Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (16 page)

Suddenly, at a word of command, scores of native police rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis [heavy wooden sticks with iron bands on them]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like tenpins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls ... There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward until struck down.

Those not hospitalized went to jail. The salt march—with its strict daily routine of predawn prayer, measured walking, and spiritual speeches by Gandhi—may have been Narotam's first exposure to the concentrated religious study befitting a brahmachaarin. Jail was the next.

For Gandhi, who had spent nearly two years in prison on sedition charges from 1922 to 1924, a cell was a place for meditation. Kept in isolation in a prison named Yeravda, he was writing dozens of letters date-lined "Yeravda Palace," "Yeravda Pleasure House," and, most often, "Yeravda Mandir" (temple).

Narotam, too, might have found jail restful, a time to meditate. It is doubtful he had many visitors, ninety miles from home in the big city of Baroda. Nor were there many letters, surely, for no one in his family could write much, and he could not read much. For company, he had the guards and his fellow prisoners. Living two to a cell, the satyagrahis—except for leaders like Gandhi—were mixed in with the regular prison population, and were allowed to see one another freely. It was the only extended period of solitude, even leisure, in Narotam's life.

Although the satyagrahis were in prison for breaking laws, once behind bars they were among the most disciplined inmates. Gandhi encouraged them to follow the rules, except when those rules were "contrary to human dignity"; if the food was rotten, for example, they were to refuse it, but if it was merely tasteless, they were not to complain. They were to insist on what they needed to fulfill religious vows, such as spinning khaadi; but otherwise they were not to seek special privileges, such as books and newspapers.

Free of the obligations of family and finances, in the company of other civil resisters, Narotam learned to knit, crochet, meditate, and practice yoga. Needles and other implements might pose a danger in the hands of a violent prisoner, but in the hands of one sworn to nonviolence, they were strictly domestic. It was a time he would look back on with pride, telling his children decades later, "See, I wouldn't know how to knit if I hadn't gone to jail."

During the three months Narotam spent behind bars, the salt campaign intensified dangerously. Eventually all of the movement's leaders were imprisoned, spinning khaadi several hours a day and forbidden to write on political matters; but new leaders and new followers arose. And the government did not fail to respond. By one estimate, sixty thousand people were jailed across India for gathering, making, or rallying around salt.

Gujarat remained the campaign's epicenter. Waves of spontaneously organized, resolutely nonviolent volunteers from all over India traveled to the coast of Gujarat to make salt from the ocean or take it from the British company's salt pans. Government police, frustrated by the volunteers' unvarying tactic of walking forward unarmed, shifted from clubbing their heads to storming them with horses to "rendering ... unconscious by squeezing their privates," according to a report by the freedom movement's secretary in Gujarat. Over one three-week period, the secretary counted 1,333 wounded, out of 2,640 volunteers. Four men died.

As Gandhi had hoped, the salt campaign was a turning point in swaying international opinion in favor of the Indian cause. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote, "This sort of thing filled every decent English person with a sense of intolerable shame, far greater than would have been felt if the Indian resistance had been of a military character."

At home, the brutality helped make the volunteers into heroes. When Narotam was released, the whole town of Gandevi turned out for a parade in his honor. Such celebrations were held all over Gujarat; the satyagrahis were treated like soldiers returning from a just war. The salt movement had shaken the Raj, and many Indians believed independence was imminent, thanks to men like Narotam who had sacrificed for the good of all.

To Narotam's father, however, his son was not so much a hero as a young rebel about to go astray. The movement's dangers had become all too clear, and Narotam's father had a plan.

Narotam's older brother and a cousin were already working as tailors in Fiji. To finance the trip, the women of the family had had to pawn all of their meager jewelry. Even Benkor, who had waited so long for her silver dowry anklets, had sold them.

Now, the eldest son had sent some money back, and Narotam's father wanted to use it to send his second son to the colony as well—away from the dangers of radical politics, and where he could help support the family.

Narotam could no longer indulge in his brahmachaarin stage; he was launched, according to tradition, into the "householder" stage of life. Here the spiritual lessons learned in youth are not abandoned. Rather, a householder must learn to apply them in a more complicated environment. He must learn his
dharma.

Dharma
has a dual meaning: religion and duty. In the second stage of life, a Hindu confronts this duality, learning to reconcile his spiritual life with familial duties.

For Narotam it must have been a difficult transition. He had just experienced his first chance to study his own soul. Then, just as quickly, he was forced to become a man of responsibility. Did his obligations to a network of kin—parents, brothers, sisters with wedding expenses, a wife and child—weigh heavily on him? Surely he must have felt some sorrow at leaving his comrades in the movement. Yet perhaps it was tempered by the stoicism that is the nature of our people. We are not ones to rail against the gods—or, as in Narotam's case, against our fathers' wishes. Narotam began to make preparations. He would leave Benkor and baby Sarasvati with his parents, and set out alone.

For my grandmother Benkor, it was another separation from the husband she had barely had time to know. She understood the need; the men of her own family were also on the move, following the trend noted that year by the special census of Gandevi. Benkor's uncle had traveled to Kenya to try his luck. Within a few years, her brother and cousins would follow him and settle there. By 1933, so many Indian entrepreneurs were living abroad that the most ambitious of them formed the Imperial Indian Citizenship Association, whose published directory estimated a total of 2.5 million Indians living abroad in the British colonies and Commonwealth countries.

Among these were all of Benkor's male relatives. She would not see them again until she was an old woman, after each of them had lived a whole lifetime in the colonies. Now her husband, too, would join the great tide of emigration. His destination, tiny Fiji, with 77,000 Indians, was fifth on the list of countries with a substantial Indian population.

