A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  A group of girls climbs with us in the care of an uncle of sorts, who has a whistle and carries a staff for good measure. He is answering questions, doling out advice: “What side of the road do we stay on?” “The mountain side!” comes back the answer, in a chorus. He scolds mildly: “Then what are you doing on the other side?” The other side borders on a sheer drop. It seems that this chattering mob with its shrill whistle is intent on keeping pace with us, stopping to rest as we do, always disturbing our peace.

  “Already tired, Uncle?” a Marathi woman asks me jovially when I sit to catch my breath. As I search for an answer, she goes panting past, adding, “He’ll not admit it.”

  The refreshment stalls are beginning to open; people trudging up or having paused to rest, kids racing and noisy. The chattering troupe is still with us, their avuncular captain keeping up spirits with his endless advice. “Jai Girnar-ji,” chant the girls as instructed. Even the mountain is a god. Now there’s a relationship with nature.

  We keep going, along a steep, black mountainside—at times almost a vertical wall—zigzagging back and forth, and we wonder at the time taken, and the devotion, and the numbers it took, to carve out this stone path, as we look down the parapet from a landing into a dark abyss. The city lights appear in a broader expanse the higher up we go, forming a tender gauze of light spread over the dark countryside, and the road coming up to Girnar, through a pass between two hills, is a thin golden strand.

  We pause to take a long break and have a cuppa, the voices of our noisy companions disappearing above us, perhaps having attached themselves elsewhere. Starting again, we soon reach a complex of stone temples. Could this be the top, so soon? The heart leaps in anticipation. But it’s the Jain sanctuary, only halfway up; we are told we are too early, it will be open on our way down. Now we are onto another mountain face. The city lights show themselves in greater number, far below. Above us the bright stars, the Milky Way carelessly and lightly spilled, and we are headed directly for them at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Dawn has approached. On the side sometimes, on a ledge jutting out into open space, are the meagre signs of habitation—a mat—on which a yogi must have sat or slept, in the proverbial fashion. Plastic and foil litter some of the hillsides, and occasionally we see large numbers of discarded plastic slippers. Perhaps on the way down the pilgrims wish to carry the dust of this sacred mountain with them on their bare feet.

  Faces beam at you; the old struggle up with brave looks and pained smiles, the middle aged trudge along, the kids chatter incessantly. Some people carry staffs, and we already wish we had taken one each, to assist us on our climb, and also to make us look like real pilgrims. The mood is pleasant but not exactly jovial. The climb up Pavagadh was easier, gradual. This one takes an obvious toll.

  Finally we reach the first of the mountain’s several plateaus, where sits the goddess Amba’s temple. It’s a squat, dark stone building, with a modern, rather incongruous, tall white superstructure topped by a red flag. At a flat ground across from it, our former chattering companions have gathered with other school groups. It appears that the uncle with the whistle is a teacher, after all. One school group has come all the way from Navsari in south Gujarat.

  We keep going. A deep ravine separates this peak from the next, the highest one on the range, the steps towards it leading down, then dauntingly going back up. At the bottom, on a ridge between the two peaks, we pause to look upon a vast vista: the city, the highways, vehicles like pinpoints moving along them, the villages beyond. And then, finally, we are at the shrine of the famous yogi Gorakhnath, of kanphata (“torn-ear”) fame. The Kanphata Jogis are a well-known order of ascetics who split their ears for their large earrings to go through; they also blow horns at various times and put ashes on their forehead. Gorakhnath was their founding guru and he is supposed to have spent time at this peak on Girnar; here, apparently, the Sufi Baba Farid of Lahore, master of Nizamuddin of Delhi, came to visit him. The shrine consists of a small structure with a decorative tiled surface, beside a couple of flags and a bell, on a rock platform that looks out at the world below in all directions.

