Read Online Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala - Free Book Online
Authors: Minal Hajratwala
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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.
3. Bread
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.
He sent the photo to her brother in South Africa, whose granddaughter—herself now white-haired and kindly—gave it to me in 2001.
On December 9, 1904, Ganda turned eleven years old in Navsari, India. An orphan, perhaps he had stayed with relatives a while after his sister's marriage. But most of his uncles and male cousins were already in South Africa. He decided, or it was decided for him, that he would join them in a land rumored to be rich with opportunity.
Of the three-week journey, his grandchildren know only that he traveled illegally. They like to think he was a stowaway; it lends a certain romance and swashbuckle to the tale. Nostalgia, a soothing gloss upon history.
Aboard ship, conditions were most unromantic. Who cared for him, who fed him? The details are lost—but fortuitously, an Indian professor visiting South Africa the same year, 1905, wrote of his own sea voyage. From his account we can catch a flavor of the times, a glimpse perhaps of Ganda's world.
"There were, say, a hundred Indians, traveling as deck-passengers," the professor noted. "I could not see any place where they could sit, put their luggage and take undisturbed rest for a while." In fierce rains and winds, they "had to stand or lie down exposed even at night"; cooking equipment was so scarce that some fasted for days, waiting their turn.
But the journey was perhaps the easier hurdle, compared to the arrival. For the world was divided into
3. Bread
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.
He sent the photo to her brother in South Africa, whose granddaughter—herself now white-haired and kindly—gave it to me in 2001.
On December 9, 1904, Ganda turned eleven years old in Navsari, India. An orphan, perhaps he had stayed with relatives a while after his sister's marriage. But most of his uncles and male cousins were already in South Africa. He decided, or it was decided for him, that he would join them in a land rumored to be rich with opportunity.
Of the three-week journey, his grandchildren know only that he traveled illegally. They like to think he was a stowaway; it lends a certain romance and swashbuckle to the tale. Nostalgia, a soothing gloss upon history.
Aboard ship, conditions were most unromantic. Who cared for him, who fed him? The details are lost—but fortuitously, an Indian professor visiting South Africa the same year, 1905, wrote of his own sea voyage. From his account we can catch a flavor of the times, a glimpse perhaps of Ganda's world.
"There were, say, a hundred Indians, traveling as deck-passengers," the professor noted. "I could not see any place where they could sit, put their luggage and take undisturbed rest for a while." In fierce rains and winds, they "had to stand or lie down exposed even at night"; cooking equipment was so scarce that some fasted for days, waiting their turn.
But the journey was perhaps the easier hurdle, compared to the arrival. For the world was divided into
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