Free And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji

stuffed into our mouths did he give us the information we sought. The Khoja assistant headman, the kamadia, had his shop just across the road. He pointed it out.
    We proceeded there, where a man sat on the floor at the doorway; after a brief chat, the mukhi, the headman himself, came by cheerfully and took us to his home. There, after tea in a cluttered yard that was the site of a cottage industry, he said he wanted us tomeet someone special. Intrigued, we followed him to a rather dark room where we saw an intensely wrinkled and shrivelled old woman lying in her bed. She was “a hundred” years old. (The number, I discovered, was canonical in this part of India for very old people of indeterminate age.) Mongi Bai had been married to a trader from Dar es Salaam “during the war,” and returned home when he died. Prompted by her family, in her feeble voice as thin as the rustle of a dry leaf, Mongi Bai spoke the Swahili greeting “Jambo” to me, and I replied appropriately. It was a trivial occurrence in its way, in a small dark room at a sickbed, yet for me a thrilling moment of connection.
    The commercial nexus between the western coast of India and the eastern coast of Africa, part of the so-called Indian Ocean trade, is many centuries old. Portuguese sailors bound for India in the sixteenth century reported the presence of Indians and Indian ships in Kilwa, Mombasa, and Malindi. The ships hailed from the great port of Cambay (present-day Khambat in Gujarat) and took away gold, ivory, and wax in exchange for cotton, silk, and other products. Writes the Portuguese captain Duarte Barbosa, in his description of the East African and Malabar coasts circa 1500, “These ships of Cambay are so many and so large, and with so much merchandise, that it is terrible to think of so great an expenditure of cotton stuffs as they bring.” The thirteenth-century sun temple at Konark in eastern India has among its wall carvings (many of them erotic) one of a giraffe that the guides delight in pointing out: intriguing indication of the connection between India and East Africa.
    It was in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman moved the capital of his Indian Ocean dominion to Zanzibar, that Indian traders began arriving at the island and the mainland coast in larger numbers. By the middle of that centurythese Indians—who were from western Gujarat, specifically from the regions of Kutch and Kathiawad—had settled as traders in Zanzibar and ports along the coast from Lamu in the north to Kilwa and Lindi in the south. Most came as penniless young men from their drought-prone villages and remained modest, but a few grew in wealth and status to become merchant princes wielding spectacular influence, as chronicled by western visitors to the island. These men were, successively, Jairam Sewji, Ladha Damji, and Tharia Topan, all from the Bhatia caste of Kutch, to whose firms the sultans farmed out their customs collection and were often in debt.
    The Gujaratis who travelled and settled abroad, then, were traders; they preceded the white man in East Africa and were instrumental in the western exploration of the region. In Zanzibar, British, European, and American travellers would stop at the larger Indian businesses for their supplies before heading off on expeditions to the mainland interior, and—nobody likes a creditor—sometimes wrote about them in the most unflattering, Shylockian terms. Richard Burton, however, having spent time in India before arriving in Zanzibar, had a softer spot for them and treated them as familiars. Here is how he describes meeting one of the more prominent Kutchis of Zanzibar at the start of his East African Expedition in 1857:
    We then took refuge against the sun at the shed called Place of Customs, where we were duly welcomed, whilst cloves were being weighed by the slaves. The Collector of government dues was a nephew of Ladha Damha [Damji] … the head of some ten Bhattias: