Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Less than a week later, Bhanu found herself at the Suva dock, waving goodbye to her closest sibling and only brother as he disappeared up the gangplank.

  Bhupendra had not expected to find himself bound for America, either.

  Upon arrival in Fiji, Bhupendra was treated as an honored guest. Under his father's orders, his brothers refused to let him help in the store, since he was educated. There was no firm plan; Bhupendra had thought his father wanted him to open a pharmacy, as part of the department store, but the weeks and then months wore on with no talk of work. Whenever he asked, he was put off:—Yes, yes, soon.

  By then his mother and younger siblings had moved to Fiji as well, leaving a distant cousin to occupy the homestead in Navsari. The family's migration was complete. But Bhupendra was growing bored. Amusements and outings with his nieces, nephews, and sisters-in-law wore thin; hanging around with the menfolk in the store, with no work to do himself, seemed absurd.

  So he took up his favorite hobby. At the downtown bookstore, he bought a sketchpad, drawing pencils, and a set of watercolors. And he used his right thumbnail, grown a few millimeters long on purpose, for an invisible art.

  As I look at his delicate etchings of 1963, it seems to me my father was dreaming my mother long before they met. The technique requires holding an image in one's mind, without benefit of sketch or tracing; the line of the thumbnail is the only tool. One image takes at least a week to make, painstakingly, touch by touch.

  To see the images, one must be equally inventive. They have no color, only texture, so you must hold them up to the light at a favorable angle. Then a woman is revealed, leaning forward, her nipples erect. Or a face turns in profile, the curve of her cheekbone, eyelash, and jaw implying longing and desire. Or a girl walks into a canopy of leaves, nude except for her high heels. In the great tradition of Indian erotic art, the aesthetic and the moral are said to be merely different manifestations of the divine—yet it is easy to see why Kaashi objected to my father's portraits of girls, the frankly sensual arcs of their bodies, their gazes hinting at a romantic imagination that, surely, a Hindu mother does not want to know her favorite unmarried son possesses.

  I do not think, though, that my father experienced a dualism in his mind between art and faith. I think he was simply an enthusiastic—the word in Gujarati, hunsyaar, can also mean intelligent, engaged, passionate—young man. He was absorbed in the process of drawing and painting, as in childhood he had been absorbed in the Sanskrit chants. In giving himself over to each with his full attention, he was performing what some might call the purest form of meditative practice. Perhaps he even experienced moments of grace, of touching the universal through the ordinary: newspaper photographs, pretty girls from his imagination, and wild hibiscus flowers that he tore from the trees in Suva and laid on the kitchen table, to render in delicate, meticulous still lifes.

  My mother picked hibiscus to wear behind her ear, strung marigolds and carnations into garlands for doorways and deities, wove strands of jasmine into her braids. In Suva in 1963, as Bhupendra idled away months waiting for his life to begin, sixteen-year-old Bhanu was choreographing folk dances for local festivals and finishing high school, her future blank and uncertain before her. With girlfriends she mused over the ideal characteristics of a husband.

  —He doesn't drink, said one.

  —Or smoke, said another.

  —He doesn't live with his mother, said Bhanu, and they laughed. To be a bride without a live-in mother-in-law would be a rare treat indeed; they all knew of the trials that could await one, the dukh—suffering—that a mother-in-law could impose.

  For an example, they had to look no further than the matriarch of the prominent Narsey family, recently emigrated to Fiji from India. Why, Kaashi was known to be a witch—with the dual connotation that word held in both English and Gujarati. With her older sons' wives she quarreled relentlessly; one daughter-in-law was often seen running away from home, declaiming loudly of the suffering the old woman had levied upon her. Better to marry a man whose mother was dead or at least lived far away, Bhanu thought.

  But it was musing in the abstract. In reality, Bhanu did not intend to marry anytime soon. Although many of her classmates were already betrothed, and her sisters had been married at her age, Bhanu had her sights set on a possibility that was, for her time and gender, a radical thought: higher education.

