“I want to show you something,” I say, taking out a book of Bene Israel history from my bag. “Do you know these people?” I show him the picture of two women sitting on an old oil press, with two bullocks in the background.
“Mustt!” David says—“Wow!”—shaking his head in astonishment. “She is our cousin! She has gone to Israel. This one, too, she has gone to Israel. We have not seen them in so long, and now they are in a book? Mustt. Where did the book come from, from Bombay?”
“No, from America,” I say.
“Amreeka se?” he says, surprised. “Mustt.”
David calls his wife to come and see the photograph, and she walks slowly out of one of the buildings, scratching her head and looking annoyed. Her hair is slightly unkempt, as if she must have been taking an afternoon nap. David quickly explains who we are and that we have brought a book about the Bene Israel all the way from America, a book that has their cousin in it. Mrs. Waskar looks at the photograph, then at us, in astonishment. She turns the book over and looks at the spine, marveling at it and talking rapidly, her voice rising. The younger women of the house, the wives of the two Waskar sons, come into the courtyard to see what all the fuss is about. The two women appear to be about the same age, in their mid-twenties, and are dressed in floral-print housedresses. One woman is lean, with a handsome, kind face. The other is shorter, with rounder, softer features and a quick smile.
“What’s happening?” says the shorter one, tucking Baby Israel under one arm.
Mrs. Waskar passes them the book, and each looks at the picture, pointing to the page and presumably talking about the two women in the photograph. Ellis, David’s other son, ambles up the path to find the group gathered around the book. He is stockier than his brother Benjamin, and slightly less interested in the book, but he dutifully looks at the picture and at us and nods his greeting.
“Do you still press oil in this way?” Rekhev asks.
“This part is the same,” David says, pointing to the base of the press, a round drum. “But we no longer use the bulls to turn the press.”
“How do you turn it now?”
David raises his eyebrows and wiggles his head from side to side.
“Yeh mechanic hain,” he says proudly. “It’s mechanic.”
David leads us inside one of the buildings. It is a small, dark space with a packed mud floor and a thatched roof. The oil press sits in one corner of the room, flanked by an antique-looking rocking chair and bales of hay. The press is a large, mysterious-looking object that consists of a deep tray filled with seeds and a log protruding from the center of the tray, which is rotated by a motor to mash the seeds.
“How does it work?” I ask, and just then a bare bulb above our heads turns on, seemingly of its own volition.
“The electricity has started again!” David exclaims suddenly. “Come, I’ll show you how we make oil.”
David turns a switch on the wall, and the press lurches into motion. The log begins to turn in circles, pressing seeds against the walls of the container and making a brown mash. David squats and jams a stick repeatedly in a hole at the base of the press to free the passage of debris and make way for the oil. Once the passage is clear, a thick, opaque beige liquid is expressed and collected in a tin receptacle. Later, he tells us, this liquid will be strained and refined before being sold.
I take some pictures of the oil press and shoot some video of David making oil.
“How long have you been making this oil?” I ask him.
“My father, and his father, and his father before him. Jews have made this oil as long as we have been in India. Teli means ‘oil presser.’ Shaniwar means ‘Saturday.’ The local people used to call us “Saturday Oil Pressers,” the oil pressers who did not work on Saturday. This is an old story,” he says, shaking his head. “I have become an old man listening to old men tell this story. . . . Now we’re the only ones left who know how to make oil in this way. After my sons, I don’t think anyone else will do it. My sons don’t want to teach their children to make it.”
“Why is that?” Rekhev asks.
“College!” David says in a booming voice. “They want college for their children, to go to Israel when they are grown.” He wags his head back and forth to emphasize his point, and returns his attention to the press, gathering fistfuls of the mashed-up seeds in his hand and throwing them into the center of the well to be crushed again.
“How many books have I read?” David asks me, as if I am being quizzed. “Two books,” David says, smiling. “I’m not literate; I didn’t have money to study.” David puts his hand on his head to mime wearing a hat. “Wear a cap, then go to study. Where was the money for the cap?” He laughs. “Even still, look what a life I have had. I have worked here, I have worked in Bombay. What times I have seen! I have good children. They work hard; whatever we make, we eat. We take care of the masjid, and Benjamin has learned some Hebrew. God has been kind to me. Come! Let’s have tea. I’ll tell you more.”
