A Life re-made…again and again

He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too.

These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History of Burning, made me stop reading. I thought how ‘traditional’ my family’s immigrant journey to America had been. For decades, the only Indian immigrants I knew or heard about came voluntarily – to study and going on to work in their chosen professions. Spouses and relatives followed when the appropriate visas were issued. But, none that I can recall stayed away from India for fifty years, for the rest of their life.

Spanning almost a century and four continents but, set mostly in colonial Kenya and Uganda, A History of Burning tells the story of an Indian family that took very different and mostly involuntary journeys to the west.

In 1898, thirteen-year old Pirbhai sits on a beach, tired and hungry. A merchant offers him work and a few coins for a meal. Pirbhai puts his thumbprint on a paper and the merchant says they will leave by boat that night. Pirbhai asks a cart driver to tell his mother and sister he has finally found work. “How proud they would be.” He would not see them or Gujarat again.

Like the many boys and men on the boat, Pirbhai didn’t know where they were going with the white ‘captains.’ Pirbhai watched many of his boat brothers get sick, be beaten, go mad or die. Those who survived the journey learned a new word for ‘land’ – Mombasa. They had left their villages because of drought and famine to find work. And work they did, to build a railroad to a place called Lake Victoria. The money they had hoped to send back to their families never materialized. Pirbhai carries the guilt of being duped by that merchant on the beach for the rest of his life. When selected by his white bosses to perform a special task, Pirbhai, wanting to prove his loyalty, clears land for the next stretch of track, even after realizing the huts are lived in, the homes of Kenyan families. While his friend begs him to run, to not do something so immoral, Pirbhai follows the order he’s been given. As he watches the first hut burn, he sees his mother, his sister, “…every detail he has grown up with, every part of his own.” He sees his own home in Gujarat burn.

Some seventy years later, Pirbhai, on his deathbed, tells this secret to his eldest granddaughter, ten-year old Latika, in whom he sees his young determined self. But first, he prepares her for another fire, his cremation.

“They turn the body into a fire. They burn it away until there’s no body left.”

“Can you imagine that? Everything inside that body, all its bones and memories erased.

All the stories. Its heart.”

Latika listens as Pirbhai tells her about that other fire, about his friend who had been brave enough to say no to the white bosses. The girl listens quietly but only asks if he’ll feel the fire when they burn him. He replies, “No…But I have felt it all my life.”

Structured so that each chapter is devoted to a character and a period of four to six years, A History of Burning covers four generations, starting with Pirbhai and his wife Sonal, whom he meets after he’s freed from the railroad. Sonal’s father, a merchant in Uganda, sets up Pirbhai to run one of his stores. Pirbhai eventually gets a government job and the security he had craved since leaving India. It’s as if to be employed by the British makes the brutality of his years in servitude worth it.

Pirbhai and Sonal have two daughters (who hardly figure in the book) and a son, Vinod, who dreams of going to India, to medical school, to make something of himself, but when he announces this to his parents, Pirbhai says he’s already found a job for Vinod. Vinod understands that though he may have wanted more than his parents could offer, his place would always be with his parents. Rajni, Vinod’s wife through an arranged marriage, is from Karachi. Her parents decide it’s safer for her to marry and move to Kenya than risk the dangerous journey to Gujarat in 1947 during the Partition of India. ‘In Kampala you will never have to fear going outside.’ Famous last words. Although it is her decision to marry Vinod and leave her family, Rajni resents ‘being sent’ to Africa, resentment which impacts how she raises her three daughters, Latika, Mayuri and Kiya. When their first daughter Latika is born, Rajni rejects her, thinking of her two young brothers who didn’t survive the journey from Karachi to Gujarat –

She hadn’t known she wanted a son until the girl was laid on her breast. Then it was clear. She had a daughter, and her brothers were gone.

Later, there is also the realization of her children being of East Africa, not India.

She realized her child would always know the language of this land better than she did. With this consciousness came a deep loneliness. Part of her child…would always be unknowable to her.

Part of me wondered if other India-born mothers think this about their children born in a foreign land. The other part just thought, this Rajni needs serious help and, poor Latika.

