Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (9 page)

Unwanted, harassed, deterred, the Indians kept coming—exhibiting their own creativity. The man in charge of keeping them out complained that "Asiatic cunning" made his mission impossible. Indians slithered through his fingers, entered through neighboring countries, claimed distant relatives as their own siblings and children.

His officers were kept busy. The Bombay–Durban steamer made one trip a month. Other ships came from Calcutta and Madras. And there were land routes, from elsewhere in South Africa, from Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), and from German South-West Africa (now Namibia). It was not easy to police so many borders.

Ganda could have traveled by any of these routes. In the year of his journey, the main port of entry for Indians, Port Durban in the Colony of Natal, turned away half of the Indians arriving: 1,526 men, 18 women, and 49 children. And officials confiscated 225 forged documents, purchased on the black market in India. The crackdown would grow even more severe; in 1908, nearly six thousand Indians would be turned away.

But by then Ganda was settled in Durban—having somehow given the authorities the slip.

Durban: "a second-rate Bombay," one contemporary called it. Although Indians made up less than three percent of South Africa's population, segregation and internal travel restrictions confined them largely to the city of Durban and its outskirts. This unnatural concentration created what over Ganda's lifetime would become the largest "Little India" in the world: the Grey Street neighborhood.

Here stood the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere, built from the profits of Gujarati traders. Colorful mounds of vegetables and spices—chili, cumin, coriander—filled the market stalls. Scribes stood ready to write letters home for the illiterate; Indian tailors made suits to measure; Indian jewelers offered real and faux gold trinkets for any budget. Many of the staples were imported from India: cooking oil, basmati rice, burlap sacks filled with the special flour for making
rotli,
the traditional round Gujarati flatbread. Luxury goods, too—insurance or waistcoats, Egyptian cigars, Turkish caps, Chinese silks, Persian rugs, tickets for trips on European steamers—could be bought within a block or two of Ganda's new domicile.

Grey Street was named for Sir George Grey, onetime governor of the Cape. The neighborhood was developed during Queen Victoria's reign, its streets named for members of the royal family: Queen Street and Albert Street (for her husband); Victoria, Alice, Beatrice, and Lorne Streets (for her daughters); Prince Edward and Leopold Streets (for her sons); and even Louise Lane and Maud Lane (for her granddaughters). Once, it had been a white residential area.

The land was marshy, though, and difficult for wagons to navigate. Gradually the whites moved on to more desirable neighborhoods. A group of Muslim storekeepers bought a portion of the now-cheap marshland, reclaimed the swamps, and erected a mosque in 1881. By Ganda's time, the cobblestone streets around the mosque were the city's main hub of Indian social and commercial activity.

But Grey Street was more than a colorful clustering of an ethnic minority. It was also a product of the Indian "problem" and white South Africa's response to it—a ghetto enforced by law.

Beginning in 1885, the first Gujaratis in Durban had set up shop several blocks away, in the city's main commercial district, on West Street. A steady stream of other Indians, both former indentured workers and new Gujarati "passengers," had followed suit.

This set off a small panic among the white merchants downtown, who did not want to have their shops next to "coolies"—or to compete with their cheaper prices. All over the colony, a similar pattern was developing in the towns as Indians set up small stores wherever they could buy or rent space.

Many of these first Gujaratis were Muslims who, in an effort to distinguish themselves from the poor Hindu masses and fall to the whiter side of the rigid racial line, styled themselves "Arabs." But the whites knew a "coolie" when they saw one. Variously the traders were also called Bombay-wallahs, Banias (for the Hindu merchant caste), and, in the unforgettable phrase of Natal's governor, "black matter in the wrong place." Like most of his subjects, the governor would have liked to keep out passenger Indians altogether—though he was still importing three thousand indentured Indians a year, at the request of Natal's sugar planters, rail companies, and coal mines.