  The grand journey of Bhanu's life to this point had come when she was a child. Born in Fiji, she had been moved back to India as a baby with her mother and sisters. Then an uncle came back from Fiji bearing the news that her father had bought a grand bungalow there, with a newfangled electric icebox that could keep food cool for weeks at a time. The uncle bought her a pair of shoes, saying she would need them on the ship. And then she was traveling across the sea.

  Six years old, Bhanu learned to work the ship's systems to her advantage. She kicked off her pinchy new shoes whenever she could, roaming barefoot, outwitting and outrunning the elderly cabin "boys" whose job it was to chase her down and enforce the rule against bare feet. Ship life was full of fearsome adventures. Bhanu had never used a sit-down toilet, so on her first try she climbed up and squatted with her feet on the rim, and nearly fell in. There were separate mealtimes for children and adults, as well as separate Indian lunches and dinners; she organized her days to attend as many meals as possible. In a Christmastime bobbing-for-apples contest, she won the top prize: a box of white chocolate.

  Now, ten years later, emboldened by her brother's example and her own academic success, Bhanu was dreaming of a bigger prize.—I want to study to be a doctor, she told her father.—Send me to New Zealand.

  Narotam gave his typical response:—We'll see.

  Bhanu knew what that meant. A young Khatri girl in Fiji might sooner imagine herself in a space suit headed for the moon than to dream, even secretly, of study abroad. Her people did not send their daughters unchaperoned to the movies, let alone across the sea.

  And then Bhanu became the first girl of her community in Fiji to finish high school.

  It is difficult to describe how rare my parents' academic success was at the time. In the merchant families of our clan, the notion of going to school was not even a generation old. My grandfathers had attended only a few grades, my grandmothers none. When Bhupendra was five or six, an older boy whose family lived on the other side of the village well was about to become one of the first Khatris to finish high school. It was a phenomenon so unusual that the neighborhood children came around just to see. Keeping a respectable distance, understanding that they must stay quiet, Bhupendra and the others would form a loose circle around the two-foot-wide desk set up in the courtyard. Then they would simply watch the boy study.

  In both India and Fiji in those years, the British system of education was in place. Each student had to pass end-of-year exams in every subject in order to advance to the next grade. Sooner or later, most sons of the community reached an exam they could not pass, at which point they went to join their fathers in the shop—whether that shop was in India, Fiji, South Africa, or one of a handful of other destinations where our diaspora had spread itself.

  As for girls, those who failed were prepared to wed. Just as often, they were pulled out of school in order to be married. Most of Bhanu's sisters and girl cousins had dropped out somewhere in the elementary grades. Only one Khatri girl in memory, Bhanu's friend Padma, had made it to high school; but finding the Methodist rules too strict—she was not allowed to wear the traditional dot on her forehead, or bangles on her arms—she dropped out. Years later Padma would tell Bhanu this was the greatest mistake of her life.

  But at the time, Bhanu's friend was simply following the norm of the community. Failing or dropping out was no shame, for either boys or girls; anyone who kept going in school was deemed a rare intellect. You could count on one hand the number of graduates in the community. They were automatically set apart.

  And it was this setting apart that would become a m
arker of both my parents' lives. For my grandparents, the stakes were high. Suddenly the world was bigger and wider; it could swallow up their children as easily as it might embrace them with open arms. Migration was no longer a desperate measure, as it had been for them and their forebears, a solution to an economic problem; it was a choice their children were clamoring to make. And it was impossible to know the right decision in advance. As the doors to many countries swung open, one had to watch one's children walk through them, and trust in destiny to ensure that the lessons one had imparted would hold.

  One afternoon Ratanji came home to discover his son engrossed in painting a hibiscus in full, glorious bloom. He was furious.

  —Did we educate you, did we bring you to Fiji, to waste your time like this?