By the time their second daughter, Mayuri, is born, Vinod and Rajni have an apartment halfway up the hill in Kampala – a sign that Asians have risen in ‘class.’ British mansions are at the top of the hill, Asian flats halfway up and African shacks clustered at the base. Mayuri is bright and, encouraged by a British teacher, Mayuri plans to go to Europe or India for further studies. When the youngest daughter, Kiya, is born Uganda is changing.

The country was rearranging beneath their feet, along with the rest of the world. India had shown it was possible to wrest free of Britain’s grip, and the ripple had crossed the ocean.

Each generation in the family reacts differently to the political turmoil – Pirbhai’s allegiance is with the British. After all, it’s because of the British they could afford their home up the hill. He is sure that nothing will happen to them, until the family is kicked out of public garden by a white security guard. Sonal is just scared for her family and grandchildren – she’s seen too much change already. Vinod, born in Africa, having played and studied with white, brown and black children – he can understand the desire of Africans for self-rule. Rajni has seen ‘independence’ during the Partition. It’s nothing to celebrate and she doesn’t, when independence – uhuru – comes to Uganda in 1962. The daughters are too young to understand their lives are about to change.

After Pirbhai and Sonal have passed on, a handsome young student, Arun, moves in as a paying guest. Arun is a student activist at the university and from a wealthy family – factory owners who could pass as Britishers except for their brown skin. Arun is passionate about justice and independence for Ugandans. Latika, who plans to study journalism is smitten and sees her own freedom through Arun. Arun’s activism is short-lived after he is arrested during a protest. While still a believer, after he is released he just wants a quiet, simple life with Latika once they are married. Per Arun’s mother, tradition dictates Latika and Arun move into his parents’ house for one year. There, Latika finds Arun’s acceptance of the status quo and mama’s boy personality frustrating. She begins to write for an underground opposition newspaper using her in-laws’ African servants to send columns to Kampala. When Arun and Latika return to live next door to her parents, the three sisters each have their secrets. Mayuri thinks she likes girls, Latika has her underground articles and Kiya has a secret African boyfriend she plans to marry, plans that are interrupted when he joins the Ugandan army, the same army committing atrocities against Indians.

By 1972, when Uganda’s military ruler General Idi Amin announces Asians must leave within 90 days, Vinod has lost his job of 35 years due to ‘Africanization,’ Mayuri is in India at medical school, Arun’s parents have left for the UK, their factory seized. Atrocities, arrests and executions of Asians are now routine. Latika continues her columns as her family prepares to leave, even after a cease and desist order comes from the government, a letter she hides from Arun. Bolstered by the order (or delusional) Latika submits another piece to the underground newspaper –

From the letter she knew that she had accomplished something greater that she had imagined: the paper was being circulated, accessed by thousands. The regime controlled what the people read, but she could reach them another way. In the people’s eyes, she was seen.

Hours before she, Arun and the baby are to leave Uganda, soldiers raid their flat and drag Arun away, because surely it couldn’t have been the wife who had written the columns.

A month later, Arun is still missing, Vinod, Rajni and daughters are stateless but have gained entry to Canada as refugees. Latika refuses to leave Kampala, filled with guilt that Arun was taken instead of her. As her family is leaving for the airport, Latika gives her baby boy Hari to Rajni – take him to safety. Rajni takes Hari as the sisters scream for Latika to come with them. Rajni feels taking Hari is her second chance – she had not been a mother to Latika, she couldn’t save her little brothers in 1947, this she could do.

I couldn’t help wondering if Rajni would have done the same if the child had been another girl.

The last section of the book, 1974-1992 shows the family settled in Toronto in an apartment complex with other refugees and immigrants from around the world. Latika is a no longer mentioned – the family doesn’t know if she’s alive and have stopped asking about her. Hari is being raised as Vinod and Rajni’s son, not grandson; Kiya is sullen, rarely interacting with her parents but protective of Hari – she is now the eldest ‘sister.’ Mayuri has completed medical school and moves to Toronto after agreeing to marry a Canadian Indian immigrant. Rajni is starting over, again, this time as a nanny to a well-off white Canadian family; Vinod is working nights as a parking garage attendant. The couple seems closer even as their children have drifted away emotionally, blaming Rajni for leaving Latika behind. When Vinod finds a house in the suburbs, the family moves up (another move for Rajni). Vinod wants this home, roots, something he can pass on to his grandchildren. In Canada, the family faces racism again, albeit a more ‘nice’ Canadian form of othering. When the family receives a letter from Uganda telling them Latika was alive in Uganda for at least one year after the family left, their world is rocked again.