  And then, the sheer exhilaration on the way down. (There is a third plateau further up, beloved to Marathis, but we’ve had enough.) The feeling is one of triumph over the mountain and over the night. The morning is cool, pure, hazy. Going down looks easy, the breathing effortless. People whom we meet coming up need encouragement—“it’s only a short way, now”—and some of the older women look beat, taking time to collapse on the steps, but we know they will keep going, no one gives up. We pass the woman who had taunted me earlier, subdued now, slowly, silently climbing up. We stop at the Ambaji temple and pay our respects. The grumpy priests seem scornful of our stinginess, expecting donations of ghee and oil.

  Halfway down, we return to the Jain complex, a magnificent medieval site of grey stone temples, exquisitely carved. At the main entrance, crowded with worshippers, we are summarily told by a guard that only Jains can go in today, a ceremony is in progress. As we proceed down, disappointed, we pass numerous Jain men and women climbing up, some of them of them struggling in the growing heat, others carried up in hammocks dangling from poles supported on the shoulders of two men, one at either end, each bearing a thick staff for support. Every few yards they pause for a break. The passengers on these rocky rides must be prosperous, more often than not they are soft and flabby, and look embarrassed, avoiding your eye. It’s a somewhat pathetic sight. Yet it’s a pilgrimage, and some need to be carried and others to carry for money. The fare depends on the weight of the passenger and could amount to a few thousand rupees.

  By now our knees, thighs, calves can tell; going down may be easy on the lungs, but it’s painful on the leg muscles. My ebullient companion has to be cautioned twice when he almost slips, for the steps are smooth. An old Marwari man—proverbially miserly—receives a taunt from a stall keeper for quibbling about the price of a cup of tea. An old Marathi woman is hanging onto the side wall, smiling. “Far?” she asks. “You’ll reach there, Mother,” we tell her. And she has to go beyond where we turned back. A young man with a child passes us; he went up last night, spent the night at the Ambaji temple. “It was cold, but there were blankets.” A youth, a student from a middle-class family, is here because the exams are only a couple of weeks away. A girl, barely fourteen, is a porter and carries up her load painfully. A boy scarcely one hundred pounds does the same. This is how the dried milk for the tea, the ghee for frying, go up.

  Finally, 2000 steps left; 800; 500; 50. And we are home. As we stumble out the entranceway, rickshawallahs are ready to take us anywhere; a masseur is prepared to massage our legs. But we first plonk ourselves down at a stall and have two sugarcane juices each. Our driver finds us and convinces us that a massage is a good idea, and so we surrender to the able hands of the masseur, who knows where exactly on the calf to press and squeeze out the pain. The driver watches with satisfaction: clients of substance reflect well on him.

  Back on the streets of Junagadh. We have been told that there are some Khojas doing business at the town’s vegetable market, and that’s where we proceed. The market is like any other: shady, damp, and cool inside, rows of raised stalls selling carrots, spinach, tomatoes, squash, among a dozen other vegetables, sellers calling out; bustling activity on the aisles. A consignment of red chillies is the focus of attention. Several Khoja men are pointed out to us, young and old—all very busy, unpacking, arranging, selling, hurrying between stalls—one with the surname Kutchi, though he claims he does not speak the language, then proceeds to do exactly that with his relations. He escorts me up the road to the khano: a broad, one-storey building with a tall, narrow, and handsome section of the front set off emblematically at one end. There is a large arched entrance here, with a blue door that is closed; but it has a smaller door that opens.

  I take off my shoes, go upstairs. Some repairs are in progress; the mukhi, who is present and supervising the work, tells me that
the damage was incurred in the earthquake of a few years before. While being repaired, the place is also being modernized. We are on an upstairs terrace, at one end of which is an office, traditionally called the daftari. It has a large desk, behind which sits a woman; there are cabinets and shelves; a ceiling fan is on. There is a similar office in Dar es Salaam, another one in Nairobi. A visitor could go there and make inquiries about the local “vata-varan,” the situation, and about relatives; he might even meet the marriage committee. Here I have a friendly chat with the woman, and with a man sitting to one side of the desk, evidently here to chat. There are always those, too, people who come by to pass the time, have a cup of tea. And once again, the trust, the comfort. My manner, my way of speaking, what I say, completely identifies me. And so I take the only chair, my friends stand. They are the outsiders. We too are given tea.

