Electronics sold more than one hundred thousand transistor radios. In another sign of boom times, the Bank of Baroda, Gujarat, set up a branch in downtown Suva. Many Gujaratis moved their business there, where they could obtain loans more easily than at a white bank and deposit money directly into accounts for families back home.

The boom improved business for everyone, even those not dealing in electronics. As head of Hazrat Trading, Ranchhod was turning a profit every year, making money for the parent company again and again. Manjula bore two more children: a second son in 1962, a second daughter in 1969. Ranchhod, traveling for three or four months at a time and working long hours when he was in town, missed much of his four children's growing up; later he would say with regret,—I never even knew when my sons started school.

His business was to sell everything: ready-made shirts, quick-release ice cube trays from Japan, saris he designed himself by cutting and pasting patterns he found appealing. In the bazaar he spotted colorful traditional Fijian bark designs on paper, and arranged them in a block for shirt fabric that became a bestseller. He followed his own taste, ordering black velvet scrolls that featured the map of Fiji in colored thread and glitter; for a time, nearly every Fiji Gujarati home had one prominently displayed.

But nothing was as sweet as that first deal: the surprised, shocked faces of his elders who could hardly believe that this boy, this headstrong, illiterate boy, could turn such a profit. He had disobeyed orders, he had used his own wits, found his own sources, and won. And that spirit stayed with him.

Business was a constant challenge, not only against the market but against what was expected of him. It was a realm in which he was able to earn a grudging recognition and respect, certainly from outsiders and to some extent from his own family. And through it, Fiji became home.