Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Architecture, then, Bhupendra suggested, thinking it a fine compromise between art and science. His father again considered, and again rejected the notion. How many houses could be built, after all? Each family needed only one, and most already had a home; surely one could not make a living designing houses.

  Bhupendra was out of ideas. He asked his father to choose.

  For Ratanji, the fact that he weighed his son's opinion at all was a sign that the question was confounding. In all of his experience and that of his forefathers, occupation was a primary function and a natural outcome of hereditary caste. The son did as the father had done, and that was all. Occupations had shifted slightly over a century, from weaver to tailor to trader, but that was a matter of economic need, not personal desire.

  But times were changing. Ratanji, given his own minimal schooling, had no basis on which to choose a profession for an educated boy. So he asked around.

  A cousin had just opened a chemist's shop, and said that was a very good line of work. People will always need painkillers and balms, Ratanji reasoned. And since the family concern in Fiji was now a department store, in a few years Bhupendra could come and open a dispensary.

  By good fortune, Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, the state's commercial capital, had just launched a five-year pharmacy program. It was part of India's new push to invest in science and technology education. When the school year started in June 1957, Bhupendra and his parents were on an overnight train to the city. They toured the campus, paid his tuition and room and board, arranged for daily milk delivery at his dorm room so he could make morning tea, and stayed one night at the Hotel Chetana. The next morning, after a tearful embrace, his parents took the next train home.

  Bhupendra did not know, quite, how it had happened that he was suddenly cast out—for an education, yes, for an opportunity no one else in his family had been given, but cast out nonetheless. Aside from a few clothes and books, his possessions consisted of a bedroll, a small Primus stove and pot, and a stash of tea and tea spices. Neither these supplies nor any situation he had encountered in his fifteen years had equipped him for life outside the family and the village. He had never gone to sleep without his family nearby, never woken up without mother or aunt or sisters to ask if he was hungry, to urge him to eat. He had never taken a meal in a restaurant, let alone a huge cafeteria like the one where students ate.

  Alone in the big city, he cried for three straight days.

  On the third morning he pulled himself together enough to try making a cup of tea. Twice he burned the milk; the third time he succeeded. Slowly he began to adjust to his new life. The barely conscious question Why me? receded until years later, when he learned of the prophecy that was the real reason he was sent away from home.

  At home, his parents also wept and worried over whether their teenager could fend for himself. A month after dropping Bhupendra off, Ratanji came for a surprise visit, just before his return to Fiji. Unable to gauge his son's academic progress, he was nonetheless glad to see that Bhupendra's room was clean, his bed made, his books neatly lined up on a shelf. Ratanji worried that the food might be institutional slop, and bought Bhupendra a bottle of ketchup to pour on rice if nothing else was edible. But the bottle of bright red sauce—foreign to Gujarati cuisine—was destined to stay on Bhupendra's shelf untouched; even if he had developed a taste for it, he would have been embarrassed to bring his own condiment to the cafeteria.

  Bhupendra did make use of his father's other gift: a bank account with an allowance of ten pounds a month. With hundreds of rupees at his disposal each semester, Bhupendra was easily the richest boy in the dorm. Three times a week he treated his new school friends to dinner and a movie in town, keeping a diary of the films they saw. They studied together, took snack breaks and practiced English at the nearby canteen, and applied their budding scientific skills to such experiments as wiring their metal bed frames to electrocute the bedbugs that, from time to time, infested their mattresses. And so my father's wandering days began—not as an ascetic, but as a student of the world.

  In the 1950s, Bhupendra and his classmates enjoyed some of the earliest fruits of India's independence. Their prime minister, the nation's first, was Jawaharlal Nehru, who as a boy had loved to tinker in a small laboratory set up for him in the family mansion. Although his breeding and political activism had directed him to the study of law and history, in his youth Nehru had also made time for geology, zoology, and botany at Trinity College in England; among his classmates was a grandson of Charles Darwin. "There are three fundamental requirements for India," Nehru wrote in 1940, looking ahead to the independence he hoped and trusted would come: "a heavy engineering and machine building industry, scientific research institutions and electric power."

  In this belief in progress, Nehru was diametrically opposed to his compatriot in the movement, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, who had observed how industrialization destroyed rural livelihoods, favored reverting to a village-based, nontechnological economy based on handicrafts such as spinning and hand-weaving. But after independence and Gandhi's assassination, it was Nehru who had the task of grappling with practical means of addressing the suffering of India. "It is science alone," Nehru wrote, "that could solve these problems of hunger and poverty." As prime minister he set about putting that solution to work, cultivating the scientific brainpower that he saw as essential to India's future.

  In 1947, as one of his first acts, Nehru laid the foundation stone of the first national laboratory in Delhi. Within a few years he broke ground on the first of the research universities later known as the Indian Institutes of Technology, on the site of a large detention camp where the British had held protesters during the historic 1930 salt march. Over the coming decades, this investment would pay dividends as the institutes gradually developed an international reputation for producing some of the world's most skilled engineers, computer scientists, and entrepreneurs.

