Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Nor do they have what some consider the greatest luxury of all: the freedom to leave India. And it was this, we would learn, that Jaydeep craved the most from us, his American kin. After lunch, the talk turned at last to Jaydeep and his future plans.

  Jaydeep was the fruit of his parents' hard work and his country's investment in education. He was the first in his family to finish high school; he had a bachelor's degree in accounting and a master's in desktop publishing, and was completing a second master's course in business. He had just found a job as a computer graphics technician for a small firm that etched images on glass for designer doorways and windows. He had hope.

  He showed us the brochure he had been saving, advertising a scheme to migrate to the United States: an expensive course that would prepare students to take a certification exam in accounting. His smile was so broad and optimistic that it seemed to take over his jawline and light up the dim room.

  My father, a financial planner, scanned the brochure and expressed skepticism. America had plenty of accountants, he said, and it was not a desired immigration category. Then, drawing on his long training as a professor, he delivered a somewhat pedantic discourse on the various ways to get to America.

  The simplest, he said, was to have a lot of money and come on a business visa: ten thousand dollars, or half a million rupees. Of course, he noted, that would not apply. Jaydeep, with his dual degrees, was making two thousand rupees a month: fifty dollars.

  Then there was illegal immigration, which my father could not recommend, and which in any case had become much more difficult since September 11, 2001. Next, sponsorship by an immediate relative—sibling or parent—which Jaydeep did not have. Three ways now remained: school, marriage, or work in a category that the United States desperately needed. Accounting was not one of these. Computers were, but the barriers to entry were high; he would need a job in hand from an American company, and those jobs were going to highly recruited graduates of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, not people with correspondence-course degrees like Jaydeep.

  My father ran down the list of options for Jaydeep, and shook his head as if discouraged. Perhaps Australia, he said. Perhaps New Zealand, where Jaydeep's aunt was living.

  Perhaps Canada.

  TORONTO

  In the suburbs of Canada's largest metropolis, a cultural and economic capital whose multiculturalism is evident on nearly every block, my cousin Raju is living out, in effect, Jaydeep's dream. When his mother, Lila, my father's baby sister, had migrated to Canada, she was joining her husband, Mahendra, who had come a year earlier and found work. Raju was born in Fiji just two years earlier, in 1965; a Toronto-born sister and brother followed. But within a few years Mahendra was disabled in a car accident, and the young family found themselves on welfare. With little English or education, Lila found factory work. Eventually Mahendra re-covered and became an insurance salesman, known to his customers as Mike. With two incomes and a series of loans, the family gradually eked its way back into the middle class.

  From this background, their eldest son emerged with a singular determination. Raju is what I grew up calling him, but almost everyone else calls him Roger. His three-page corporate biography, titled "Roger Sholanki: A success story," begins:

  Growing up, Roger Sholanki was the type of child who possessed that certain drive and motivation that most kids didn't have. The type that walked to the corner store during lunch break to load up on candy, only to turn around and sell it for a decent profit to other kids around the schoolyard. Some call it the entrepreneurial spirit. Some may even call it greediness. But no matter what term you choose, the bottom line is that Roger was born with the knack to make money.

  Roger loved fast cars, took up auto mechanics, and built go-karts, giving rides to neighborhood children "for twenty five cents a pop." In tenth grade, he failed a class in computers—but determined to try again. From the biography:

  After all, Einstein once failed math. As it happened, perseverance prevailed and Roger finished Grade 11 computers at the top of his class with an A+. Though this may seem to be a miniscule accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, it is a perfect illustration of his desire to succeed. "If somebody tells me I can't do something, it just motivates me to show them how it's done," Roger explains. [Emphases in original]

  While still in high school, he started building and selling computers. He enrolled in a local polytechnic university, graduated with a degree in computer science, and went to work for a large travel agency, developing software to help agents log transactions at the point of sale. Eventually, point-of-sale software would become his ticket to wealth. He took a series of corporate computer jobs throughout the personal-computer boom of the 1980s, spending nights and weekends on his own ventures; his first company resold hardware and software. By 1992, he had started his second company, a small consulting firm that earned contracts in the millions of dollars from some of Canada's largest corporations. By 1999, on his third venture, his point-of-sale software for cell phone providers was dominating the North American market. This, according to his official biography, "made Roger a financial success at the age of thirty-two." He then started a fourth company, took it public, and would eventually sell it to start yet another venture.

  I interviewed Raju, whom I could never bring myself to call Roger, and his wife, Judy, in their "library," which featured burgundy leather sofas and dark, softly gleaming wood paneling. Like the homes of new-money tech entrepreneurs everywhere, their large suburban house was tastefully outfitted in neutral colors, with plenty of shiny new appliances, a chandelier in the foyer, and furnishings that might have been decorator-approved. Their two school-age children were well mannered and polite, and wore designer jeans. Judy, who had grown up in a large Indo-Trinidadian family in Toronto, was slim, flawlessly coiffed, and had a passion for shopping; she spent many of her afternoons at the mall. We talked about their marriage (an intercaste scandal within our family), their childhood in Canada (Judy remembered racism, with schoolyard bullies picking on Vietnamese "boat children"; Raju remembered being one of the bullies), and the experience of diaspora.

