Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (27 page)

Weeks later, a vinyl recording of the program arrived by post. Bhupendra and his brother placed it on the turntable of their gramophone, cranked the handle, and watched with dismay as the heavy needle irreparably scratched the surface. The record was designed for a more modern turntable, and was now ruined. They would have to wait a few months or years to hear their father's voice again. And they would never know what, exactly, Ratanji had been saying, though they were sure it was profound and important.

If his father's absence had been unique, perhaps it might have caused Bhupendra more grief. But in fact, few fathers were present in the neighborhood, and it had been that way for a long time. Bhupendra knew that paternal migration had begun at least two generations earlier, with his grandfather Motiram. Now, almost all of his uncles and older cousins were overseas, in Fiji, South and East Africa, London, and elsewhere. The men sent back money and visited when they could; where passports have been lost, the journeys of the fathers can be tracked by the births of the children. This, too, had come to seem a normal part of the rhythm of village life.

Besides, at the crucial moments in Bhupendra's life, his father always seemed to arrive, like a hero in the movies: Bhupendra's bout with typhoid, his primary school graduation, moments when decisions needed to be made about his future. Bhupendra learned to accept his father's gruff, periodic love and also, when the visits inevitably ended, to survive without it.

Instead, his childhood was filled with family, faith, and school. Grade school was math, science, geography, Indian history, and Gujarati. High school brought a new subject, world history, in which they memorized the English kings (why did so many have the same name?) and surveyed the spread of the British Empire. They also added languages: Hindi, English, and a choice of a fourth—Persian for the Muslim boys, Avesta for the Parsis, and Sanskrit for the Hindus. In English class, for the first time, Bhupendra was told to spell his first and last names. The first he managed; the second request confused him.

—What is my last name? he asked the teacher.

Like his brothers and uncles before him, he was an Indian with only one name confronting the English system of two names. And as with them, the outcome was somewhat arbitrary.

His teacher happened to know that one of Bhupendra's uncles owned a building, on which a second name was engraved in Gujarati. It was not Narsey, which was his father's last name and the name of the store in Fiji. Instead, it was a longer version of the name his brother Ranchhod had chosen, Hazrat: destiny. In block letters the teacher wrote it down:
H-A-J-R-A-T-W-A-L-A
. The
J
was the teacher's interpretation of a Gujarati letter that is pronounced more like
jh
or
zh;
the
wala
was a common suffix that is transliterated equally often as
walla
or
wallah.
Bhupendra copied out the English letters, and
Hajratwala
became the spelling that he, alone in his entire family and indeed in the world, would adopt as his own—a memento of his own unique moment of encounter.

***

As Bhupendra started his second year of high school, his younger brother, Manhar, entered high school as well. The boys took classes from 10
A.M.
to 5
P.M.
each day and did their homework each evening under the direction of a private tutor—a rare luxury that was one of the fruits of Ratanji's success overseas. Because the high school was across town, their mother arranged for them to take lunch each day at the home of the family priest, who lived behind the school.

Before they went, she gave them a lecture.

A man who has always used knife, fork, and spoon may look at one who eats with his hands as more casual, lacking in etiquette, perhaps even primitive. But eating with one's hands carries its own complex rules, which any Indian village child comes to know. A Hindu eats, for example, only with the right hand, never the left—which is reserved for bathroom functions—and never both; eating with two hands is something only very small children or people who are somehow incapacitated may do.

Bhupendra and Manhar, of course, knew this much. Now their mother schooled them in the finer points.

—Now you are about to eat at a Brahmin's house, so eat neatly! Don't mush everything together like you do at home! Tear off one little piece of bread and put a little vegetable in it, like this.

She demonstrated, and continued.—Mix a little rice with a little daal, and eat that before mixing more. Don't make a big soup on your plate.

At the first meal, Bhupendra hesitated, watching closely how the priest and his family ate. It was the first meal he had ever taken outside his family, and he wanted to make no mistakes, to bring no shame upon himself or his kin. He saw that they were doing as Kaashi had described: They broke off pieces of rotli, with which they scooped up vegetables. They built a bunker of rice in which to pour the soupy daal, instead of letting it slosh all over the plate, then blended it neatly, bite by bite. Bhupendra copied them, feeling his discomfort and fear of embarrassment subside as he mastered the new skill. Eating with them daily, he developed a habit he would keep the rest of his life.

In the most subtle of ways, my father's manner of eating sets him apart from, and some would say above, the rest of our people. Whatever he eats now, whether tacos or Szechuan chicken or home food, his plate is always neat; he takes one bite at a time and chews it calmly, in a disciplined way. And I wonder how it was that he thoroughly internalized the rules set before him for two years as a teenager. Did he begin eating in the high-caste way at home immediately, perhaps showing off a little in front of his own family, exhibiting his own social mobility? Or was the shift gradual, as over time it simply became too much to maintain the gap between the home way and the outside way? Or was practicing encouraged by his mother at home, in the effort to save him—and herself—from embarrassment at the priest's home? Whatever the case, it was a first step out of the narrow confines of his family's home and caste. And even today, when my mother serves rice, she knows to pause a moment, to let my father first shape it into a barrier on his plate, before pouring the daal within it, neat and contained.

The priest told Bhupendra and Manhar religious fables over lunch and sat with them in meditation afterward. Later it was said that the reason both brothers did so well in school was that they had eaten the Brahmin's food, which in the Ayurvedic system of traditional medicine would be called
sattvic:
balanced, pure, healthy for the body-mind. Over vegetables and flatbread, rice and daal, they imbibed not only the ideal foods conducive to learning but also a greater share of the priest's blessings. This informal aspect of their education, the family believed, made both boys unusually brainy.