  —But what am I supposed to do? asked Bhupendra, who had no work or study to occupy his time.

  So his father set him a task: the family tree.

  One photocopy of the tree remains in my father's, and now my, files. In his finest Gujarati, Bhupendra inked the generations of male names dictated by his father. He then adorned the branches with curvaceous twigs and heart-shaped leaves, inscribing the history of his family.

  From Kaashi he learned that he had had another brother, a boy who lived only long enough to be named: Giridhar. His mother wanted the boy on the family tree; his father did not. Ratanji had his way, but my father kept the knowledge. Decades later, when he typed a new version into his first computer, he would list Giridhar as the fourth son, and himself as fifth.

  On the branching tree he drew in 1963, he set the names of the next generation—his young nephews—into flowers, coddled by soft, rounded petals. His own twig ended in a bud not yet opened. Inside its optimistic folds waited my brother, nameless and formless as any future.

  I am with the other girls, the wives and sisters and daughters, in the shadow tree that cannot be perceived at high noon.

  Without work or income, Bhupendra continued to say no to eligible bachelorettes suggested by his parents. After the family tree was completed, and as no wedding bells were imminent, Ratanji declared that Bhupendra's term of idleness had lasted long enough. He dispatched Bhupendra with his uncle Magan to find the appropriate government office and obtain a license to practice pharmacy in Fiji.

  At the licensing office, the official was apologetic.

  —Mr. Narsey, he told Uncle Magan,—I want to tell you that this man is more educated than I am. Your nephew is the most educated pharmacist we have on the island. But I am so sorry, I cannot give him a license.

  Bhupendra's degree was from India, the man explained, and Fiji recognized bachelor's degrees only from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

  Bhupendra was outraged, his patriotic spirit offended by the suggestion that India's degrees were inferior to those of the white Western nations. Ratanji wanted to send him to complete the required two-year certification course in New Zealand. But Bhupendra suggested that instead of two years of repetitive course work, he could spend two years earning a higher degree: a master's in manufacturing pharmaceuticals. The move would prepare him not only to open a pharmacy but to set up a manufacturing facility in Fiji. Ratanji agreed, so Bhupendra began looking into graduate programs.

  He recalled that a few of his peers back in India had talked about going to America to study. And so he approached the door of the U.S. consulate in Suva, entered a small office where the Stars and Stripes hung, and walked for the first time onto what was, technically, American soil.

  If Bhupendra's dream, in 1963, had been to live in America, being a student was one of the few ways that he could have accomplished it. Born in India, applying for a visa via Fiji, he fell into what the U.S. Congress back in 1917 had established as the "Asiatic barred zone," a region from which immigrants were deemed wholly undesirable. The bar was effective; the most recent census of 1960 had found fewer than nine thousand people from India living in the United States. Some were old enough to have entered in an earlier time when migration was free, and most of the rest were visiting students and scholars.

  Christopher Columbus's error notwithstanding, no one knows when the first Indian arrived in North America. A slave from India may have been among the possessions imported by an early settler of Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s; a handful of sailors, merchants, and swamis from India were said to have landed at East Coast ports in the late 1700s and 1800s. The earliest documented arrivals were students, in 1901. Enrolled at first in East Coast institutions such as Cornell University, they came with scholarships from various Indian educational societies or funding from their own families, and soon made their way to California's large universities as well.

  The student presence was quickly overshadowed by a larger group: hundreds of Indian laborers on the West Coast. These men, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab region of northwestern India who had become world travelers by virtue of serving in the British Indian army, were drawn first to western Canada by rumors of high wages and a voraciously expanding economy. As Canada reacted with immigration restrictions to squeeze them out, some traveled south.

