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 dec
ades 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.
And he had graduated from his early protest tactics, filing petitions and writing pointed letters to the editor, to taking the initiative—by staging mass actions. In one dramatic moment in 1906, Gandhi had gathered hundreds of Indians who together vowed, before God, to resist draconian regulations that required all Indians to be registered and fingerprinted like criminals and that allowed police officers to search houses and demand domicile certificates at any time, on punishment of deportation. They burned their certificates on a massive pyre. It became "shameful," Gandhi wrote, to refer to such nonviolent resistance using English words. His newspaper held a contest, and the technique was renamed satyagraha, "force which is born of Truth and Love," or "soul force."
South Africa's Indians were trying out and developing the strategies that would become Gandhi's legacy to the world: peaceful defiance of unjust laws, long marches on foot, mass meetings, fasting, political oaths before God, and deliberate courting of arrest. They won small victories, suffered greater defeats; time and again, Gandhi turned to his core supporters, the Gujarati merchants of Durban's Grey Street and of Johannesburg, to help bankroll the movement.
Three generations later, every Gujarati in Durban claims a Gandhi connection, swears that the Great Soul once patronized his ancestor's family establishment. It is likely that Ganda saw and even met Gandhi, but unlikely that the restaurant fed him; by this time Gandhi was subsisting mainly on a diet of fruit and nuts, eschewing cooked foods. Whether or not the two men ever exchanged words or broke bread, what is certain is that all of the major events of the community passed by Ganda's front door. And because South Africa's was no ordinary Indian community, with no ordinary leader, Ganda's small fast-food stall turned out to be a front seat to history.
The marriage ruling led to two years of a massive satyagraha campaign. After thousands of arrests, strikes, police crackdowns, and even some deaths, the government and the protesters reached a compromise: the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which restored some rights. Gandhi sailed back to India on the winds of victory, carrying with him a new methodology of passive resistance. In Durban he was a homegrown hero; in India he was not yet the Mahatma, the Great One, but a young lawyer who, having spent twenty-one years fighting for justice in the diaspora, had managed to cause the empire some embarrassment.
But the price of victory for Indians in South Africa was high: an absolutely closed door to Indians outside. There would be no new immigration for any reason: no siblings or ailing parents; no entrepreneurs or laborers or students; no grooms, no brides. South Africa's Indian sons and daughters would marry, from now on, within South Africa. As it turned out, Amba was one of the last brides from India.
The closed door created an unintended side effect, entrenching the Indian population even more and solidifying its position as a population not of immigrants but of South Africans born and bred. By the 1920s, Indians in South Africa were no longer an expatriate population. Three in five were born in the new country. Among these were two new Kapitans: Ganda and Amba's daughter, Parvati, born in 1918, and their son, Dalpat, six years later.
As the family grew, the neighborhood was changing. A few blocks from the mosque, a flourishing nightlife district pulsated with jazz joints, billiards clubs, and ballrooms for dancing. Men of all races brushed elbows to bet on boxing and horses, and by the time Parvati and Dalpat were in primary school, at least a dozen Indian-owned cinemas were showing Hollywood films. Grey Street was no longer the swampy outskirts of the city; it was a busy sector in its own right, its shacks and horse stalls slowly giving way to modern buildings, paved roads, motorcars. In keeping with the times, the façade enclosing the mosque was completely rebuilt in 1930. A two-story structure rose up all around like a fortress: shops on the ground floor, apartments upstairs, the mosque itself hidden mostly within, like a secret treasure. Amid the material pursuits of street-side, its minarets were the only sign of its reaching toward the heavens.
Soon the owner of 154 Grey Street decided to remake his side of the block, too. Ganda was on good terms with his landlord, who agreed to renovate the humble thirty-year-old eatery with its outdoor kitchen into a wholly modern structure—part of the new, grand Aboobaker Mansions, named for the very first Gujarati in Durban, whose son owned the property.
