Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents Read Free

flowing robes, and horses kicking up dust. In this manner also, more pomp than substance, the maharaja ruled over the five villages where my ancestors lived.
    The Temple of Justice turns out to be another of his old palaces, now repurposed as a courthouse. "Behind" means a neighborhood of gullies too narrow for our taxi to navigate. We transfer to a motorized ricksha to enter the maze, then stop and ask directions.
    "The house is closed," someone calls out. One old woman sitting on a porch directs us left; her companion, equally wizened, points right. A boy hops into our ricksha and takes us to a house where after some time a man comes out. The boy runs off, the man hops in, we go back past the old ladies, one shouts a friendly, "Told ya so, this way," and so it goes till we reach a low-ceilinged house where a girl opens the door and, hearing the name we ask for, nods.
    Inviting us in, she tells us the power has just gone out. Her father is not home right now, and he has the books. Still, she gestures for us to sit and wait, then withdraws behind a cotton curtain. We sit in the dim living room for several minutes, breathing deeply—a relief, after the ricksha's diesel fumes.
    When the girl returns from the back of the house, she brings her uncle: a slim man with a full mustache and a few days' growth of beard, wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and a blue satin dhoti wrapped around his legs. He greets us and introduces himself. The name we came with is his grandfather's; his father is also dead by now; but he and his cousin, the girl's father, are keepers of the tradition.
    To keep the records up to date, he explains, they—like their male ancestors before them—make their livelihood by traveling from town to town, recording new births, deaths, marriages, and sometimes emigrations, all for a fee. What they know of our community alone fills ten great books. He takes out another family's to show us what a book looks like: a huge, loose-bound sheaf twice as wide as an open newspaper, stained red at the edges. Upon closer examination, the stain turns out to be rows of red fingerprints, left by the powdery paste known as
kanku
with which the genealogists consecrate the pages during prayer. The oldest books are kept on bark.

    I have already seen some of the names in the books.
    In 1962, my father, a twenty-year-old amateur artist, drew a curving, flowering family tree. He was given the information by his father, who most likely purchased it from one of this genealogist's forefathers.
    At the top of my father's drawing are a few pieces of data from antiquity. Some are obsolete: a word that identifies us with one of the seven original branches of humanity at the time of Creation, the name of our family physician in ancient days. Others continue to have ritual or practical use:
    Kshatriya,
our caste, places us among the warrior-kings who are generally considered to be second of four in the hierarchical Hindu caste system: lower than the priests, higher than the merchants and the laborers. No relative in living memory was actually a warrior or a king, yet this caste identity persists, and continues to be held with pride.
    Solanki
is our branch or clan. This is a kind of subcaste or lineage: the group of people we think of as our close relatives, a cluster of Kshatriyas who live in certain villages—five villages, to be precise—and with whom we share rituals and sacraments. It is this group for whom Bimal Barot and his family serve as record-keepers.
    Our family goddess is
Chaamundaa.
To her we make offerings at weddings and births, that she might bring good fortune to all. Western books on Hinduism describe her as gory and gruesome: "emaciated body and shrunken belly showing the protruding ribs and veins, skull-garland ... bare teeth and sunken eyes with round projecting eye-balls, bald head with flames issuing from it..." But our goddess, at least the version represented by a statue in the village temple, is marble-skinned and