  "So," I asked Raju, "do you feel more Indian, Canadian, or something in between?"

  He paused before answering. "Actually," he said, "I feel American." Americans, he explained, were serious about making money, and so was he. "Basically my identity is, I'm a capitalist."

  HONG KONG

  It is this capitalist drive to succeed, rather than some nostalgic connection to India, that some theorists believe is the true connection among citizens of the global Indian diaspora. As the United States dominates the economy and popular culture of countries all over the globe, and asserts a greater and greater role as the world's sole superpower, perhaps we are all flashy bits of the American mirror, more starred-and-striped than we know. Or perhaps the American dream is only one manifestation of a kind of economic success that my relatives have been pursuing for more than a century: the Fijian dream, the South African dream, the Australian dream, the Hong Kong dream.

  As diaspora entrepreneurs go, Raju/Roger, the self-made man, is far less typical than my third cousin Hemesh, in Hong Kong. I interviewed him in his firm's upstairs office—Chhiba Trading, named for his great-grandfather, who was my grandfather Narotam's uncle. Hemesh was working long hours running the modest import-export business, taking regular business trips to factories in China whose goods he shipped out of the world's busiest port in Hong Kong. He was not an individualist; rather, he was proud of carrying on a family tradition.

  Hemesh's father, Harilal, had come to Hong Kong in 1970. The move was a natural outgrowth of his family's booming business in Fiji. For years Harilal and his three brothers had been buying textiles, toys, costume jewelry, sewing machines, transistor radios, and more from Japan, Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong, then reselling the goods to retailers in Fiji and other nearby islands. Such import-export was profitable, but the commissions could kill you: five percent to the agent i
n Asia, five percent to the agent in the Pacific, and soon your profit margin was halved, or worse. Harilal was already making frequent trips to Asia, to inspect and buy the latest electronics and household goods, when the family decided to try cutting out at least one middleman by opening up a shop in Hong Kong.

  At first, Harilal's primary customer was the family firm in Suva. A handful of other Khatri shopkeepers had hit upon the same strategy; in Hong Kong's crowded real-estate market, they settled for tiny bachelor apartments and small offices with minimal staffs. They tried to ship goods immediately; when they had to store them, they rented space instead of buying warehouses. They worked twelve-hour days and hired bilingual locals to negotiate with Chinese factory owners for the best deals. Once they had set up shop, they sent for their families.

  Hemesh and the other children learned Gujarati at home, Cantonese in the streets, and English in their British-run private schools. Business was good, and Harilal opened an office in Taiwan, then one in Bangkok. The Indians were a tiny minority; an exact count was hard to come by because of their highly transitory nature, but India's embassy in the mid-1990s estimated 23,000 people of Indian origin living in Hong Kong. Despite this tiny number, relative to the island's population of six million, Indian businessmen were estimated to account for nine percent of the international trade. The Khatri community at its peak in the 1980s comprised about eighty people, including young Hemesh.

  Hemesh left Hong Kong for a year to study business in London, then returned to the family firm, which he called "the best school for business." He began making sales trips to Fiji with suitcases full of samples. Then, after Fiji's 1987 coups and the resulting economic decline, all of the "Hong-Kong-walas," as the Khatris in Hong Kong called themselves, were forced to look for other markets. One became "king of Nepal," another specialized in the Middle East, and so on. Working hard to coexist while trading in essentially the same industry, they carved out niches for themselves. Of course, conflicts were inevitable: families quarreled over tricky business deals and perceived social snubs, and one man was ostracized for taking two Chinese concubines. But overall, they remained a tight-knit clan bound by a common culture. To allow for both cordiality and survival within the tiny community, they maintained the gentlemen's agreement not to compete with one another. Hemesh and his father ended up developing the trade in Africa.

  For a time, Africa took Hemesh away from home six months out of the year. Business only grew better. Khatri families came and went, creating a kind of temporary community that was, in some ways, a reflection of the nature of Hong Kong itself. When Harilal and his peers had first arrived on the island in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a British colony under ninety-nine-year lease from China. The turnover date of 1998, when communist China would take over capitalist Hong Kong, had seemed sufficiently distant. Who knew; perhaps Britain would buy the colony outright, or China would lose the Cold War. Anything was possible, and certainly not worth worrying about so far in advance.

  But by the mid-1990s, each week seemed to bring new turnover rumors: The communists would nationalize all private enterprise; no, they would respect private enterprise. The government would evict non-Chinese; no, it would open up the immense China market. The Indians would become stateless; no, they would be given British passports; no, they would have to go home to Fiji or India.

  Amid the uncertainty, some traders left Hong Kong. They took their families back to Fiji or moved on to a third country; they shut down their businesses or sold them to others in the community. Hemesh and his family decided to stay. In the end, the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong meant only two concrete changes in their lives: they managed to obtain British passports, and their children had to learn written Chinese alongside English in school.

