The covenant - James A. Michener [568]
'Gommint policy,' Desai said. 'All Indians to get out of Johannesburg.'
'You think they'll move us miles out in the country, like they say?'
'Look, Barney. Mukerjee told me yesterday the surveyors were out there, laying out streets.'
'Who can believe Mukerjee?'
'Well, he kept warning us that one day Sophiatown would be knocked down. Then I laughed. Today I believe.'
'But blacks are different from Indians. There are so many of them. So few of us.'
'Numbers mean nothing to apartheid. It's only interested in color. Today it hates this black spot. Tomorrow it'll be a brown spot, and off we go-'
'But Kruger's gommint gave us the land we have. I own my land.'
'Yes, they put us there for what they called "sanitary" reasons. Today their grandsons will kick us out for economic reasons. Believe me, Barney, the bulldozers will come down our streets, too.'
They stood in silence, watching the destruction, marking the exodus of black families, and as they knew themselves to be powerless to protest this brutal maneuver, they thought back upon their own curious history in this fertile land.
Woodrow Desai's grandfather had been one of the three Desai brothers shipped to the sugar fields by Sir Richard Saltwood. When their contracts had been worked out, they had stayed on and were soon joined by 'passenger Indians' like the Patels, who had paid their own way to serve the rapidly growing community as shopkeepers and traders.
The Indian immigrants settled mostly in Natal, near the port of Durban, and there they proliferated: Patels, Desais, Mukerjees, Bannarjees. Unlike the Dutch before them and the Chinese, the Indian men would have nothing to do with black women, or white either, for that matter. They remained strictly aloof, and in the first forty years of their work in mine and field, few Indians married persons of another race. Woodrow's father and others moved to the Transvaal, and in the smallest towns they opened shops to which all customers were invited, but in their homes they kept to themselves, with their dishes of ghee and lamb and rice and curry. They were clean, usually law-abiding, and the other people of South Africa hated them.
'Without the little one,' Patel reflected, 'Indians would have been in even worse shape.'
The little one was a skinny lawyer with a high whining voice who emigrated to Durban in 1893. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, intelligent enough to have made a good life for himself in South Africa had he been free to operate there. Indeed, when he arrived at age twenty-four he intended to remain, but the disadvantages which Indians suffered so irritated him that he found himself constantly at war with the authorities.
'He was a fighter,' Desai mumbled, recalling this contentious man who had defied the entire white establishment.
'And clever too,' Patel said admiringly. 'When the Boer War was at its worst, what does he do? Organizes an Indian ambulance corps. Helps the English, even though they've been harrying him. Very brave, you know.' He chuckled to think of little Gandhi issuing orders to the white government.
'My father knew him well,' Desai said. 'But Father was much like me. Never wanted trouble. So when Gandhi started sending letters to General Smuts, like he was head of an Indian gommint, my father warned him: "You watch out, Mohandas. Gommint's going to throw you in jail." That was when he invented Satyagraha, right here in South Africa.'
'If he were watching this disgrace now, he'd do the same for the blacks as he did for us. Peaceful resistance. Just lie down in front of the bulldozers.' 'The bulldozers in India were British. They stopped. These are Afrikaner bulldozers and I don't think they'd stop. Not even for Gandhi.'
I love him,' Patel said. 'Not for what he did in India. For what he did here.' He paused and shook his head. 'I often wonder what might