David nimbly gets up and walks outside to sit on a charpoy, a wooden-framed, string-laced bed heaped with old clothes, swooping down to place Baby Israel on his lap. He asks his wife to make tea.
“How long were you in Bombay?” Rekhev asks as we pull up two plastic chairs.
“I worked there nine years. I was a young man then. I made seven rupees a month, then fifteen rupees a month, and I would send it to my parents. They used to show it to everyone in the village, show them that their son had sent fifteen rupees. These are the kind of days I have gone through. . . .”
“Those days were good, or these days are good?” Rekhev asks.
“These days are good!” David says vehemently. “I earned little by little. Then I got married to my first wife. We didn’t have any children, so I married a second wife. Then both wives got children. What to do? I was already married to both.” David laughs at the thought. “Then we all lived together. Two sons have gone to Israel, two have stayed; my daughter is in Bombay. Most of the Jews have gone to Israel, only four or five of us are left in the area. There are five Jews in my village. In Chaul there is one man, and eight kilometers after that there is one man. We meet at Eid.”
“Rekhev, he said Eid?” I ask, surprised that he would use the Muslim name for the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. Rekhev asks him what he means and clarifies that David is using the term as a catchall for the High Holidays. Then he bursts into a long monologue about Muslims that I don’t understand.
“Now that so few Jews are left, will you stay here, or move to Israel?” Rekhev asks.
“Somehow, I have this feeling that we should stay here,” David says, looking at his compound. “If we go, who will take care of the masjid, of the graveyard? My first wife’s grave is there. I don’t want to leave her behind. Israel is my fatherland, but India is my motherland.”
“What about your grandchildren?” I ask, looking at Israel. “Will Israel stay in India, or will Israel move to Israel someday?”
David looks at Israel, who is staring up at him.
“If he wants to go he can go,” David says softly. “If he wants to stay he can stay.”
Israel grunts in response, and David laughs, bouncing him on his knee.
“Right? Let the people who want to go, go! You can stay here! With me!”
Mrs. Waskar brings us tea in three piping-hot chipped cups and hands David a plate with several tablets on it, which she instructs him to take.
He gives her a begrudging look and winks at us.
“My wife is trying to kill me with medicine!” he says, teasing her. “She complains about me, but she would be sad if I went before her, isn’t it!”
Mrs. Waskar shoots back a shrill retort in Marathi before returning to the kitchen. David winks at us conspiratorially.
“I ENJOYED THIS TRIP,” Rekhev says to me in the six-seater rickshaw back to Alibag at the end of the day. “It’s so different here from where I grew up; it’s as foreign for me as it is for
you. You’ve been invited back, by the way. In September. For some kind of festival. David was going on about some kind of hut they make, with lots of dancing and smashing of fruit.”
“Sukkot and Simchat Torah!” I say. “It must be. It’s the harvest time. Jews construct a sukkah, a temporary structure outside of their homes and synagogues, to commemorate the forty years the Jewish people spent wandering, and they spend time in it for seven days. Then, on Simchat Torah, there’s rejoicing in the synagogue, they celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. . . .” Suddenly it seems necessary that Rekhev come with me when I return to Revdanda; I can’t imagine coming back without him. “Will you come with me?”
Rekhev looks straight ahead, as if he is thinking over what I have suggested.
“I don’t think so,” he says. I feel a twinge of something, of disappointment.
“So what did he say about the Muslims?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
“Oh, it’s very interesting. It had nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—perhaps you thought it did.”
“I was wondering.”
“He seemed mostly unaware of it, in fact. No, his trouble with Muslims was some theory of his about how they marry their brothers’ children. According to him, it’s proper for a Bene Israel man to marry his father’s sister’s children, but not his father’s brother’s children. He got very upset about it. I’ve read some anthropology—kinship patterns and that sort of thing. It reminds me of that.”
“But that’s the reason he doesn’t like Muslims?” I ask. “It seems like there must be more to it.”