Latika had made her to way to London, accepting that Arun is dead. She finds her mother-in-law, who tells her Hari and her family live in Canada; it is up to Latika to contact them, if she wants. Sadly, there isn’t much space devoted to Latika in these chapters– after she, or her absence, looms so large in the lives of her family in Canada. She doesn’t want to be found, and then she does; she remembers her family but tells others she has no one. The last chapters move quickly with Hari, now a young adult, in discovering there was a third sister and that he is her son. Kiya, Mayuri and Hari bond as they tell him their family’s story.

All in all, the almost-100 years move quickly, each chapter jumps a few years in the first sections, with shorter leaps by the end of the book. Oddly, only two chapters are written as first person narratives ‘Latika, 1981’ and ‘Latika, 1986′. I had to check twice to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, I’m still not certain why just two and why those two.

After finishing another ‘epic saga’ I again wondered why there is a need to cram so much into one family’s life. Isn’t surviving boat journeys, fires, violence, political turmoil and being kicked out of one’s country enough? Would this book, this family, have been less interesting if, for example, Kiya had not gotten pregnant in Toronto or if Mayuri had not been gay, or if Vinod, finally enjoying his retirement, had not also had a stroke just before a protest march turns violent and their store is fire-bombed (while Hari is missing for hours having participated in said protest march)? Perhaps it’s literary-correctness – one gay sibling, one health crisis, one single mother sibling – check, check, check. If so, then these elements should not be glossed over. Take Rajni, who had berated Kiya in Uganda, screaming that her daughter is a prostitute for going around with an African boy. When the ‘prostitute’ daughter a few years later informs her parents she is going to have a baby and doesn’t know whose it is, all Vinod and Rajni say to each other is, they should have controlled Kiya more. Similarly, when Kunal, Mayuri’s husband, leaves her, Rajni encourages Mayuri to try harder to save the marriage. Mayuri says, twice, that she “can’t” love Kunal. I’m still not sure Rajni understood exactly what Mayuri meant. No matter, subject closed. There’s no coming out, no show of acceptance, no owning up by Mayuri for using Kunal to get a visa to Canada while pining for her girlfriend in Bombay, then avoiding her husband as long possible then having a child with him, giving the impression is all hunky-dory.

Actually, by the end of the book, I didn’t like the women in this story. From Sonal, the grandmother, then Rajni, to her daughters – each blamed their mothers or families for their woes, passing on hurt from generation to generation, with their hurtful choices. Then, some years later, each seems to come around – oh, now I understand why my mother did that! Even Latika, after leaving Uganda, thinks maybe Arun was right, that she had put her family at risk by continuing her underground activism in secret. (Ya think?). The men – they weren’t perfect but took responsibility for their decisions and seemed aware of their weaknesses, not punishing others, or their children.

Of course, racism and class are woven throughout the story, no generation escapes it. White skin against brown and black; brown skin against black, then black against brown. Rajni, in particular, seems to carry her biases to Canada. Being on the receiving end there, from her white employer and suburban neighbors, at times she seems genuinely confused, even indignant – what could they have against us? At other times, she feels the humiliation acutely.

The chapters detailing post-independence Uganda and the 90 days after Amin’s expulsion edict are harrowing in detail – the violence and indignities suffered by Asians at the hands of Amin’s goons, even as they waited in lines at the airport. I was in grade school when the evening news showed footage of people who looked like my parents – women in saris, men in overcoats – lined up on a tarmac, carrying children and handbags. Those images came back to me as I read Oza’s vivid descriptions. I also remembered weekly chats, decades later, with the young guy behind the counter where I rented Bollywood videos. When he said he had just become engaged I asked if the wedding would be in Gujarat or here in the US. He said he’d never been to India, why would the wedding be there? “I am Zambian.” Even now I can hear the mix of defiance (maybe) and pride (definitely) in his tone. “A History of Burning” is an important book, telling stories of a different and difficult immigrant experience, stories that need to be told.