Leaving India Read online

  The Temple of Justice turns out to be another of his old palaces, now repurposed as a courthouse. "Behind" means a neighborhood of gullies too narrow for our taxi to navigate. We transfer to a motorized ricksha to enter the maze, then stop and ask directions.

  "The house is closed," someone calls out. One old woman sitting on a porch directs us left; her companion, equally wizened, points right. A boy hops into our ricksha and takes us to a house where after some time a man comes out. The boy runs off, the man hops in, we go back past the old ladies, one shouts a friendly, "Told ya so, this way," and so it goes till we reach a low-ceilinged house where a girl opens the door and, hearing the name we ask for, nods.

  Inviting us in, she tells us the power has just gone out. Her father is not home right now, and he has the books. Still, she gestures for us to sit and wait, then withdraws behind a cotton curtain. We sit in the dim living room for several minutes, breathing deeply—a relief, after the ricksha's diesel fumes.

  When the girl returns from the back of the house, she brings her uncle: a slim man with a full mustache and a few days' growth of beard, wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and a blue satin dhoti wrapped around his legs. He greets us and introduces himself. The name we came with is his grandfather's; his father is also dead by now; but he and his cousin, the girl's father, are keepers of the tradition.

  To keep the records up to date, he explains, they—like their male ancestors before them—make their livelihood by traveling from town to town, recording new births, deaths, marriages, and sometimes emigrations, all for a fee. What they know of our community alone fills ten great books. He takes out another family's to show us what a book looks like: a huge, loose-bound sheaf twice as wide as an open newspaper, stained red at the edges. Upon closer examination, the stain turns out to be rows of red fingerprints, left by the powdery paste known as kanku with which the genealogists consecrate the pages during prayer. The oldest books are kept on bark.

  I have already seen some of the names in the books.

  In 1962, my father, a twenty-year-old amateur artist, drew a curving, flowering family tree. He was given the information by his father, who most likely purchased it from one of this genealogist's forefathers.

  At the top of my father's drawing are a few pieces of data from antiquity. Some are obsolete: a word that identifies us with one of the seven original branches of humanity at the time of Creation, the name of our family physician in ancient days. Others continue to have ritual or practical use:

  Kshatriya, our caste, places us among the warrior-kings who are generally considered to be second of four in the hierarchical Hindu caste system: lower than the priests, higher than the merchants and the laborers. No relative in living memory was actually a warrior or a king, yet this caste identity persists, and continues to be held with pride.

  Solanki is our branch or clan. This is a kind of subcaste or lineage: the group of people we think of as our close relatives, a cluster of Kshatriyas who live in certain villages—five villages, to be precise—and with whom we share rituals and sacraments. It is this group for whom Bimal Barot and his family serve as record-keepers.

  Our family goddess is Chaamundaa. To her we make offerings at weddings and births, that she might bring good fortune to all. Western books on Hinduism describe her as gory and gruesome: "emaciated body and shrunken belly showing the protruding ribs and veins, skull-garland ... bare teeth and sunken eyes with round projecting eye-balls, bald head with flames issuing from it..." But our goddess, at least the version represented by a statue in the village temple, is marble-skinned and rosy-cheeked, slightly plump and curvaceous in the manner of a maternal Marilyn Monroe. The benevolent smile she wears is, admittedly, at odds with the fearful scimitar and dagger she wields and the bloodied demon corpse at her feet.

  Below these basic bits of information, in the neat, curling letters of our language, my father has inked thirteen generations of male names. Naanji, at the tree's root, rises thickly into his lineage of sons who begat sons. Halfway up the page, the tree begins to branch. The most prolific limb is that of Narsai, my great-great-grandfather.

  I am interested in whether the genealogist has any further information about these ancestors. Any birth or death dates? Any tidbits on occupation, place of residence, fees paid? And—might the charts list the names of the women?

  "Possibly," he says politely, which also means possibly not. He regrets that our books are traveling with his cousin just now; but for three thousand rupees, or sixty dollars, they will hand-copy our genealogies and mail them to us.

  The price is steep in Indian terms, the result uncertain; but he knows we are from America. We will pay. Meanwhile, we sit in the half-dark of the power outage as he tells us older tales—muddled, mysterious, mythic.

  Once upon a time, he begins, the god Vishnu became furious.

  I am familiar with Vishnu; when I was thirteen, I impersonated him for a school presentation. Coached by my father and dressed by my mother, I arrived at my suburban Michigan high school festooned in blue, red, and gold silk, with thick bands of bells around my ankles. In the school library I sat cross-legged and explained "my" role as preserver of the universe, the member of the trinity who keeps everything going, maintains the status quo. I described, in some detail, "my" ten incarnations on earth—the giant fish who saved the world from the floods, the turtle, the boar, the lion-man, the strong dwarf, and so on—and fielded questions from white classmates who did not know the first thing about "me."

