Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (58 page)

When I interviewed Hemesh, he was confident that the turnover had posed no problems for businessmen. But another threat was presenting itself: the emergence of Chinese capitalism. For a century, China's insularity and British efficiency had given Hong Kong traders a virtual monopoly on importing goods into China and exporting the products of Chinese factories to the world. Now China was opening up, as was evident a short boat ride away from Hong Kong, in the new city of Shenzhen. Once a tract of shrimp and litchi farms, Shenzhen had been transformed into a giant experiment with capitalism: a "free enterprise zone" with thousands of garment factories, silicon chip manufacturers, high-rise buildings, and, somewhat incongruously, three sprawling theme parks for tourists. International buyers no longer needed Hong Kong; they could now deal directly with factory owners in Shenzhen and other designated Chinese centers of industry. They could cut out the middleman.

And then there was, for the Khatris, a social change. Once home to perhaps twenty-five families, enough to hold an annual festival and organize a soccer league for the men, Hong Kong by 2001 had only four Khatri families. I had met all of them at a Divali party at Hemesh's place the night before our interview; they barely filled the apartment. Some of the children were growing up with Chinese accents and almost no contact with their ancestral traditions. In the tiny apartments that are the lot of all but the wealthiest Hong Kongers, the Khatris' sense of isolation was growing. Hong Kong no longer felt like a frontier; it felt like exile. It was, for many of those who could manage it, time to move on.

Chhiba Trading remains a remote outpost of our diaspora, tucked into a dead-end lane of shops displaying dried herbs and cheap leather goods. Within a few years of our interview, Hemesh had taken his family to Australia, though his father remained in Hong Kong to keep up the office. On the day I interviewed Hemesh there, several staff members, all Chinese, worked quietly at their desks. Hemesh explained that although he was fluent in Cantonese, most Chinese factory owners preferred to deal with other Chinese, so he employed some local "translators." On his desk were piles of papers and several varieties of batteries. He noticed my glance, and said, "These are for export to Africa." Oh? "Very cheap, but they only last a few hours. For Africa price matters more than quality. You couldn't sell these in America, but for Africa, they are the only ones."

I asked a few more questions about the trade, and he warmed to his subject. Every three to four months he had to tour the African continent, checking on customers and the market, trying to collect payments amid the constant currency devaluations. Goods from China—not just batteries but cloth, household items, and anything else—were perfect because they could be provided as cheaply as Africans could afford to buy. "The thing about items going to Africa is, they will never sell in Europe or the States. Because for one thing they'll never pass the quality control; I mean, the example is the battery. If you want the price of a battery like this"—he held one up—"the first thing they'll ask you in China is, How long do you want it to run? And I can get you a battery at a price which says that if you run it continuously on this tape recorder"—he pointed to my hand-held machine—"it will run for only fifteen minutes. What is the value of that? In America you wouldn't even pay fifteen cents for a fifteen-minute battery, you'd go and complain that it didn't even work. In Africa, who's going to see about a complaint? You can sell them in bulk, so it works out."

I looked at my tape recorder, and the pile of batteries on the desk, and the calm black eyes of the businessman-cousin in front of me: a series of reflective surfaces, tiny mirrors whose messages I could not decipher.

S
OUTH
A
FRICA

If Hemesh was trading with Africans at a cool and businesslike distance, my relatives in South Africa were encountering them up close, particularly since the end of apartheid. That intimacy has led them to numerous responses: racism, tension, fear, rage, emigration, attempts at re-segregation—and in some cases, compassion and hope.

Outside Johannesburg, I met up with my second cousin Praveena. A single mother since her husband's suicide just after their daughter was born, Praveena is just a few years older than I am. I stayed with her family for a couple of days, and we were able to talk easily. Praveena was living with her parents, brother, and four-year-old daughter in Lenasia—"Land of the Asians," a formerly Indian-only suburb that, like the rest of the new South Africa, was in a period of transition. Many Indians were moving "up" to the formerly white areas. Black and "coloured" (South Africa's term for mixed-race) people were likewise moving "up" to the Indian areas. Most Indians were not pleased by these newcomers.