For longtime tenants, units were built to specification. Ganda worked out a design for his ideal shop, then watched it take shape: a front room with glass windows for displaying wares and letting in sunlight, and long tables and wooden chairs for seating a few dozen customers. A full indoor kitchen with industrial-size stoves and ovens. A courtyard out back where firewood for the ovens could be piled neatly along a wall. Two storage rooms downstairs: a cold room for vegetables and perishables, and a granary filled with flour, rice, and daals. Two more storage rooms upstairs, for stocks of Chiclets, candy, cigarettes, and other easy over-the-counter sales. Also upstairs was a two-bedroom apartment where Ganda moved his family, reducing his commute by a block.
After their one-room existence, the apartment in Aboobaker Mansions was, if not a mansion in the modern sense, expansive. Inside, it opened onto an Indian-style courtyard where children played in the stairways and adults called across the railings, women visiting to borrow a cup of flour, to swap recipes and news, to catch up on the latest gossip. Inside, Ganda and Amba had their own room for the first time since Parvati's birth seventeen years before. The two teenagers shared another room, and the hallway in between led to a balcony that faced the mosque, where Amba hung her laundry. An inner courtyard led to a kitchen, toilet, and bath. Just below was the newly renovated store. The year was 1935, and Dalpat was eleven years old, the age that his father had been when he came to South Africa. The new sign proudly proclaimed the boy's inheritance and destiny: G. C. KAPITAN & SON VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT.
Around Grey Street, factories were springing up: shoes, clothing, leather. The owners were mostly white and Indian; the workers, mostly African. As black Africans entered the city in larger numbers, Grey Street shop windows took to displaying traditional African clothing and modern Western clothes alongside saris and salwar kameez. In such a stratified society even food had a color, yet the colors were beginning to blend; Indians could be seen eating "mealies," or boiled corn, and Africans developed a taste for curry.
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The whites might have liked some of the new flavors, but the large populations of black and brown people who produced them were a grave problem. Seeking always to keep the races as separate as possible, and to keep crowds of black or brown South Africans from "swamping" the white cities, they produced a series of racial zoning proposals; a 1944 planning map, for example, shows an ideal Durban divided into zones for "Europeans," "Asiatics," "Natives," and "Coloureds." As officials considered the feasibility of various versions of such plans, they also enforced a steady stream of race-restrictive regulations. Some targeted business, that old sticking point between Gujaratis and whites. Others targeted black Africans, who were barred from entering the cities without passes, being on the streets after certain hours, and—most significantly for Ganda—eating in restaurants.
The date of this change is uncertain; it may have been a strictly local ordinan
ce, or an old regulation being freshly enforced during one of many periodic attempts at shepherding the unwieldy mix of populations. Whenever it occurred, its impact was significant, for by this time a substantial portion of the curry houses' clientele was African.
Ganda and other restaurateurs, thinking quickly, realized they must begin to sell "take-aways." In search of a cheap container, in the age before Styrofoam, they hit upon the humble bread loaf. They invented what became known as the bunny chow.
To make a bunny chow, you need a loaf of bread and a scoopful of vegetable, meat, or bean curry. Cut off the end of the bread and hollow it out, reserving the soft innards. Fill it with curry. Serve.
To eat it is another trick altogether. If you just bite in, everything spills out—a steaming, spicy mess, dripping all over your lap. With experience, you learn to nibble gently at the outer crust; to cradle the loaf in one hand and gently scoop out curry with the other, using the extra bread that was pulled out earlier, or your fingers, so that nothing spills; to savor the complementary tastes of rich spices and soothing, yeasty bread. When the loaf is no longer overflowing, you grasp it with both hands and lift it to your mouth. Bite carefully, taking both curry and bread in each bite. Continue eating until entire loaf and all curry is consumed. Lick fingers and wipe mouth, chin, et cetera.
At a modern bunny chow joint, Africans of all colors can be seen chowing down. Watching them, black, brown, and white, it is easy to forget that the bunny chow was born of segregation—South Africa's extreme and relentless version of it.
The etymology of "bunny chow" is as uncertain as the identity of its inventor. Descendants of the pioneering Grey Street restaurateurs battle it out valiantly on both counts, without any expectation of settling the question at this late date. Ganda, a lifelong vegetarian, does seem to be the undisputed creator of the "beans bunny," the version in which the loaf is stuffed with a rich, spicy stew of tomatoes and fava beans.
Leaving India Page 7