Along with his religious tutelage, in high school Bhupendra broadened his interests. He and his friends walked along the railway tracks of Navsari, conversing about philosophy, school, the world beyond. To practice his new languages, he wrote to the
Rotarian,
the magazine of the international Rotary Club, to find Hindi and English pen pals elsewhere in India and throughout the world.

One day he came home with a request: Could he take an afterschool elective? The school was offering music classes, taught by a sitar maestro and classical singer who was so famous that he sometimes performed on the national radio station. Bhupendra thought it was a magnificent opportunity.

To his surprise, his mother was anything but pleased.

The performing arts were for low-caste people, Kaashi remonstrated, and no child of hers would be involved in singing and dancing and carrying on. Performers were vagrants, all but begging on the streets—traveling minstrels, showmen—or mingling with courtesans, dancers, and other entertainers of dubious provenance. Becoming a musician was like joining the circus; you might like the clowns, but you wouldn't want your son to become one.

Surprised, Bhupendra rallied enough to make a counteroffer. There was an art class, too; could he take that?

Drawing, painting: still a questionable enterprise, in Kaashi's view. In the village, artists sat on the street with their boards and paints, or climbed scaffolding to paint the buildings and temples of the rich. The Western model of museums and concert halls, of a high art performed by, not only for, the elite, had not yet penetrated the village of Navsari. People of the royal caste, however remote from royalty themselves, did not become artists; they hired them.

But, reluctantly—perhaps unable to dash her favorite son's hopes altogether, or perhaps eager to keep him out of the corrupt world of music—Kaashi gave her consent to the art class. So Bhupendra learned about pencils, charcoals, paints; perspective, composition, color; the human eye, the artist's eye. He started with flowers and still lifes, progressed to bodies. And he took yet another step beyond the world of rules that had circumscribed his ancestors, following instead a path toward a liberal, worldly education.

Along the way, he studied hard.

The unofficial policy of the community was that boys went to join the family businesses abroad; usually this came to pass naturally, when they flunked out. But Bhupendra did not fail. He passed grade after grade, his brother Manhar one year behind him. Bhupendra became the first, among all of his siblings and first cousins, to graduate from high school.

What came next? Kaashi wrote to Ratanji, who wrote back:—The boy is studying, no point in wasting his education here in Fiji. Ratanji decided to visit India to seek a solution.

Meanwhile, Kaashi sought counsel of her own. She summoned to the house a beggar-prophet, one of the wandering wise men who meandered from village to village exchanging fortunes for alms. She asked about the fate of her brightest son: What would become of him?

The prophet listened. Perhaps he looked at the boy's star chart, or simply closed his eyes and deliberated; perhaps he was pondering the meal or money my grandmother was about to give him. Then he delivered stunning news:

—If this boy does not leave the house before he turns sixteen, he will become a monk and never give you grandchildren.

There is so much we do not know about our own lives, so many ifs and perhapses that guide us toward becoming ourselves. These days we might consult horoscopes or tarot readers, herbalists or therapists, but their advice is simply that: advice, a new perspective to be weighed and considered, one potentially useful reflection upon our situation. My grandmother's generation was, in a way, the last in my family to take destiny seriously. To take the word of a wandering prophet, and make of it a life decision, requires a kind of faith I do not possess. Somewhere between my grandmother's time and mine, in the westward migrations of diaspora, there came a moment when such pure belief—called, now, superstition—was left behind.

Had Kaashi been worldlier, perhaps she would have dismissed the prophet as a quack and kept my father at home to attend the local college, which offered a course in accounting. Perhaps she would even have resisted any decision that would take him away from the fold, and my father would have remained immersed a while longer in the circumscribed sphere of her influence: family, tradition, food, caste, village, home. Perhaps, from this protracted cocooning, swaddled some years longer in her nest, he would have emerged a different man.

But as it was, she took the fortuneteller's word as we might take a product of hard science, as if the man viewed Destiny through a telescope whose gaze was simply more powerful than the naked eye. For a woman of her time, it was a devastating vision.

A fable from the life of a Hindu saint and commentator, Shankaracharya, brings home the nature of my grandmother's dilemma. I came across a translation of this tale in a text written decades later by my father. He asked me to edit the manuscript, which in draft form included this passage:

As a boy, Shankar was swimming in the river when he was attacked by a crocodile. As his mother stood on the bank watching, the river goddess came and offered a choice: save the boy's life and have him become a monk, or let him die. Of course it was a difficult choice...

My comment in the margin was, "Why was it a difficult choice? Not obvious to a Western reader." What mother would not first save her son's life and only later consider his career choice?

But my father explained the difficulty: "Either way, she would lose her son." A religious man not only renounces worldly possessions; he must also shed attachments of any sort, including family ties. For Kaashi, who longed to see her sons settled with wives and families of their own, Bhupendra's childhood piety now seemed an ominous portent. The idea that her baby could be swept into the harsh life of a renunciate was unbearable.

—No matter what, she told her husband,—I want this boy out of the house.

My father's memories of 1957 are, naturally, distant, made more so by the fact of his multiple migrations ever since. Each time we move, we must leave something of ourselves behind; perhaps then the map of a diaspora consists, like a constellation, mainly of gaps. And these distances gape in our memories, as in our personalities; we lack the physical objects, buildings, people whose presence might remind us of what we once were, might lend us some continuity. Now in his sixties, my father can barely believe he was once that boy, it was so long ago and far away. So when I ask him to amplify this moment—what was it like when he and his father decided his future?—he cannot remember whether the conversation took place in person, by sea mail, or through the intermediary of his mother.