  I tell the woman I am looking for a place called Gadhada, where my ancestor came from. This does not surprise her; others have come by with similar requests. This must be Gir Gadhada, she says; the other Gadhada is Swami na Gadhada, where the Swami Narayan people have their headquarters.

  I learn that there is a community policy to move from villages to larger centres, for social reasons like marriages, for educational opportunities, and for safety. There is also a trend for young men to go away to Kinshasa, exactly what I was told in Dhroll, which I think of now as Somani Town. These young men set themselves up overseas and return like big shots, the woman says; but they also send for other youths from the area and employ them. History repeating itself, for this is exactly what the people who left a hundred or more years ago for Zanzibar and Mombasa did, though the east coast of Africa was not a desperate place, as the Congo is now. In Zanzibar and Mombasa, communities were established, traditions preserved and developed, generations progressed. These new entrepreneurs will probably head off somewhere else from Africa.

  Gir Gadhada, my ancestor Nanji Lalji’s birthplace, is near a town called Una, which is where we proceed. The woman says she will make a phone call about us to the office in Una, where there is a khano.

  In Una, a market centre for the local villages, it is easy to find the local Khojas. We ask for the khano at a shop, are pointed to a boy selling fruit at a stand. He is the mukhi’s brother’s son, a young man who has just finished school, he informs us, after the initial greetings. Behind him is the mukhi’s fruit and vegetable store. The young man tells us to go straight, turn right, then right again at the “vadalo,” which turns out to be a large banyan tree.

  The mukhi’s house is across from the khano, which is represented as elsewhere by a large gate. A quiet place, closed, unprepossessing. There is an entrance across the street that leads into a yard, at the end of which is the open door to the mukhi’s house. We have disturbed his siesta, and he doesn’t look very happy, the first time I have seen such a reaction from a Gujarati Khoja, let alone a mukhi. There is a daughter of about eighteen around, the mukhi himself is seated on a chair. The house looks prosperous, a new-looking television on a stand is showing a movie. We are given tea and uncomfortably try to make conversation. Yes, he says, there is a village called Gadhada…Very soon a well-dressed young man in his twenties arrives and rescues us from our ordeal; he is the local Khoja administrator contacted by the woman in Junagadh regarding my inquiries concerning Nanji Lalji Bhimani. This is a good pretext for departure and we hasten out with the young man to his office.

  He opens the khano gate and we enter a paved courtyard above which stands a quite magnificent structure. Not the Taj Mahal, of course, we are in a village. But the contrast with the outside, and with the house we have just departed, is striking. It is a tall, two-storey building, with arched doorways and decorative details. There are two flights of stairs, one for the men, the other for the women. We take the former to the second floor, where the congregation hall is, as well as the office.

  The young man tells me, when we are alone in the office (my two companions, “outsiders,” are waiting downstairs), that he has taken a census of the community in the region. He shows me his results, tabulated in a ledger-style book: names, numbers of persons in each family, levels of education. A full report on each family, the last names, I notice, all with the typical ending,–ani. He travels by motorbike regularly to the villages, collects his data in Gujarati and enters it into a computer, also in Gujarati. His salary is three thousand rupees and is hardly enough; in Bombay, he is aware, the salary is five times as much for the same job. He has a wife, and a child in nursery school. He confirms that Khojas are moving to the larger centres, and that many young men are going to Africa. He has his own passport prepared. I ask him about the recent violence. He says Khojas were spared personal attacks, but property was burnt down. A Khoja boy was surrounded at a bus station by a mob. But they spared him when he identified himself as a Khoja, walking him home just to make sure he was who he said he was. In the Muslim area two Hindus were killed. But, he is convinced, as are many in Gujarat, that there is an active campaign to keep the Muslims economically backward. After every so-called riot they are set back.