  To their new bosses in the American West's lumber mills, railroads, farms, mines, and quarries, they were a godsend: strong and hardworking, cheaper than the whites, less particular about their working conditions than the Japanese, and younger than the Chinese—to whom America's borders had been closed for more than twenty years. That change had come about after white vigilantes burned down Chinatowns throughout the West Coast in the 1870s. The arsons had proven such a success—culminating in congressional passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—that, rather than being pacified, white vigilantes learned that mob action was an effective form of political expression.

  In comparison with other groups, the number of Asian Indians arriving in the United States was small, never exceeding one thousand annually. Still, within a few years of arrival, they were subject to a tide of anti-Asian xenophobia.

  In 1906, an anti-Chinese riot enveloped Vancouver, with three hundred whites mobbing the Chinese quarter, tearing down and then setting fire to their shacks. The same year in San Francisco, Japanese scientists studying the aftermath of the city's massive earthquake were stoned and told to go home.

  In 1907, the violence reached Asian Indians.

  CROWD NUMBERING 500 DRAGS DUSKY ORIENTALS FROM THEIR HOMES, triumphed a headline in one of the towns where violent mobs attacked "Hindoos," as all Indians, regardless of religion, were known. In settlements as large as Seattle and as small as Live Oak, California, white men fearful that their jobs were being undercut by cheap immigrant labor rioted to drive out hundreds of Indian, Filipino, and Chinese workers. Political leaders raced to follow up on their constituents' violently expressed views.

  In 1913, California's Alien Land Law stripped Asian immigrants of the right to own property, forcing quick sales and economic devastation on those few Indian laborers who had managed to save money to buy their own farms. In a reflection of how dramatically the xenophobic focus was shifting, by 1920 the commissioner of the state's Bureau of Labor Statistics would report "the Hindu" to be "the most undesirable immigrant in the state" and "unfit for association with American people."

  The rioters' victory was enduring. California and other western states shaped the national debate on Asian immigration for decades to come. In 1917, the U.S. Congress barred Indians from migrating to the United States and prevented those already in the country from bringing over wives. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that Indians could not be granted citizenship, which was limited to "whites." The Court admitted that both science and history classified the races of India as Aryan and "Caucasian," following a taxonomic system under which the other categories were "Mongoloid" and "Negroid." But, the unanimous decision said, "the common man" would identify Indians as nonwhite and would "instinctively recognize and reject the thought of assimilation" with them. The following year, Congress extended the immigration and citizenship ban to all of the so-called Asia Pacific Triangle
, closing the leaks and putting an effective end to what newspapers of the day had termed "the Asian invasion."

  Students, however, enjoyed some exemptions to the ban. Without the option to become American citizens after graduation, Asian students were generally temporary visitors, not immigrant threats. During the 1920s, when the borders were otherwise tightly sealed, more than a thousand students from India arrived to study in U.S. universities. In 1935, an Indo-American surveying his countrymen estimated that five hundred Indian students were scattered throughout the United States, making up one-ninth of the Indo-American population.

  A few of these scholars managed to remain, and even rise through the ranks. In 1944, the Senate Committee on Immigration heard expert testimony that at least fourteen Indian scholars and scientists were holding key positions in American industry and universities.

  The Senate hearings were part of a quixotic effort to reverse the draconian immigration bans. Indo-American activists, with a few allies in Congress, sought to prove that they were indeed desirable citizens, willing and able to contribute to America's urgent needs. By this time, World War II had brought slight relief to the long-maligned Chinese Americans; Congress, throwing a bone to an important ally and attempting to stave off charges of Nazi-style racism, had just consented to let in 105 Chinese immigrants each year. Chinese in America were also, after a hiatus of six decades, being allowed to apply for citizenship.

  Prominent Indo-Americans, including a doctor, a former senator, and community activists, lobbied for the same treatment. It took two more years to overcome congressional and labor opposition. At last, in 1946, President Truman signed legislation extending similar provisions to Filipinos and Indians. Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians were still banned; yet America's freeze on Asian immigration was beginning, ever so slowly, to thaw.