Lenasia looked to me like any suburb in America, but with more barbed wire; security was one of South Africa's fastest-growing industries. Everyone I met was concerned about the growing crime rate. Everyone had experienced or heard of crimes that were shocking in their brutality, even allowing for some exaggeration: street muggings, carjackings, home break-ins, multiple rape-murders of whole families. While Indians had welcomed the end of apartheid, many were somewhere between ambivalent and fearful about black-majority rule.

In this volatile environment, Praveena was a teacher in the integrating public-school system. The position made her, de facto, one of the people trying to bridge the racial divides that had been enforced in South Africa for generations. She took me on a visit to her school, where the staff remained almost all Indian but where the student body now included Indian, black, and "coloured"—but no white—children.

Y. Chengalroyen, the school's principal, sat down with me for one class period and gave me an overview of what was happening in the school system. One problem, he said, was that people who were active in the anti-apartheid struggle had been given important posts overseeing public education, pushing out skilled career educators. These activists seemed to be modeling their administration on the U.S. public-school system, with erratic results.

Another, more immediate issue was that Indians were moving their children out to schools in white areas or to private schools, where they paid up to 8,000 rand ($800) per year in tuition. His high school was functioning on less than 600 rand ($60) per pupil per year. "Indians are not prepared to uplift the schools in their own areas," he complained. Into the vacuum came black and "coloured" students, from areas whose schools were even worse off. He was allocated one staff member per thirty-five students, which included the principal and deputy principal.

Chengalroyen bore no nostalgia for apartheid; he had been an activist himself, involved in the early days of the national teachers' union, and a leader in the movement to protest a history curriculum that included little but the mythologizing tales of white settlers. But he was frustrated by the scope of the challenge. "Parents have become desperate to send their children to good schools," he acknowledged. "Our teachers are not very relaxed."

At 8
A.M.
the morning assembly opened, and the students chanted in unison: "Let God be in my head, and in my understanding; let God be in my eyes, and in my looking..." While the other teachers huddled together and talked under an awning, Praveena walked up and down the neat rows of her students, saying good morning. Her students were mostly "matriculates," meaning that they were in their last year; she taught biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. At 8:10, she unlocked her classroom door, and the chattering students filed in. By American standards, they seemed polite and well behaved, most saying "Good morning, ma'am" as they entered. Praveena launched into a lesson on vectors and polygons, scrawling problems and diagrams on the board: "A spider in search of food crawls 2 meters on a bearing of 225 degrees, then 3 meters on a bearing of 270 degrees, 2 meters on a bearing of 315 degrees," and so on for several more steps; "Determine the resultant displacement of the spider." Sitting in the teacher's chair near the front, I tried to solve the problem, then gave up. Instead I watched the class: "coloured" girls with light skin and fine features, darker African girls with hairstyles that would not have been out of place in the latest rap videos, Muslim girls wearing black headscarves, and Hindu girls with henna highlights and eyeglasses. The boys were less varied in their hairdos, and everyone wore the school's uniform, gray with accents of red and white. The students seemed to have grouped themselves by race in their seating choices, but in my quick survey, I could detect no hostile currents among them; they seemed attentive and focused on learning. By 8:30
A.M.
, Praveena had chalk on the scarf of her salwar kameez.

In third period, she taught physics. "In your opinion you're doing work," she started off, "but scientifically, you're doing
nothing.
" This was a prelude to explaining that "Work is done when a Force is applied to a Mass, and the object moves in the direction of the Force." Heads bent over papers; pencils were raised. She described Newton's second law, then concluded, "You're only doing Work if a Force causes a Mass to be displaced." There were forty-eight students in the class, and when she asked them to break into small groups to solve a problem together, chaos ensued. She had to shout to regain their attention. By 11
A.M.
, Praveena was exhausted—and she had three more classes to teach.

