Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (24 page)

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 building 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.

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.