  Nehru also named scientists among his top advisers and incorporated scientific investment into each of the "five-year plans" that governed the new country's spending. Government funding for scientific research grew from 24 million rupees in 1947, when Nehru took office, to 550 million rupees by the time he died in 1964—an increase of 2,200 percent. And he began funding education at a phenomenal rate, raising no less than thirty new universities between 1947 and 1961—as well as encouraging new programs, especially in the sciences, at existing institutions.

  Under British rule, Bhupendra and most of his classmates would have had neither the wealth nor the connections to gain a higher education. "University" had been virtually synonymous with "England," where Nehru, Gandhi, and other elites had studied in the pre-independence era. Now, thanks to the efforts of these largely foreign-educated leaders, the knowledge of the world could be taught to young Indians in their own country, by their own countrymen—in shiny new laboratories complemented by a garden, behind the school, of pharmaceutical herbs.

  The realm of science that Bhupendra entered as a fifteen-year-old must have seemed a kind of rigorous and thorough explanation of the world, a relief from the chaos of the Hindu calendar with its constant fluctuation between auspicious and inauspicious times, of the Hindu gods with their impenetrable whims that, in boyhood, he had done his best to track. Science spoke to his already logical, mathematical mind. In one more barely perceptible step away from his family, he soon began, privately, to eschew some of the beliefs of his mother and sisters as superstition, replacing them with Western medical knowledge. The clear equations and cause-and-effect rationality of a scientific education were, for him, natural and easy to embrace.

  First, however, he had to understand its vocabulary—in a foreign tongue. His college was a "mixed" one, meaning that the students came not only from Gujarat but from all over India. English was ostensibly the common denominator and therefore the language of instruction.

  But what the students shared most was that they had no idea what their professors were saying. Their high sc
hool English proved radically insufficient for practical use. The first time someone said "Hello" to Bhupendra, he froze. He knew the textbook meaning of the word, of course, but not the proper response.

  In the classroom, although his professors spoke slowly, Bhupendra struggled to follow the technical vocabulary, which was far beyond his previous exposure. Each night he sat with a pharmacy textbook in English and his old science books in Gujarati, looking for diagrams that matched. "Triangle" meant, apparently, trikone. "Distillation process" was nisyandan nikreeyaa. Every word was different, and at the end of six months came the midyear exams.

  When the results arrived, he had to write to his father in Fiji:—I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, I have failed every single subject in the program. The good news is, I am still number one in the class!

  His classmates, twenty-five students who also came from regional high schools where they had studied only in Bengali or Tamil or Marathi, had had the same problem. Bhupendra's scores, though failing, were the highest.

  Luckily, Ratanji saw the humor in the situation. For years afterward he bragged about his son who was "number one failing," and he let Bhupendra stay in school. Bhupendra managed to pass the year-end exams, and all of the exams thereafter.

  As the boys—there were only two girls in the program—struggled through the material, they also bonded, like any group of adolescents thrown together far from home. Bhupendra's world grew. He studied Urdu, for the beautiful script and poetry, and made Muslim friends for the first time. He took German, and added German pen pals to his list of correspondents. And he entered doorways forbidden to him in the village.

  With a friend, he took lessons downtown in art and, for the first time, his beloved music. He learned the scales and principles underlying Indian classical compositions, and dabbled in Hawaiian guitar lessons. He found he had a knack for rendering images in watercolor, in pen and ink, and in a near-invisible form of embossing created with only a sharp thumbnail. He painted birds: white lines on black paper, an exquisite and delicate trio with sweeping arcs for tails, intricate feathers. Turning to the human figure, he chose the natural aesthetic object for a heterosexual male teenager. In drawing after drawing he explored the curves and lines of the female form, rendered in realistic detail, draped sometimes with fabric—and sometimes not.

  Despite these extracurricular activities, he never lost track of the reason for his freedom. He kept his grades high and stayed in school even as his class steadily shrank, his peers succumbing to language and other barriers.

  Then, in his fourth year, urgent missives began arriving from home.

  By now only his youngest sister, Lila, lived in Navsari with their mother. The two older sisters were married; all of the older brothers had gone to Fiji; Bhupendra and his younger brother, Manhar, were in university (the latter in Bombay). Kaashi felt abandoned. She started drinking heavily, and wreaked her alcoholic rages on her only remaining daughter. Every few weeks Lila would sneak off to the post office to telegram Bhupendra:—Situation bad, come home quick. And Bhupendra would board the Friday night train, arrive home on Saturday morning, and do what he could before taking the Sunday night red-eye back to school. Sometimes he fetched antacids for his mother's stomach pain and administered seltzer water; mostly, he listened.

  That my father remembers his childhood up to this point as joyful is no mean feat, considering that he saw his father only every few years, that his mother beat the other children, that he was discouraged from pursuing his artistic and musical interests, and that he barely knew his older siblings. Migration had split the family apart, yet family life stumbled on as if uninterrupted. Now, driven by spirits, Kaashi ranted of its difficulties. Her husband traveled the world, she seethed, but never took her anywhere. She was alone; none of her children cared; she would die alone, any moment now.

