Finding lines in the sand

Title: Leaving India: My Family’s  Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents
Author: Minal Hajratwala
Published by: Tranquebar Press
Price: Rs595      
Rating: **1/2

After you spend years roaming the world and interviewing your relatives, putting out the experiences in a tome might risk them being fraught with monotony in theme. But not for author Minal Hajratwala who sought to delve into India’s ancestral villages tracing her family’s moves into bigger world cities and providing a detailed and interesting account of the same.

History, naturally, comes pouring into the book. The reader learns that Hajratwala’s family comes from the Solanki dynasty of warrior kings who ruled over Western India. When a goddess advised her clan to put down their arms, they were reduced to becoming weavers and move into little villages in Gujarat, “until the next great scattering . . . by forces nearly as mysterious as gods and demons.”

And that one big force is the British Empire. It was a time dotted by the cotton boom and followed the drought that urged people to sail to newer lands to seek out their luck. One of them being her great-grandfather Motiram, who went to the Fiji Islands and made it big from a little tailor shop that grew into a department store and later turned into a retail giant.

A few pages on, you also have another of her relatives, this time a great-great uncle, Ganda, who ran an eatery in Durban and served curries in hollowed-out loaves of bread, a dish that famously came to be called ‘bunny chow’.

As Hajratwala’s characters seek and find their own way in life, one finds them interestingly interspersed with the times. Perhaps more than all that, the lyrical narrative questions what led her family like so many countless others — to become immigrants from India. An interesting read.