  Life in Hong Kong is all vertical, all about ascent. Its citizens live like birds, perched in the air high above the city. Even at the Central Library, where I went to look up statistics and histories of Indians in the colony, people stood in neat lines to enter the elevator, as if we were traveling up the Empire State Building instead of to the ninth-floor reference desk. One can buy anything in Hong Kong—a three-thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton purse at the most sumptuous of luxury malls, or a three-dollar version of the same item in the alley behind. Ensconced in small high-rise apartments packed with multiple generations of family members, my Hong Kong relatives seemed to have perfected the art of feathering their nests with all manner of comforts while also being always ready to fly.

  When I interviewed Hemesh, he was confident that the turnover had posed no problems for businessmen. But another threat was presenting itself: the emergence of Chinese capitalism. For a century, China's insularity and British efficiency had given Hong Kong traders a virtual monopoly on importing goods into China and exporting the products of Chinese factories to the world. Now China was opening up, as was evident a short boat ride away from Hong Kong, in the new city of Shenzhen. Once a tract of shrimp and litchi farms, Shenzhen had been transformed into a giant experiment with capitalism: a "free enterprise zone" with thousands of garment factories, silicon chip manufacturers, high-rise buildings, and, somewhat incongruously, three sprawling theme parks for tourists. International buyers no longer needed Hong Kong; they could now deal directly with factory owners in Shenzhen and other designated Chinese centers of industry. They could cut out the middleman.

  And then there was, for the Khatris, a social change. Once home to perhaps twenty-five families, enough to hold an annual festival and organize a soccer league for the men, Hong Kong by 2001 had only four Khatri families. I had met all of them at a Divali party at Hemesh's place the night before our interview; they barely filled the apartment. Some of the children were growing up with Chinese accents and almost no contact with their ancestral traditions. In the tiny apartments that are the lot of all but the wealthiest Hong Kongers, the Khatris' sense of isolation was growing. Hong Kong no longer felt like a frontier; it felt like exile. It was, for many of those who could manage it, time to move on.

  Chhiba Trading remains a remote outpost of our diaspora, tucked into a dead-end lane of shops displaying dried herbs and cheap leather goods. Within a few years of our interview, Hemesh had taken his family to Australia, though his father remained in Hong Kong to keep up the office. On the day I interviewed Hemesh there, several staff members, all Chinese, worked quietly at their desks. Hemesh explained that although he was fluent in Cantonese, most Chinese factory owners preferred to deal with other Chinese, so he employed some local "translators." On his desk were piles of papers and several varieties of batteries. He noticed my glance, and said, "These are for export to Africa." Oh? "Very cheap, but they only last a few hours. For Africa price matters more than quality. You couldn't sell these in America, but for Africa, they are the only ones."

  I asked a few more questions about the trade, and he warmed to his subject. Every three to four months he had to tour the African continent, checking on customers and the market, trying to collect payments amid the constant currency devaluations. Goods from China—not just batteries but cloth, household items, and anything else—were perfect because they could be provided as cheaply as Africans could afford to buy. "The thing about items going to Africa is, they will never sell in Europe or the States. Because for one thing they'll never pass the quality control; I mean, the example is the battery. If you want the price of a battery like this"—he held one up—"the first thing they'll ask you in China is, How long do you want it to run? And I can get you a battery at a price which says that if you run it continuously on this tape recorder"—he pointed to my hand-held machine—"it will run for only fifteen minutes. What is the value of that? In America you wouldn't even pay fifteen cents for a fifteen-minute battery, you'd go and complain that it didn't even work. In Africa, who's going to see about a complaint? You can sell them in bulk, so it works out."

  I looked at my tape recorder, and the pile of batteries on the desk, and the calm black eyes of the businessman-cousin in front of me: a s
eries of reflective surfaces, tiny mirrors whose messages I could not decipher.

  SOUTH AFRICA

  If Hemesh was trading with Africans at a cool and businesslike distance, my relatives in South Africa were encountering them up close, particularly since the end of apartheid. That intimacy has led them to numerous responses: racism, tension, fear, rage, emigration, attempts at re-segregation—and in some cases, compassion and hope.

  Outside Johannesburg, I met up with my second cousin Praveena. A single mother since her husband's suicide just after their daughter was born, Praveena is just a few years older than I am. I stayed with her family for a couple of days, and we were able to talk easily. Praveena was living with her parents, brother, and four-year-old daughter in Lenasia—"Land of the Asians," a formerly Indian-only suburb that, like the rest of the new South Africa, was in a period of transition. Many Indians were moving "up" to the formerly white areas. Black and "coloured" (South Africa's term for mixed-race) people were likewise moving "up" to the Indian areas. Most Indians were not pleased by these newcomers.

  Lenasia looked to me like any suburb in America, but with more barbed wire; security was one of South Africa's fastest-growing industries. Everyone I met was concerned about the growing crime rate. Everyone had experienced or heard of crimes that were shocking in their brutality, even allowing for some exaggeration: street muggings, carjackings, home break-ins, multiple rape-murders of whole families. While Indians had welcomed the end of apartheid, many were somewhere between ambivalent and fearful about black-majority rule.