  He comes with us to Gir Gadhada, leading the way on his motorbike with us following in our taxi.

  We arrive at a large, rather messy-looking village: untidy narrow dirt roads, abandoned dwellings. There are a cobbler shop, two tailors, some clothing stores, a barber, a provision store. The khano has been recently closed, the blue door firmly padlocked. It seems to be a large building. There are one or two Khoja families around, including one with a provision store, attended by a young woman. We inquire about local history at a few shops and are directed to the home of someone called Baap Bhai, a turbaned, mustachioed man—at not much more than sixty hardly the aged person we expect, but very much with the bearing of a chief. We are in a courtyard, entered from the street, and there are two women about, one of whom is Baap Bhai’s mother. There is a low bench-swing on the verandah, on which, at his invitation, I come and sit next to him. He can’t tell me much except that this was a Khoja village once. The village accent is caustic, and the speech fast, not so easy to follow, but his manner is kindly. His people, the Vanyas, had come later and been welcomed, he says. When he was young he had heard of a place called Nanji Khoja’s house, from where, presumably, this Nanji Khoja had departed. He could tell the history of his own community up to ten generations, but how could he tell mine? he asks. Why, I ask myself, could my people not preserve records like their neighbours did? Could it be due to the initial conversion, the first exile, as I see it, then the consequent uncertainties? I can hardly assume that Nanji Khoja was my ancestor Nanji Lalji; perhaps he was, perhaps not. But that Nanji and Vassanji are Khoja names in this village does not lack significance. Gujarati names are regional, communal, generational.

  It pleases Baap Bhai no end that I have returned to the village of my ancestors. After tea and water, we go to what looks like a square or crossroads and sit down outside a shop, on chairs brought out for us. People gather, drawn to the strangers. Kids play around. A bearded man in a green shirt goes inside his house, returns wearing a new white shirt for the benefit of the camera. There is talk of Nanji Khoja: people point to where the shop had been, but are vague. Nobody seems to know exactly. The village had been smaller once, and all the Khojas, it appears, had farmed and run shops.

  There is no Kunta Kinte moment; I did not come looking for one. If there ever was one close to it, it was when I first stepped on Indian soil, undertook that quick tour of the country that began with a train ride, the Puri Express.

  It is dusk when we return to Una, which, like all Indian towns at night, thrums with busy life—noisy, dusty, brilliantly lit, people out to buy their necessities. We pause at a food stand for a meal. The khano is in progress; something is being sung that we can hear all the way down here, and it sounds nice, but I can’t recognize it. We have omelettes and scrambled eggs made for us by a Makran—a Baluchi whose family came here some generations back. His way of making scrambled eggs is to put o
il and onions into his large pan, throw in red chili powder and salt to create a stinging mist, to which he is immune, then add more spices and mix them in before adding a whole egg and scrambling it. The omelettes are cooked similarly.

  We depart for Baroda via Bhavnagar on the coastal road. Our young driver, who may soon be off to Dar es Salaam, is as reckless as ever, the music on his tape a hip, modern mix, very much popular with the young, though he does not realize that its main refrain is a line from a well-known Sufi qawali, an ode to Imam Ali. The night is thick and dark, lit periodically by lonely roadside shrines to Shiva awaiting the upcoming festival of Shivratri.

  During this trip, while asking for directions, I have learned a new Indian English expression, “road to road,” meaning a direct route, one road leading to another, more or less.

  More Road-to-Road: Gujarati Fragments

  THERE ARE THE OTHER PLACES in Gujarat that I passed through, or stopped at, or visited briefly out of curiosity or whim, all memorable nevertheless, some intriguing, some literally wonderful; and there are the people who touched my life momentarily, the driver, the greengrocer, the priest, the doctor. Places and people that would make a much longer narrative, but I turn away from them reluctantly and move on in this madness that has become the endless quest for a place.