Minal Hajratwala set out to write a book about her family in one year. Seven years and many international miles later, she completed the task. Piecing together her memories and scattered partial records including horoscopes, postcards and photographs, and visiting across the globe with as many of her family members as she could, Hajratwala became an explorer, mapping both the outer and inner lives of a huge clan and, with them, her own.
Through the vast scope of this book and its particularities, we learn that Indians wherever they find themselves generally work hard. Leaving a harsh life of poverty in Gujerat, Hajratwala's grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles did not shrink from doing menial work that would have been considered undignified back home. They did not let anything stand in the way of their determination of furthering the aims of the extended family, even if it meant never seeing the family again --- husband leaving wife, children leaving parents. The author herself was an immigrant by age five, going with her family from New Zealand, which she thought of as home, to migrate to the U.S. to live among relatives she had never met before. She has close family in South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada.
One of the reasons for such far-flung upheavals was the British Empire and its ceaseless need for laborers to expand new colonial opportunities. Indian labor was shipped at a per head price to Fiji, to Africa, to anywhere it was required to keep the Empire humming. Once there, a laborer became attached to the new environment and, like Hajratwala's family, set up not one shop but many, built homes, developed neighborhoods and left a permanent mark on large communities. One of her relatives started as a tailor in Fiji and wound up owning one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific. Another, orphaned and sent to Durban when still a child, started with a tiny food stand and eventually established a centrally located restaurant and became known as the inventor of a "national" food delicacy. Hajratwala learned that the restaurant had been used as a meeting place by Nelson Mandela in his early activist days. Hajratwala's grandfather marched with Gandhi during the famous salt boycott, going to prison for his principles. As she retells these family legends, she reveals a sweeping historical panorama, a view of the Indian diaspora rarely seen in so many facets.
Hajratwala focuses closely on the lives of her ancestors but more so on the lives of people she has had a chance to visit and follow personally, such as her cousin Mala and Mala's husband Madhukant, a Fijian couple who applied to emigrate to the U.S. by lottery and won two of the small number of places sought after by thousands of Asians. Once there, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, both holding down as many as three jobs at a time. Both won employee awards at the fast food joints and parking garages where they found employment. They even tried motel work, one career that has been opened up to Asians largely through the machinations of people from Gujerat. In less than 50 years, a few southern Asian families have parlayed a willingness to do every task associated with motel management and a strong family support system into a remarkable monopoly of motel ownership across America. As Mala penetrated ever deeper into the American scene, she stopped wearing saris and willingly donned the scratchy uniforms required by her jobs at McDonald's and in a hospital. She considers her life in the complicated culture of America "freedom" compared to her youth spent in a traditional setting, under the thrall of a tyrannical mother-in-law.
The author also learned about freedom in America. From asserting her independence as a college student by traveling far from her Michigan home to Stanford University, to dabbling in the heady vapors of feminism, to the conviction that she is a lesbian, she made departures from her heritage, even refusing marriage, a shock to her tradition-minded parents. But each "departure" was a journey to somewhere else, in that way asserting her inner bond with the diaspora.
"Every migrant," Hajratwala writes, "constructs, or spends her life seeking, a new definition of home." She has found her home on what she calls her "queer planet" --- but she has the comfort that she is never far from her family and her heritage. As she has followed it, it follows her, all over the world.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
