Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (7 page)

Competition was gentle and work plentiful, enough for each man to call others to help. Motiram wrote home, sent for his brother Jamnadas. The whites sold them machines, thread, cloth. He sent for his sister's husband, Govind.

The shop grew crowded with sewing machines, lined up in a neat row. At night they spread bedrolls on countertops and floors, strung mosquito nets over jerry-rigged sleeping spaces. The workday started at dawn and ended at dark, long tropical days well suited to men who wished to turn a profit. Slowly M. Narsey & Co. began to pull customers: Indians who were more comfortable buying clothes from their own kind, and those of any stripe who sought the lowest price.

Seven years after landing, and five years after starting his shop, business was good enough that Motiram could leave his brother and brother-in-law in charge and make the long-delayed visit home. It was 1916—coincidentally, also the last year that girmityas could sign up for indenture. The system was ended by imperial decree, as neo-abolitionists had finally managed to draw sufficient attention to its outrages. It did not hurt that by this time most of the labor needs of British colonies could be met by Indian workers already in place. From now on, the Indian diaspora would have to grow on its own.

Was it a pleasant visit? Seven years away: he must have grown slimmer, or plumper. He had acquired Western clothes, the habit of shoes. Did his mother, his wife, start as they recognized him? As he touched his mother's feet, surely there were tears in her eyes, and perhaps his.

He paid off the mortgage on the ancestral land. He spent time with his two young sons, who did not know him; he fathered a third.

The wild island was no place for a wife; he did not try to bring her back to Fiji, though she wanted to come.

Or: She did not want to come. Her name was Kaashi, she was a village girl, and to all of her descendants she would be known as Maaji: respected mother. He wanted her to come, but she refused.

For fifty more years, she would refuse to leave India.

He left her again.

Motiram must have felt, on that visit, like a big man in the small town of his ancestors. Strolling Navsari's unchanged streets, he was recognized not only as his father's son but also as a prodigal son, returned from the wilderness. And was there a new quality in his eyes, the eyes he turned now on his home?

For
home
was a landscape in decline. Though Navsari was an oasis of relative stability, the surrounding areas remained in profound depression. A historian, perusing famine records for the area, notes grimly, "Conditions were bad again in 1911–12, 1915–16, 1918–19 and 1920–21."

By contrast, opportunity in Fiji was plentiful. Rather than a homecoming, Motiram's trip became a recruiting mission. He turned evangelist, encouraging others of his caste to make the transition he had made. His youngest brother, Jiwan, accompanied him back; the next year, eleven more Khatris made the trip. Most of them worked, at least at first, for the pioneering tailor shops.

Kamal Kant Prasad, a historian who in the 1970s interviewed sources now deceased to research the rise of Gujaratis in Fiji, pieced together this portrait of Motiram's shop:

The Narsey business was well organized ... Motiram Narsey relied upon his large family network to provide the necessary manpower. His own immediate family served in managerial capacities, whereas other Khatris performed much of the menial tasks. Managerial duties embraced a wide range of activities, and largely entailed the careful supervision of the everyday activities of the concern—meeting the customers, measuring them, delegating the sewing tasks, undertaking the fitting, and finally consolidating the sales. In the shop there was an actual barrier separating the owner or supervisor from his workers. The owner worked on a long counter where he supervised the cutting. In front of him, or to either side of him, were placed rows of machines where his workers performed the sewing tasks. His machine was normally set apart from the rest, in a position from where he could constantly supervise his workers. Only he had access to the area behind the counter where the money was kept.

In the Fiji census of 1911, taken while Motiram was at Walter Horne & Co., the government had counted twelve Indian tailors in all the country. By the early 1920s, so many Khatris had opened their own shops that they monopolized the trade, driving even the big European houses to focus on importing and retailing and to leave the tailoring to the Khatris. Within another fifteen years, Gujaratis would dominate Suva's retail economy. Motiram's was one of three tailoring shops that brought in dozens of Khatris over the next decade and, Prasad writes, "dictated the pattern of Khatri emigration from Gujarat."

In the vast ocean of the Indian diaspora, the migration of Khatris to Fiji constitutes a tiny trickle, significant as perhaps a brief squall of rain. Yet an ocean does not form from nothing; it is entirely composed of such currents, all swirling together to make a massive, powerful force. The many microcultures of India give rise to a Gujarati diaspora, a Bengali diaspora, a Punjabi diaspora; and within each of these we can distinguish castes and subcastes, regions and subregions. Ours is one of these subdiasporas, famous only to ourselves, approaching and associating with these others where the Indian population is small, otherwise retreating and coalescing, jelling back into itself when it reaches a critical mass.

In Fiji, Motiram must have had social and business intercourse with others of his countrymen, Indians of many castes and states, as well as the often mixed-caste "Hindustanis" of Fiji. Yet he and his descendants structured their lives around language and caste, Gujarati, Khatri, specific and recognizable, so tightly that his granddaughters, for example, to this day have only Khatri associates, their social lives almost exclusively composed of relatives, even though they live in Toronto, London, and other metropolises. This clannishness is, to some extent, a factor in our community's economic success.

Still, we are undeniably part of a larger picture—a worldwide network of Indians outside India, bonded by historical circumstance. Ours is but one small undercurrent in an ocean: a diaspora that was and is being built one journey, one family, one economic niche at a time.