Indian shopkeepers, it was widely held, undercut "legitimate" businesses. At rallies and town-hall meetings throughout Natal, the complaint rose: Indians kept their stores open on Sundays, when good Christians must rest. They worked late into the nights, when family men should be with their wives and children. They had minimal requirements of clothing, food, and luxury, subsisting "on the smell of an oil rag," their white competitors complained. How could a white man raise his family if he must match these conditions?

In 1897, the Natal colony gave its town councils the power to deny trade licenses to anyone, with minimal cause and no right of appeal. Neutral in language, the law was aimed at and deployed against Indians.

Some towns used their new powers to expel all of their Indian shopkeepers. In Durban, the town council was content to drive Indians out of long-established business locations downtown, on specious charges of sanitation or bookkeeping irregularities. By 1908, the licensing bureau was proud to report, Durban had succeeded in cutting back the number of Indian licenses by a third. Virtually all remaining businesses were in the Grey Street area.

For Ganda, eleven years old, it would have been easy enough to disappear into the ghetto. An uncle and cousins lived in the neighborhood, and they must have taken him in. They would have known that, sooner or later, he would need an official identity: he could be stopped on the street at any time and asked to show his documents; he could be arrested for breaking the 9
P.M.
curfew or walking on a sidewalk reserved for whites; he could be deported.

So his relatives—being, after all, wily Asiatics—hatched a scheme.

In Johannesburg, cousin Chhiba reported to the police that his son had gone missing. He gave a description, a name. Perhaps he said that the boy might have run away, to Durban.

Meanwhile, in Durban, Ganda filed for his identity papers. He had no birth certificate, but that was not unusual. He gave his "father's" name, Chhiba of Johannesburg.

As for his last name, the uncles and cousins used "Kapitan." Most rural Indians never use a surname until they encounter a Western authority, and so it was with Ganda's predecessors, who had to invent one upon landing in South Africa. Kapitan is a unique choice among our people, and the stories of its origin vary widely. Three brothers jumped around like monkeys and were nicknamed "three monkeys," or
kappi tran.
Or, it comes from the first port where they landed in South Africa: Cape Town, pronounced according to the principles of Indian-English phonetics. Or, the first family member in South Africa came on a ship steered by a man called
el capitán,
which the sojourner thought to be a fine surname and so adopted as his own.

In any case, armed with these names, young Ganda submitted his papers and his references. Crosschecking, the officials found the missing-persons report. They verified his identity.

Ganda's middle name, by tradition, should have been his father's name, Dayaram. He would have become known as G. D. Kapitan; the Durban institution he founded would have been G. D. Kapitan & Son Vegetarian Restaurant. His father would have lived forever, almost, in that single initial recognizing his paternity.

But now his name reflected his new "father." And somehow in the transcription process, Chhiba became Chhagan. He became Ganda Chhagan Kapitan, a self-made man—G.C., for short.

Despite the concentration of Indians in Durban, few schools were open to Indian children. In any case, schools cost money, and Ganda had none. He apprenticed as a tailor instead. At fifteen he opened his own tailoring stall, becoming one of thousands whose entrepreneurial spirit was considered part of the "Indian problem" in South Africa. When he could afford it, he moved out on his own, living in a rented room in the mosque building. All around were apartments housing Indian families and bachelors and, at street level, their shops and curry houses.

His cousin Fakir owned one of these food shacks, in an arcade across the street from the mosque, at 154 Grey Street. And this became, for Ganda, an unlikely opportunity. Fakir was caught unexpectedly in the net of South Africa's immigration laws. He needed to leave his shop in the care of someone trustworthy. But most of his other relatives lived far away or had their own businesses to run.

Ganda was young, just a teenager, but he had several years of work experience under his belt; more importantly, he was, as Gujaratis say,
ghar-no maanas:
a man from home, a kinsman. He could be trusted. Fakir traveled to Fiji, where he had other relatives, until the paperwork could be sorted out. He left his eatery in Ganda's charge—temporarily, they believed.

