A Place Within (41 page)

Alauddin Khilji himself never came to Gujarat, of course. But his name as the conqueror is still remembered seven hundred years on.

I come out of the temple hoping the best for my knees.

There is another small temple to Kali at the side of the main one. It is sacred to everyone, of course, but especially to the pavayas, the eunuchs. There are three of them about, calling to us, one of them slim, long-faced, and pretty, wearing a black dress patterned with yellow flowers and a stud in the nose; he seems about thirty. Of the other two, one seems fifty or thereabouts, says he came here forty-five years ago; and the third one is old and wrinkled, silent. If you give them money, they bless you to produce boys. These pavayas were presented to Kali, or the temple, as young boys, when the “call” came for them. The pretty one had no parents when called. Perhaps the boys are consecrated when they arrive, perhaps abused. They brazenly ask us for money, of course—it seems to be expected of them—in their typical teasing, mischievous manner. Give us some American or Japanese coins, the pretty one says, moving his head from side to side, flashing a smile, eyes atwinkle. This is their public life, a performance—calling out to the people, clapping hands sharply in the characteristic manner of their kind.

What usually gives pavayas away is the slightly overdressed and overmade-up look to them, the false jewellery. The younger one is dressed this way, but if I did not already know otherwise I would swear the older two were just ordinary women.

The story about this little temple (which is essentially a stall), through which an ancient tree grows, is that once in ancient times two local kings took vows that their expected children would be married to each other. Unfortunately both children were born girls. One of the kings decided to mislead the other and ever since her birth dressed his child as a boy. The wedding day approached. Someone discovered the groom’s secret and reported it to the bride’s father, whose wedding party then demanded that the purported boy be seen undressed before the ceremonies proceeded. Meanwhile the child, upon passing the site of the temple, where
there was a spring at the time, saw a bitch bathe in it and emerge a dog; a female horse similarly turned into a male one. And so the princess took a dip in the spring and came out a prince and was happily married.

Bhajans of the Kathiawari style blare out from speakers in the long line of stalls outside the temple gate; the food stalls display colourful mounds of gathias, jelebis, bhajias freshly removed from the fryers. We buy gathias for some children and an old woman and sit down and have our own meal. Then we depart, one Ashok Goswami blaring out of our tape deck.

The dhabas on the way are simple shacks with charpais in front to sit on, or sticky tables and wobbly chairs and benches inside. Outside, a standpipe sometimes for a wash, a car or truck parked. Tea is instantly made fresh on smoky stoves, with minimal tea and plenty of sugar. The fare consists of rich paranthas, vegetable curries, and here in Kathiawar, the specialty, looking so homely—the bajra (millet) roti, a thick, grey, and granular version of the usual refined wheat roti that only a Gujarati can consume. When I was young bajra roti (called rotlo, perhaps because of its masculine coarseness) was the poor man’s bread, which you had with a simple curry or even just yogurt. You could make a laddoo with it, after mixing it with green garlic and ghee, to have with yogurt. We did not like it. My mother would say that when she was little the wheat-flour white roti was so exceptional a treat in her home in Mombasa that the children, and they were plentiful, would cry out in joy when it was available. Now the grey, unwieldy bajra roti is a delicacy. The children still don’t like it. Here the dhaba serves it with an oily, spicy curry of a simple vegetable, eggplant or squash perhaps, and the local kadhi, the tangy curry made with mustard seed and yogurt, thickened with chickpea flour, which is drinkable and quite different from the dumpling-filled thick Punjabi karhi of the north.

As we approach Jamnagar we see devout-looking Muslim young men walking beside the road outside some of the towns, dressed in long white robes and caps, bearded, and holding Qurans or readers in their hands. I recall having been to a Khoja village outside Jamnagar some years before, and so we stop and ask some of these men if there are any Khojas in the area. We are outside a village called Dhroll, and the young men, returning from a Muslim school, a Dar-ul-ulum, tell us, yes, there are some Khojas here.

We turn in to Dhroll, a rather drab-looking place with broken dirt roads, garbage heaps, and very modest shops and houses. What do people do in such a place? They perhaps go to the city to work, or sell things from handcarts on the road; and they service local needs. We ask around about the Khojas and are pointed to a small paan stall. Again the simple trust, the familiarity. The young man behind the window treats us each to a paan at once and directs us up the busy street. People stop to gape at us. Finally we arrive at a small but busy shop selling small grocery items through the open front. We sit or stand outside and chat with the Khoja owner sitting on the ground at the doorway, who tells us there are some hundred people in the community here. Presently a man comes strolling by, having heard we are in the town. He is the local kamadia, the assistant Khoja headman, and he walks us to his home, which is reached through a small alley.

The front yard of the house is strewn with metal junk, car parts and the like, attended to by a young Muslim in a beard. Some substantial business evidently goes on here, explaining the high local status of the head of the house. But the house, a suite of rooms side by side, is modest and dark and cluttered. There are a few women about and a man. I am told that all the Khojas in the town are of the Somani clan. I recall that the name comes from the Sanskrit,
referring to the soma juice and also to the moon. A girl has recently got married, will soon be off to Kinshasa with her husband. Kinshasa, despite the bloody situation in the Congo, seems to be the new Eldorado, the frontier; people have also gone to Maputo, in Mozambique, and Kampala. All these places in Africa were recently devastated and are in need of small entrepreneurs. When I was in Nairobi once, I was told about such entrepreneurs, who were introducing simple items like soap in Uganda after the ravages of Idi Amin. A hundred years ago, Zanzibar was the Eldorado for enterprising Gujaratis from the peninsula escaping a dreadful famine; they went also to Mombasa, Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam. One of the women here is on a visit from the village of Khoja Gaum, which I now recognize as the town I had visited nine years before. It is on the other side of Jamnagar.