On Saturdays and Sundays she also taught, all day, giving private lessons in her family's garage to students who could pay for extra tutoring. At first only Indians came; then, as the schools integrated, other students asked if they could also come. She told me, "At first I was guilty, but then my heart told me, you mustn't be so ugly. They are children too, and I am a teacher. And I'm so glad I took them, they are lovely children, they want to learn so much."

By the end of each day, chalk dust forms a sort of Milky Way across Praveena's blouse. The moral force of the anti-apartheid resistance has caused a great displacement; now, for the Indians as for other South Africans, there is work to be done.

N
EW
J
ERSEY

Praveena and her family were planning to stay in South Africa—while I was there, they were looking to buy a bigger house—but many of their relations and peers had chosen emigration. At a Starbucks on Astor Place in lower Manhattan, I met my father's cousin's son Nainesh, who was in his first year as a biology major at New York University. We rode the train back to the New Jersey suburbs where his family had lived since 1995. Before that they had spent ten years in Toronto, and before that, in an infancy he cannot remember, they were in South Africa. His grandfather was the eldest brother of my paternal grandmother, Kaashi. The great-grandfather we shared, Ramjee Govind, had first traveled to South Africa in 1899.

Nainesh was now nineteen, and when I told him the subject of my book, he said, "That's so boring—I can't think of anything interesting about our family, not one thing." At home, his brother Vimal, a year younger, was more interested, or more tactful: "I'd like to read that book, I can't wait." Their youngest brother, Amit, only thirteen, said nothing at all. They invited me to join them on an excursion to see
American Desi,
an independent feature film that had just come out about the second-generation Indo-American experience, along with other members of the Kshatriya (Khatri) Youth Association of New Jersey. Both brothers had served a term as president of the caste-based group, despite being only half-Khatri. Their parents had had one of the first "love marriages" in our family, after meeting in a Hindu youth group in South Africa.

"I joined every club I could," Nainesh said by way of explanation of his involvement in KYA. When they moved from Toronto to New Jersey, Nainesh was thirteen. At school white youths taunted the brothers with racist comments. New Jersey's Indian population was growing steadily, and the backlash was fierce; the state had seen a rash of unsolved hate crimes in the late 1980s, committed by an anonymous group who called themselves the Dotbusters and took as their target the bindi, or "dot," that Hindu women wear on their foreheads.

KYA gave both boys a forum in which they quickly became leaders, though a few parents murmured about the bad influence; the boys were mixed-caste and were rumored to be wild and even (gasp) to date. Lean and tall, in black leather bomber jackets, they towered over the rest of the youth group. With their slightly rakish good looks, they stood out like young James Deans or Matt Dillons in a cluster of sheltered suburbanites.

At the theater, a red neon sign on the parking structure identified our destination only as CINE_AS. Once a Regal Cinemas franchisee, the multiplex now featured all Indian movies all the time, mostly Bollywood megastar musicals. It was Saturday night, and the theater was full.

Onscreen, the main character, Kris (Krishnagopal) Reddy, drove away from his suburban New Jersey home toward college vowing, "This year's going to be very different!"

"
Mein bhi,
" said Nainesh loudly—Hindi for "Me too"—eliciting a round of laughs from his friends. When another character in the movie, Salim, kissed a huge poster of the voluptuous Bollywood star Rekha, the audience laughed and Nainesh said aloud, "What's wrong with doing that? I do that." When Salim opined that Indian girls in the United States can't cook, Nainesh blurted out, "He's got a good point." And at the first shot of the long-haired, light-skinned heroine, Nainesh moaned in appreciation: "Aah."

Afterward, as everyone clustered in the lobby to say their goodbyes or make plans for the rest of the night, Nainesh waxed enthusiastic: "That movie was totally about my life, I could identify with everything!" At a diner with those KYA members old enough or free enough to stay out late, Nainesh said he identified strongly with the term "ABCD," which stands for "American-Born Confused Desi,"
desi
meaning Indian—a self-mocking label that hints at the difficulties of forging a new identity in the United States.