Could Motiram read the newspapers? Never mind; he could hear. Someone read to him, or he heard the radio news. Or he talked with other men in the places where men talked: at the market, in the lodges, near the seaport watching the ships, in the back rooms behind the shop where they slept and, breaking Fiji's prohibition laws for nonwhites, drank.

The things that circled the globe began to touch him. A prospering businessman, he wore shoes every day, and European suits. He grew a mustache, and combed it; it balanced his thick, serious eyebrows. He followed the news: Ships coming in. Prices of goods. War. The world had become round, interconnected, and many things were circumnavigating it, traveling from place to place: ideas, fashions, patterns of mercantilism. And a new epidemic.

In the
Fiji Times and Herald,
advice for staving off the disease was plentiful. A local chemist recommended "eucalyptus oil sprinkled around dwelling rooms, camphor carried about the person, and some Antiseptic Lozenge, such as eumenthol jujubes, for the mouth and throat." The New Zealand Board of Health prescribed a few drops of quinine every four hours, plus gargling with baking soda. Quarantines held up ships for weeks as panic swept the world.

In 1918, a ship named the
Talune
docked in the port of Apia, in Western Samoa. The New Zealand officers and crew knew that some of their passengers were ill, with symptoms that resembled the deadly disease known variously as influenza, Spanish influenza, and the flu. Yet they told the harbormaster there were "only sniffles, but nothing serious." One passenger called out a warning—"There is sickness in this boat!"—but was not understood, or was ignored. People disembarked; people embarked.

Then the
Talune
carried on to nearby Tonga and to Fiji.

Within two weeks, 7,500 Samoans—22 percent of the island's population—were dead. It was the world's worst single case of the epidemic.

In Fiji, the disaster lasted through the end of the year, when the colony's chief medical officer reported a total mortality of about 8,000. In the capital alone, 469 people died of the flu. Around the world, the epidemic would claim 20 million to 100 million lives.

Motiram, at perhaps thirty-five years old, was one of its casualties.

In bed with the flu, armed with Tylenol and cough drops, I wake in a sweat, the covers tossed about me like seas.
Imagine dying this way,
I tell myself. Who knows how many days and nights feverish chills racked my great-grandfather's body, what dreams and delusions filled his last hours? Growing weaker, confined at last to bed, his body would have been less and less able to fight the quick-moving virus replicating itself in every cell. Was he alone in a cot strung behind the shop, or in one of the makeshift quarantine clinics set up around town? Did his kinsmen tend him, or stay away from fear? Whose name did he call out in delirium? No records survive; no one is alive who remembers, who can offer more than this threadbare witnessing.

What was left: an unfinished story.

What was left: Motiram's two brothers, a brother-in-law, a shop full of workers. A storefront with treadle machines and customers. The knowledge of how to run a tailoring shop in Suva. And a path for his sons to rise out of poverty.

What was left: a wife and three sons in India. The eldest, Ratanji, was only eleven when Motiram died. Three years later he would come to Fiji and work for his uncles, eventually taking over the shop. By the end of Ratanji's forty-five years in the business, M. Narsey & Co. would become Narseys Limited—one of the largest department stores in the islands.

What was left: the beginnings of a new home for his people. When does an outpost become a settlement, a group of sojourners turn into a community? Births, weddings, deaths: the reenactment of ritual on foreign shores is one thread in the tapestry.

Motiram was not the first of our people in Fiji, but he holds a place in history nevertheless. He was the first of our tribe to die there, the first whose ashes might have graced the South Pacific—dissipated in the warm blue waters of shark gods, cannibals, pirates, and tragic bargains.

To deny yourself the pleasure of a good bunny chow is to deny an integral part of South Africa's culinary heritage.

—Sunday Times,
Johannesburg, 2001

I
N THE PHOTOGRAPH
, Maaji, as we always called her, is well into her eighties, squatting waist-high in shiny leaves. She was born in India around 1886, married Motiram Narsey sometime before 1909, and lived a few more years after this photograph was taken in the 1960s, in Fiji. Her hair is sparse and very white, bright as sun on the leaves, thick eyeglasses rejecting the light, painted beams of the bungalow behind her. Through its wooden shutters, one can see into the house: a sofa, aluminum barrels and trays, black coil of hose or wire, part of a ladder, a frame, doorways within doorways. Her head hunches forward over her collarbone; her shoulder blades almost touch her heart. She does not smile. Her back aches, perhaps, but harvesting betel leaves from the yard is a job she will let no one else do.
Paan,
our people call it; it is eaten after meals, and stains the teeth and tongue red. As she squats, one hand rests on a knee; the other, long and wasting, reaches into the vines, disappears. She seems all bone, skin thrown over it like a carelessly wrapped sari. Her sari itself is white, cotton, draped loosely and without adornment, the garb of widows.

In a season of migration, women like Maaji watched their neighborhoods empty out like villages in wartime, left populated only by the female, the aged, the feeble, and the young. While Maaji's husband traveled east to the wide-open opportunities of Fiji, those who boarded westbound ships to what the colonizers called "the dark continent" found a more complicated welcome. One of these was her younger brother, my great-great-uncle Ganda, who was only a boy when he went to the land that would become South Africa.

Brother and sister did not meet again for decades, yet they maintained a warm connection. The photograph of Maaji crouching in the leaves was taken sometime after she finally consented to join her sons in Fiji in the 1960s. On the back, my grandfather wrote a note about how his mother was settling in:
In our yard a lot of paan is growing and Maaji is collecting paan and the wedding was also performed in the yard.