  The genealogist is speaking of Vishnu's sixth incarnation, a holy warrior whose mission was to eliminate all the other warriors on earth. Enraged by mankind's endless warfare and the arrogance of kings, this divine warrior slaughtered all of the world's Kshatriyas. When they sprang up again on the battlefield by means of miracles, he kept going. In the end he killed them off twenty-one times; apparently the twenty-first genocide did the trick. Then he turned their lands over to the priests and returned to his heavenly abode.

  But as any good Hindu knows, by the laws of karma you can never end killing by killing. After the slaughter, the priests had no way of defending their realms against either the demons who roamed the earth or the corruption in their own ranks. Without warriors, the earth was overtaken by sin. And the Earth herself, a goddess, begged for relief.

  The great sages decided to do what they could: pray. With their fingernails they dug a giant pit in which they lit a sacrificial fire. They begged the gods for new warriors to destroy the forces of evil, including a demonic she-buffalo who was terrorizing the land. By the power of their prayer, from the fire arose a fearsome divine being, never before seen on earth: Ardhanaarishvara.

  Here my father raises his hand for a pause, to translate the word.

  But I already know it. Ardhanaa, meaning half. Ishvara, meaning god or goddess—or, in this case, both. Divided down the middle, Ardhanaarishvara is half god and half goddess, portrayed in the full glory of divine femininity (one round breast, one curvy hip) and divine masculinity (half of a flat, muscular torso, one arm bearing a weapon). She/he is a sort of patron saint for India's eunuchs and has been claimed in recent years by gays and lesbians as well. Spiritually, Ardhanaarishvara symbolizes the union of opposites: male and female, certainly, but also effort and surrender, reason and faith, worldly joys and spiritual liberation. I have incarnated this deity as well, in a rather scandalous performance-art piece in front of hundreds—not suspecting that, if the genealogist is correct, she/he is my direct ancestor.

  In order to destroy the demons, Ardhanaarishvara created four great warriors to help. After the victory, these four propagated a new race of warriors and kings, repopulating the Kshatriya caste. One of the four, named Solanki, became a great king, head of his own tribe—our tribe.

  ***

  Listening, struggling to follow the complex narrative twists with an imperfect understanding of the language, I feel the nausea of my recent illness and the skepticism of my journalist self fade away. The poet-my
stic in me is captivated. Even as I enjoy the childlike comfort of storytime, I begin to sense that these odd, otherworldly stories may indeed be the ones I have come to find.

  The girl goes into the back room and brings out glasses of water, which we accept but dare not drink; our American stomachs are sensitive to anything but bottled water. The genealogist takes a sip, then continues.

  "The Solankis ruled for many years," he says. "And then, seventy-one generations ago, they were defeated."

  My father asks, "How many years is a generation?"

  The storyteller looks puzzled, shrugs. In those days people lived to be a hundred years old, so maybe three generations per century? Or four, five, six? He has never thought about it.

  In any case, our ancestors fled south. They took refuge at a hill fort named Champaner, not far from where we sit, a few hours by car. There they remained for some time—a generation, several?—until one Mahmud Saahib Begada attacked the town with a fierce and powerful army. At the most desperate moment of battle, our ancestors uttered prayers. Divine intervention came once again, in an odd form. The Goddess of Asafoetida—a spice—appeared before them.

  "Please help us," they begged her. The nature of her powers was unclear, but asafoetida is certainly an acquired taste and smell; perhaps they hoped she might smoke out their enemies with its pungent aroma.

  "Stop this fighting," she said.

  "But we are warriors," said they, who had sprung from the palm of a previous deity in order to do battle, and knew nothing else. "How will we live? What should we do?"

  The Goddess of Asafoetida replied in keeping with her domestic concerns. "Take up the craft of weaving," she said. "The sages have no cloth; they are forced to wear skins and leather, which is a sin. You must weave for them."

  And so the warriors became weavers: they laid down their arms and retreated farther south. The five royal Solanki brothers each settled in a different village, so our people became the Kshatriyas of the five villages. They retained a separate caste identity. Over generations, only the pronunciation changed slightly, to match the local dialect: instead of Kshatriyas, Khatris.

  For hundreds of years, nothing happened. Living quiet lives as weavers, they would wait out the centuries until the next great scattering—recorded in the genealogists' books not as myth or legend, but only as a series of emigrations, guided by forces nearly as mysterious as gods and demons.

  I spent the next few days trying to readjust to solid food, and to reconcile these stories with history. At first glance they resisted being placed in historical time; then again, the seventy-one generations and the place names seemed like tantalizing clues. My father and I visited the library for a history lesson.

  From the fragile pages of an old Gujarati text, my father read and translated aloud the history of the Solanki dynasty and the story of their origin in the sacrificial fire at the Lake of Nails. They were indeed great kings, reigning over a large swath of western India for almost three centuries, from 961 until 1242, when a rival tribe ousted them from their northern capital.

  I found no book, then or afterward, that told where the Solankis went next. But Fort Champaner was at the southern reaches of their realm, perhaps a logical place to retreat. And it was indeed sacked by one Mahmud Begada, in the year 1484.