As it turned out, Fakir could not come back. The year was 1912, and Ganda hung his own name on the shingle. He was seventeen years old. For the rest of his life, he would feed the people of Grey Street.

Vegetable curries, rice, the thick lentil soup called
daal.
Sweet, milky tea and deep-fried samosas. Food was a basic, and as the community grew, so did Ganda's business. Strictly vegetarian, he cultivated a loyal clientele who came for curries and rice at lunch and dinner, tea and snacks all day long. At some point it must have seemed like a good idea to have a helpmeet; perhaps he realized he was no longer a sojourner but an immigrant. Now that he was settled in business, the natural step would be to settle down with a wife.

Few Khatri women were in South Africa, fewer still of marriageable age. In any case, a girl raised in India was more likely to possess the proper domestic skill set and temperament. So he took a vacation: a trip to India to get married.

The match was arranged, of course; the girl's name was Amba, and she had lived her entire life in the village of Gandevi. They walked around the marriage fire four times, and soon afterward they were on an ocean liner—this time, as paying passengers.

Plunged into the hustle and bustle of Durban, Amba had no trouble keeping busy. The Grey Street shop where Ganda spent his hours was a small wooden shack with an outdoor kitchen; barely screened from the busy street, it was no place for a woman of their caste. But in their apartment, just around the corner on Pine Street, attached to the mosque building, she sewed shirts for extra money, and she made snack foods in her own kitchen for sale in the restaurant. Durban's climate was just like home in a year when the rains were good—warm, neither dry nor humid, a solid seventy to eighty degrees most of the time. The hills and farms surrounding the city were verdant, and Indian farmers from the countryside kept the city well supplied with all of the proper Indian vegetables. Among Amba's specialties were two types of thin lentil-flour wafers known as
paapad
and
paapadi,
which she rolled out on a round wooden board, then arranged to dry in the sun so they could be stored indefinitely and deep-fried whenever needed.

Their neighbors included many Gujaratis, shopkeepers of one kind or another. Devout Hindus, Ganda and Amba formed ties with the small Hindu community while keeping good relations with their mostly Muslim neighbors, worshipping their own pantheon in an altar at home while living under the archways and minarets of the mosque. Each dawn a holy man climbed to its highest point to broadcast the call:
Allah u Akbar,
God is great, Hasten to prayer ... At nightfall Ganda watched as most of the street's merchants locked up their shops and, along with many of their customers, disappeared through the main archway of the mosque, pausing at a courtyard fountain to wash their hands and feet before entering the inner chamber to kneel and pray:
Allah u Akbar
... Closing up, he too went home to his devotions, to practice a religion and way of life that seemed, to the men who ran his country, both outlandish and barbaric.

In March 1913, a high court of South Africa declared invalid the marriage of two Hindus—and, by extension, invalidated the marriages of Ganda and Amba Kapitan and every other Hindu and Muslim couple in South Africa. A stroke of the judicial pen rendered illegitimate any marriage conducted by rites of "a religion that recognizes polygamy," even if the marriage was itself monogamous.

Aside from the indignity, many Indian spouses were in danger of being stripped of citizenship and deported. The outcry was immediate. Large crowds of Indian men and women took to the streets in protest. The ruling crystallized the community's outrage over decades of mistreatment and ignited a fire that Indian advocates had been carefully stoking for years.

Seeds of this organizing had been planted on Grey Street, where a shopkeeper had hired, in 1893, a young lawyer from his hometown in Gujarat. Upon arrival, the Oxford-educated lawyer was kicked off trains, insulted in courts, and beaten in the streets for his color—and soon realized the pervasive injustices facing Indians in South Africa. "I then awoke," Mohandas Gandhi would later write, "to a sense of my duty."

Although Gandhi had moved to Johannesburg, he had left his mark on the Durban neighborhood. At 113 Grey Street was the office from which he first published his weekly newspaper,
Indian Opinion,
in 1903. Down the block was Congress Hall, home to South Africa's first Indian civil rights organization, founded by Gandhi and a group of merchants in 1894.