Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (26 page)

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 pickled 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.

For my father (as for me), the primary source of this extrafamilial knowledge, this deep initiation into the world beyond the family, was books. Once he learned to read, books took him into the realms of the gods of science and history, of other languages and the alien concepts embedded within them: Hindi, Sanskrit, English. And later, or along with all of these, the inner realm of himself.

His quickness made him a teacher's pet. Year after year, all the children sat on the floor or low benches except Bhupendra, who sat on a chair at a proper desk, next to the teacher. In return he came to love education. In third grade, he ran a fever during final exams but insisted on going to school; his mother came and sat with him through the examinations. Every morning the children chanted a traditional Hindu mantra:

Lead us from darkness into light,
from the unreal to the real,
from the cycles of life and death to the everlasting.

Bhupendra took the teachings to heart. Studying scripture, he memorized Sanskrit
slokas
well enough to correct visiting priests tartly when their tongues slipped. He and his school friends followed the religion's unwritten rules without discussing them; he did not eat in the homes of his "lower"-caste friends, and the "higher"-caste boys did not so much as accept a glass of water in his. In Fiji his father and older brothers had all but dropped such caste taboos, but at home in Navsari, caste purity was very much alive—so much so that no one needed to explain or speak of it. It was part of the subtle education he absorbed, woven into the fabric of a village whose traditions seemed eternal.

The only gap in Bhupendra's life was his father, whom he saw only every three or four years. Ratanji inhabited the distant and fuzzy world beyond Navsari, a world known to Bhupendra only through his geography textbooks and scattered family anecdotes, although almost all of his older male relatives lived out there.

In 1946, when Bhupendra was four years old, Ratanji had just taken the helm as director of Narseys. When Bhupendra turned ten, Ratanji was opening a shoe-distribution business and a drinking club for Gujarati merchants in Fiji. As Bhupendra entered his teenage years, Ratanji was expanding the tailoring and clothing shop into a department store, with new divisions selling liquor and electronics. Business took Ratanji not only to Fiji but also to Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, England; and once to New York, where his connections landed him a radio interview on the Voice of America, to be broadcast in Asia. He telegrammed home, and at the appointed hour the clan in Navsari gathered in Kaashi's front room. The year was 1956 or '57; Bhupendra, precocious, had skipped a few grades and was in high school.

The main room of the family home, with its dark wooden walls and raw floor, became an informal amphitheater focused on a chest-high cabinet radio—the latest model, brought home by Ratanji himself on an earlier trip. Aside from the plank swing that hung from the ceiling, on which eight adults could easily crowd together, the radio was the largest piece of furniture in the room. Someone turned the dial, past the national radio stations with their patriotic news and classical tunes, and found the Voice of America. The program was in English, which only a few of the dozens of family members packed into the room could understand. Even Bhupendra, who was taking English in school, could hardly count himself fluent. Still, as his cousins and aunts jostled and hushed one another, Bhupendra leaned in close and listened, over thousands of miles of radio hiss, to his father's voice.