  Two days later we visited Champaner, where we found nothing but a row of huts and stalls built along the ruins of an old fortress. Swarms of monkeys leapt about, chattering their own sharp-toothed explanations.

  I continued to research the dynasties and the fire-pit tribes, trying different timelines to see if "seventy-one generations ago" could be matched with any known dates involving the Solankis' loss of their kingdom. It couldn't, but my preoccupation with this math problem was curious. Surely it was a trivial item, a distraction from the overall story I was researching: that of how millions of Indians, including my relatives, had been leaving India and settling all over the world for the better part of two centuries.

  Indeed, the story of our diaspora sprawled around me. Every village we visited in Gujarat seemed to overflow with overseas visitors, who took up bed space in their relatives' homes, purchased heaps of fabric in the sari shops, and carried bottles of water with them everywhere. 'Twas the season of the NRI: the Non-Resident Indian, as we are known in India's bureaucratese. We NRIs tend to visit in December and January, when Western school holidays coincide with India's temperate season.

  Cloistered in libraries while my family joined the transcontinental shopping spree, I found to my pleasure that one of the Solanki queens had been named Minal-devi (Minal the goddess). Although I knew that my mother had named me after a friend, I felt a glimmer of—could it be?—pride, as if royal blood might indeed be flowing through my American veins.

  And immediately, also, shame. The caste system with its dirty logic and visible oppression was all too clear around me. How could I write the story of my family, whose very origin myth was grounded in caste pride and purity, without being complicit in this system of oppression?

  Months later, back home in California, a parcel came in the mail: a large pink piece of paper, poster-size, onto which had been copied a lineage. There were no female names, no birth or death dates. Indeed, only one date appeared on the whole page, at the very beginning of the family tree. It was the date that the first ancestor's name, Naanji, had been written in the books: A.D. 1765.

  It still didn't solve the math problem.

  There is no hard link between the medieval Solanki dynasty and my family. Between the last Solanki king's demise in the thirteenth century and our modern family tree's beginning is a gap of five centuries. Any vagabond tribe might have adopted the names and legends of its former rulers and over time created for itself a royal past.

  Colonial scholars, trying like me to make sense of such tales, speculated that just such a process was at the root of the fire-pit myth itself. Certain invaders or upstart clans, people whose caste origins were suspect, might have invented lineages for credibility's sake. By shoring up military victories with convenient links to ancient myth, their genealogists collaborated in investing might with a kind of divine right. Various British scholars guess the medieval Solankis to have been invaders from Bombay or modern Pakistan, or even "Scythian mercenaries." If so, it may be that the tradition of migration runs deeper in our blood than I had imagined.

  ***

  But as my father and I studied the histories that first afternoon in the Vadodara library, one name leapt from the brittle pages: Mulraaj, the first Solanki king.

  In every wedding in our clan, two small figures are shaped from soft clay—men on horseback, armed with swords—and placed on the altar. They are worshipped in a set of ceremonies whose details have traditionally been a closely guarded secret, shared only with immediate family members; even servants are typically sent out of the room. The small soldiers guard a tiny fortlike structure, also made of clay. And this diorama is known as Mulraaj.

  Until now, Mulraaj has been only a name, its origins lost in a fog of ritual, stripped—as ritual often is—of its root meanings. Perhaps, my father surmised, this is the old Solanki ancestor come to inhabit, briefly, our lives; to join the celebration and offer his blessings.

  If so, King Mulraaj must wonder at traveling so far from his realm. The miniature kings formed of village mud who blessed my great-grandparents' arranged marriages more than a century ago are kin to the ones formed of craft-store clay who blessed my cousin's love marriage to a Vietnamese American woman in the year 2001 in Ames, Iowa. And the progeny of Mulraaj, if that is who we are, are now spread around the world. Though we trace our roots to a tiny region in northwestern India, only one of my thirty-six cousins lives there today.

  The rest of us have spread out over five continents, in nine countries, to almost every time zone on the planet. The story of this scattering, and how it happened, is what I have set out to tell—not only for my family's sake, but as a window into the extraordinary narrative of India's diaspora, wh
ich is perhaps the fastest-growing dispersal of people in the world today.

  The Indian government, eager to market to our nostalgia via business investments, shopping, and tourism, has tried to estimate the numbers of Indians living abroad. The most recent approximate count is 11.5 million. And how many of us are seeking, studying, or shopping for some myth of our origins?

  The Lake of Nails, where Bimal Barot said our history began, has a real geographical location: in the modern state of Rajasthan, on the peak called Mount Abu. The lake is said to be the gigantic fire pit dug by the sages with their hands and filled in by rain after the supernatural battle. Nearby are two breathtaking marble temples, with room after room of carved deities and intricate archways, built during the long and architecturally prolific Solanki reign. Wandering the temples, I have trailed my fingers over the white marble goddesses carved into every nook from floor to ceiling. Walking the lake's shores, I have gazed into its murky, polluted waters, and wondered.

  Every dry season, I am told, the bottom of the lake shows the curving scoop marks of the sages' giant fingernails.