“Of course there is,” Rekhev says. “Sadia, the relationships between different communities in India, they’re not as simple as your family has made it seem to you growing up. I like your story, growing up with three religions, learning about these different paths. It’s a very American idea. But, frankly, I am closer to understanding David Waskar, who is from a region and a religion that is foreign to me. . . .” Rekhev gestures at the landscape outside the rickshaw. “I know nothing about Revdanda. But these prejudices, growing up with a fear of the man next to you, I understand that. I may have had Muslim friends as a child, I may have grown up with people of all castes and all communities, but when I used to come home from school at night my mother would get angry if she found out that I had eaten dinner in a class-mate’s home.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we are Brahmins. And that’s the way we were raised, to keep apart. Even now, that old bias stays with me. I don’t believe in it, but it’s ingrained in me somewhere. I have a very difficult time eating in friends’ homes. You and I, I’m not sure that we will ever be able to be friends, not in the way you want.”
“Why not?”
“You have an idea about India, you want to find something here that is going to make you more complete. Somehow, you’ve decided that I am a part of that plan, that I can teach you things. You have an idealized concept of friendship. I have no such illusions. The whole notion of your work here is predicated on the idea of a search. I don’t actually believe that you are searching.”
“Of course I am. . . .”
“I think that when you were growing up you were not actually very confused about who you were. But confusion is a natural impetus for a journey, and so you have entered a state of confusion. What you are seeking, in fact, is not greater clarity but greater disorder.”
I look out the window at the tall grasses whipping by our rickshaw, trying to figure out how to respond.
“Don’t you think that if I am compelled to take this journey—seeking disorder, as you say—then experiencing confusion is a necessary stage? If I am not here seeking something, some greater understanding, then why do you think I’m here?”
“It’s a surface understanding, what you want, and you’ll get it. You will work hard, and you will get these people to accept you, and you will photograph them and tell their story, and you will return to the world you came from and feel proud of yourself.”
“How can you say that?” I ask, feeling a sharp rise of anger. “You don’t know anything about me or the world I come from.”
“Perhaps not. But I know something. You will spend months and years unraveling the questions that you’ve muddled into here. Some of these questions you haven’t even formed yet; you cannot imagine them. There will come a time when you’ll want to do simpler work. You will feel this acutely, many times.”
“You’re telling me not to give up.”
“I’m telling you that something about your story, about your grandmother, affects me, and that is why, against my better judgment, I’m helping you. You are ambitious and you want to do good work. I like that.”
“So will you come back with me, to the harvest festival?” I ask, feeling bold.
Rekhev shuts his eyes for a moment.
“This is why I don’t make friends,” Rekhev says.
“Why?” I ask.
“People always leave. Books are much more reliable.”
17
JEWS AND INDIANS
BOMBAY, APRIL 2002
Magen David Synagogue of Byculla stands like a relic, a great, faded yellow old lady by the side of Sir J.J. Road. Built by the Baghdadi Jewish community leader David Sassoon in 1861, it was enlarged and renovated to accommodate the then thriving Jewish community of Baghdad, many of whom relocated to Bombay in the mid-nineteenth century. I have read about the difficult relationship between the Baghdadi community and the Bene Israel. In their early years in India, the Baghdadis, lighter in skin tone and more European in their manners, felt more culturally aligned with the British and distanced themselves from the Bene Israel. But in recent decades, as numbers in both communities have decreased, the gulf between them has diminished, and the two groups now share synagogues and celebrations.
I walk in the gate and look up at the Gothic structure, four frontal pillars holding up the edifice, supporting a long, tall spindle. It’s imposing and impressive. The interior of the synagogue is dark; the pews are covered in protective cloths, and the lights are off. I wonder if anyone is here.
“Who is it?” comes a woman’s voice from a side chamber of the synagogue, on my left.
I pass through a door and find an older woman fanning herself with a newspaper, her cheeks slick with sweat. She has pale pink skin and is wearing a flowered housedress that billows around her frame like a curtain, her remaining strands of white hair tied into a tight bun. She is surrounded by the sedentary layers of many years: stacks of books, folding chairs, old papers. Her cot is visible in the background, and I realize that this room might be her home. Perhaps I am intruding.
“Are you the caretaker here?”
“I am, by the grace of God,” she says. “Flora. Sit down, I can’t see you.”
I pull up a folding chair and bring it close to hers. She looks at me closely.
“You’ve come to see the synagogue?”
“I’d like to take some pictures, if I could.”
“You come from Israel? America?”
“America,” I tell her. “But my grandmother was a Bene Israel, from Bombay.”
“Ah, so you’ve come back. What was your grandmother’s name?”
“Rachel Jacobs. She was raised in Thane, Pune, then eventually here.”
“This was when, child?”
“This would have been in the thirties, the forties—before Partition.”
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