  For Bhupendra, it must have been as if the sweet flesh of his childhood had suddenly split apart to reveal an ugly, rotten pit. He developed a lifelong distaste for alcohol, but kept trying to help his mother. His final summer in university, he took an unpaid internship at a chemical factory in Navsari, to be close to home. It was then that, for the first time, he found himself a target of his mother's rage.

  The notion of privacy within the family was nonexistent. Bhupendra realized that his mother would not approve of the frankly secular images he had created in college, but he could not bear to part with them. He stored them in the only place in the house that was remotely his: his bedroll.

  One day Kaashi discovered them, and she was outraged. In a screaming fit she made her displeasure clear. Perhaps it was as if all her fears about the corrupting influence of the arts had come true; he was misusing a gift that should be used, if at all, only for religious images, not for such filth.

  Somehow that summer passed, and in December 1962, Bhupendra—frivolous or not, lusty or pious—made both of his parents proud. He became one of only five from his original class of twenty-five to graduate.

  Once again Ratanji was in India, this time to escort his most educated son to Fiji. There, Bhupendra was at last to be taken into the fold of the family business. Kaashi thought it was high time her son married; at twenty, he was more than ready by the standards of the community. His "art," along with his habit of acquiring female pen pals, must have been in the back of her mind; on a rare family vacation in the hill station of Pune, he had shocked everyone by hopping on the back of a motorcycle driven by a strange girl, who turned out to be one of his correspondents. A big biscuit-manufacturing family had a daughter the right age and would have welcomed an educated son-in-law in their extensive commercial concerns, but Bhupendra said no. He never saw the girl; he simply was not ready to marry, he said.

  His father did not force the matter, instead taking him on the scenic route to Fiji. First, Ratanji shepherded him through the rounds. At the Civil Hospital in Surat, Bhupendra was vaccinated against smallpox and cholera, to meet Fiji's requirements for anyone coming from India. In Bombay, he obtained his first passport, containing handwritten permission from the government of India to visit Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, and Fiji.

  In Singapore his passport was stamped with a landing pass, good only for the few days that the ship was in port. There Bhupendra was introduced to, and declined, another prospect fancied by his parents. In Sydney, he met a pen pal who showed him around the city. As they entered a department store, he bragged to her,—My father has a store just like this in Fiji. Of course, Bhupendra had not yet been to Suva, and had no way of knowing that the towering glass and steel department stores of Australia were skyscrapers compared with the row of street-level wooden shop-fronts that were the Narseys empire. He entered Fiji on September 6, 1962—by coincidence, the day Bhanu was celebrating her sixteenth birthday.

  ***

  Bhanu had passed the tenth-grade exam, but with a B.

  As her classmates began eleventh grade, Bhanu resigned herself to not going to school. By the terms of her deal with her father, she would stay home, learn to cook and clean, and become educated in the ways of being a good adult woman. A cousin was to be married in Tavua, on the other side of the island, and Bhanu was dispatched with her aunt to help out a week before the wedding.

  But while she was gone, the high school principal paid a visit to Narotam at the shop. She wanted to know why Bhanu had not started the school year with her class. The next day a teacher who had taught Bhanu history and Hindi stopped by.—Send her back to school, the teacher begged;—she is a smart girl, she should study. And by the end of the week Narotam telephoned the relatives in Tavua.—Her teachers are driving me crazy, he said (in Gujarati, maaru maathu khaai jataa chhe, they are eating my head).—Send her back.

  With this reprieve, Bhanu started working her way through eleventh grade as her brother was finishing twelfth. Champak, who had earned top marks in his Catholic high school, had somehow gotten it in his head that he wanted to go to America to study. He had already applied to a Catholic universit
y recommended by his principal, located somewhere named Iowa; had shown his father the admissions letter; and had asked, and asked, and asked. Narotam's standard reply was,—We'll see.

  So Champak waited. But he was not waiting idly.

  Unknown to his parents, Champak had started dating an Indo-Fijian girl from the nearby town of Vatuvanga who was a class ahead of Bhanu. In his senior year, Champak had taken to meeting Sita nearly every afternoon.

  One day sometime in the spring of 1963, shortly after graduation, the amorous young couple were ambushed. Acting on a tip, his uncle Kalyaan had followed Champak to the meeting place, caught him with the girl, and dragged him home. There, he faced his parents' wrath and tears.

  Champak was Narotam and Benkor's only son, and the only male descendant of his paternal grandfather; all the others of his generation were girls. Only he could carry on the family lineage, and its honor. He had to, just had to, marry a Khatri girl, his parents told him. Or else.

  Narotam shared his woes with his friend Ratanji Narsey—who, remarkably, offered a solution. Ratanji was sending his son Bhupendra to America in a few days' time. Perhaps a ticket could still be purchased.

  Narotam did not have much money to spare, but given the emergency, he scraped some together. Did Narotam recall his own youthful love affair, in his case with the movement, and his own father's formula of migration as discipline, migration as correction? Just as he had been sent to Fiji to keep from becoming "lost" to Gandhi's political movement, he would now send his only son to America. He told Champak to pack his things.