I am taken now inside a room to meet a hundred-year-old woman. The exact number of her years is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. She lies in her bed against a wall, a shrivelled little woman with a deeply worked small face, extremely fair. Ma’s brother died four months and a few days ago, I am told. Much to my astonishment, I am also informed she has been to Dar es Salaam, was in Zanzibar during the war, though she can’t tell me which one, and no one else knows. She returned here after her husband died. My hosts ask me to say something in the African language of “there,” to humour her, and to their delight I say, “
Jambo, Ma
,” a simple “How are you?” in Swahili. “Ma, did you hear him? Say something in reply,” the kamadia says. Remarkably, she’s heard me and answers faintly, with a surprised look on her face, “
Jambo
,” and explains to the others what it means. It’s made their day. After all the stories of Africa she must have told them, now an authentication, walked in from the blue—or the dust, as it were.

We depart for Jamnagar, walking through an ancient stone gate on the way that, we are told, partly crumbled in the earthquake of 2001.

A couple of years later I read in a history of Gujarat that this obscure little town of the Somanis was where in 1592 the last independent sultan of Gujarat, as a captive of the Mughals following a campaign of resistance, alighted from his horse, went behind a tree, and slit his own throat.

If Jamnagar was the Indian city name I heard most often as a child (besides Bombay) this is hardly surprising when I see it. Parts of it bear an uncanny resemblance to the Indian section of downtown Dar es Salaam when I was growing up. The low buildings, the tiled roofs on the older ones, the casement windows, the oil-painted green shutters and frames, the assorted shops—paan, snacks, tires, newspapers, a barber, a shoemaker. The names on the shops—Lakhani Shoes, Lalji Virji, Bhatia Stores, Rawji Jetha. And the easy pace of life in a city by the sea. All this is enough to make me nostalgic, imagine a boyhood here, traipsing off to school early in the morning, like the kids I now see on the sidewalks, or to khano in the evening. The only visible difference would be that I’d be swinging a satchel in my hand, while these kids carry backpacks. In Dar es Salaam, the buildings have been mostly torn down or reconstructed to produce ugly structures; streets are chaotic during the day and quiet at night. Here, before me, there is the typical Indian touch: bicycle and scooter, horse-drawn cart, Ambassador car, old bus, all in a row on the road. And in the manner of Indian cities, the streets are more chaotic at dusk, and brightly lit, when people come out to shop for groceries and other essentials.

The city was founded following a family feud in the royal house of Kutch, the region across the narrow strait from it. In 1535, Jam Rawal (“jam” meaning prince or king), having murdered an elder of the ruling clan, rather than fight his nephew (or cousin) who
had sought assistance from the Mughal viceroy in Ahmedabad, crossed the strait into Kathiawar. This, according to a history of Kutch by James Burns, first published in 1839 and reissued in 2004. Five years after the crossing, the Jam founded the city of Navanagar, meaning “New City,” which was renamed Jamnagar in the early twentieth century. The Jam, descended according to Burns from Rajput Muslims, though he was a Hindu, brought with him many families. This would explain why many people from this area, including my family, are bilingual, easily switching between Kutchi and Gujarati. Among the places conquered by the Jam was the town of Dhroll, which we visited on our way.

One of the greatest players ever of cricket was Ranjitsinhji (1872–1933), called Ranji, from Jamnagar’s royal house. Starting out as a student at Cambridge, he played for both England and Sussex, his career lasting from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It has been said, and often quoted, somewhat vaguely, that “when he batted, a strange light was seen for the first time on English fields.” The Ranji Trophy, much coveted in India, is named after him.

It turns out that the hotel owners where we are staying are Muslims whose family came over to Saurashtra, or Kathiawar, with the Jam, and they speak Kutchi at home. Not only that, they have run dhows between Gujarat and East Africa for many decades; the business is still in operation, though now they carry only cargo and use an engine as well as the usual sail.

The young man who speaks to us, together with his father in the office, is in his twenties and intelligent and eloquent. He offers to take us to look at an old dhow being repaired. After about half an hour’s drive, at a rather quiet part of the coast, we are welcomed by a short, dark, muscular man, with the weathered, scruffy face of an old sea dog. The dhow is nearby, and not very large. Painted black and white, with a gold streak, it stands propped up with logs on a patch of shore from where the sea water has been drained.
We follow the captain up a wooden ladder to the deck of the ship, clamber down into the hold. As we sit on makeshift benches, the captain orders tea, which comes in a kettle and is served black. The ship’s hull is in the process of being repaired with new wood. The front has been cut away, and the sides will be extended to lengthen the ship from roughly forty to sixty feet. Where we sit, the owner’s son tells us, is where the passengers would have been quartered for the duration of the voyage in olden times. The ship hands all speak Kutchi.

In such a dhow my paternal great-grandfather, Nanji Lalji, went to Mombasa, then proceeded to the interior of what is now Kenya. He settled in a trading village called Kibwezi and became the local mukhi. My maternal grandparents went to Zanzibar some years later. The journey would have taken about two weeks, and as far as I know, as for most other migrants, it was a one-way trip—though some men did return to marry, and they returned in style, newly wealthy. The old dhows were carried back and forth by the trade winds. The young man’s father told us that pot makers (the kumbhad) would depart with their clay pots in little boats and let the trade winds take them to the East African coast, where they would sell their wares and return to Gujarat when the winds reversed. But many of the kumbhad did emigrate, and in Dar es Salaam they had their own settlement, or wadi, where as children we would go and buy clay from them to make models for school projects. Some of their descendants are now mechanics.