In the passport office of the empire, in Bombay, Narotam had his picture taken for the second time in his life. His national status was listed as "British subject by birth," his occupation as "tailor," his height as five feet. On August 8, 1931, he boarded a ship called the
Ganges
in Calcutta. On September 3, Fiji's afternoon newspaper reported its arrival at Suva harbor.

The same newspaper carried ads for goods imported by the ship (mustard oil, Rangoon rice, Genuine Indian Brassware), an advertisement for M. Narsey & Co. (Printed Chiffons, Numerous Patterns to Choose From, Absolute Bedrock Prices—Call Early), and a news item: "Mahatma Gandhi, Dressed in Loincloth, Sailed for England." Gandhi had been re-leased from prison in order to attend an imperial conference, where he hoped to raise for the first time in London the formal prospect of India's independence. As Narotam reached Fiji, Gandhi was aboard the S.S.
Rajputana,
telling the Associated Press that he was "hoping against hope" for freedom.

In Fiji, Narotam found a country far different from the land of opportunity that had welcomed Motiram Narsey. Because of the worldwide depression, the capital was no longer a bustling port. Three years earlier, Suva had shipped 121,000 tons of sugar around the world; in 1931, the market could support only 68,000 tons.

Narotam worked for a while as a tailor with his brother, who eventually retired to India because his health was poor. Once on his own, Narotam decided to risk moving to the only section of the island that was thriving: the town of Tavua, on the northern coast, where surveyors had recently discovered gold. He went north, setting up a tailoring shop to serve those rushing to exploit the gold and, soon, silver buried in the island. He sewed women's clothes and saved money to send home.

The Gujaratis of Fiji mostly kept apart from native people, except as business demanded. Many of my relatives say they were afraid at first of the tall, strong people who seemed as fierce as their historical reputation for cannibalism suggested. Natives and whites tended to see the Indians as clannish and separatist—but the Indians were in fact divided among themselves. While indentured Indian immigrants had quickly dropped many distinctions of caste and region, the Gujaratis who came later had the money to travel home frequently. They maintained strong ties to home and rarely married outside their castes. They owned a large proportion of the retail stores and generally imported relatives as assistants, rather than hiring local Indians. Some Gujaratis even acted as loan sharks, extending credit at unfavorable terms against future paychecks. In 1937, two hundred Indo-Fijians signed a petition urging limits on further immigration:

There are certain undesirable types of Immigrants; Fiji is full with such. These men refuse to admit in their social circle which in itself creates bad feeling; there is nothing but these traders refuse to employ local borns in services; they refuse to teach them any form of trade; they refuse to spend in Fiji; their God is money.

They were talking about the Gujaratis.

In the decade of Narotam's arrival, Fiji took a series of steps to discourage young Gujarati men from coming and going strictly for the purpose of making money. It began charging the hefty fee of £50 for each immigration permit and giving preference to those who were accompanied by wives. M. Narsey & Co. spearheaded a protest letter, which received a courteous but unyielding reply from the colonial secretary in London. He acknowledged the contributions of the "Bombay community" but encouraged the Gujaratis to promote family migration.

Narotam sent for his wife in 1937. Benkor left behind their six-year-old daughter to be raised by Narotam's parents in India. Narotam's younger brother, Kalyaan, also came to Fiji with a young wife. Together the brothers expanded from tailoring to retail, opening a ready-made clothing shop in Tavua. They sold T-shirts and dress shirts, trousers, dresses, and the native attire, a kind of wraparound skirt called the
sulu,
to Fijians and local Indians.

The shop had a small room in the back where they kept their files and, when business was slow, retired to drink tea. A shady path led to the kitchen, and down another path was the single bedroom. Just beyond that was the outhouse. For bathing, water had to be brought from the river; a bucket sat in a small tiled area next to the store, with ropes strung around it so that temporary walls of cloth could be drawn for privacy. In the yard, chickens clucked and pecked at the dry soil, and sometimes a goat grazed, waiting to grace the family's dinner table. Benkor bore a second girl in 1939, and a third in 1942.

After his adventures in the movement, the life of an entrepreneur and family man in Fiji would have been quite a contrast for Narotam. His days were filled with practical details, far from the continuing and dramatic battles of the independence movement and the ideals he cherished. But perhaps he took solace in the Bhagavad Geeta, a religious text whose passages on dharma Gandhi urged his followers to memorize. "Better is one's own duty, though devoid of merit, than the duty of another well performed," the god Krishna tells the hero Arjuna in the Geeta. "Therefore, always perform your work, without attachment, which has to be done; for a man who works without attachment attains the Supreme."

Narotam earned a reputation for helping others in the tightly knit Khatri community of Fiji. In a typical instance, a young man knocked on his door well after midnight. He owed so much money, he said, that his creditors were coming to beat him the next morning. Would Narotam hide him for the night?

Narotam did, and in the morning he negotiated with the merchants, buying the man some time by paying a percentage of the loans. Through such acts Narotam found his role in the community, reconciling the obligations of a businessman with the Gandhian philosophy of service.

World War II sharpened the division between the native Fijians and the Indians, who were by now about half and half on the island. One out of every three native Fijian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty volunteered to fight on behalf of the empire. But the Fiji Indians balked. First they demanded the same rate of pay as white soldiers, and were refused; then they argued that growing sugar and other economic activity was their contribution to the war effort. Then, in 1943, a strike by Indian cane workers over low prices left most of the harvest to rot in Fiji's fields. The Indians were labeled disloyal, and their status as citizens of Fiji was further diminished.

July 24, 1945, was the day my grandmother had been waiting for, in some ways her whole life long. Fiji's internal politics were volatile, and World War II was about to end, but neither of these was the reason for her prayers or sighs of
Raam, Raam.
She was going into labor.