Free Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala Page A

interests—opted to simply exclude all Asians.
    In 1913 Natal's legislators would adopt what was then known as the Australian system; they knew it as their own, and welcomed it home like a prodigal son. It allowed them to bar virtually every Indian immigrant. In the news reports of the day, one senses glee, pride, the thrill and relief of a hurdle overcome.
    At Ganda's arrival in 1905, the system was not yet airtight. Even so, every Indian immigrant had to fill out a simple standard form, take dictation of words of the officer's choice in English, and give prints of his fingers and thumb. Permits were being demanded from women and from boys under sixteen, who had previously been left unmolested. In some cases even infants were required to take out and pay for permits. Shipping companies who carried illegal immigrants were fined if they allowed "undesirables" off the ship. One shipmaster locked seventy-five passengers into the hold for three days, without food or water, because their papers were questionable; only a lawyer's intervention freed them.
    Unwanted, harassed, deterred, the Indians kept coming—exhibiting their own creativity. The man in charge of keeping them out complained that "Asiatic cunning" made his mission impossible. Indians slithered through his fingers, entered through neighboring countries, claimed distant relatives as their own siblings and children.
    His officers were kept busy. The Bombay–Durban steamer made one trip a month. Other ships came from Calcutta and Madras. And there were land routes, from elsewhere in South Africa, from Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), and from German South-West Africa (now Namibia). It was not easy to police so many borders.
    Ganda could have traveled by any of these routes. In the year of his journey, the main port of entry for Indians, Port Durban in the Colony of Natal, turned away half of the Indians arriving: 1,526 men, 18 women, and 49 children. And officials confiscated 225 forged documents, purchased on the black market in India. The crackdown would grow even more severe; in 1908, nearly six thousand Indians would be turned away.
    But by then Ganda was settled in Durban—having somehow given the authorities the slip.

    Durban: "a second-rate Bombay," one contemporary called it. Although Indians made up less than three percent of South Africa's population, segregation and internal travel restrictions confined them largely to the city of Durban and its outskirts. This unnatural concentration created what over Ganda's lifetime would become the largest "Little India" in the world: the Grey Street neighborhood.
    Here stood the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere, built from the profits of Gujarati traders. Colorful mounds of vegetables and spices—chili, cumin, coriander—filled the market stalls. Scribes stood ready to write letters home for the illiterate; Indian tailors made suits to measure; Indian jewelers offered real and faux gold trinkets for any budget. Many of the staples were imported from India: cooking oil, basmati rice, burlap sacks filled with the special flour for making
rotli,
the traditional round Gujarati flatbread. Luxury goods, too—insurance or waistcoats, Egyptian cigars, Turkish caps, Chinese silks, Persian rugs, tickets for trips on European steamers—could be bought within a block or two of Ganda's new domicile.
    Grey Street was named for Sir George Grey, onetime governor of the Cape. The neighborhood was developed during Queen Victoria's reign, its streets named for members of the royal family: Queen Street and Albert Street (for her husband); Victoria, Alice, Beatrice, and Lorne Streets (for her daughters); Prince Edward and Leopold Streets (for her sons); and even Louise Lane and Maud Lane (for her granddaughters). Once, it had been a white residential area.
    The land was marshy, though, and difficult for wagons to navigate. Gradually the whites moved on to more desirable neighborhoods. A group of Muslim storekeepers