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

spiritual liberation. I have incarnated this deity as well, in a rather scandalous performance-art piece in front of hundreds—not suspecting that, if the genealogist is correct, she/he is my direct ancestor.
    In order to destroy the demons, Ardhanaarishvara created four great warriors to help. After the victory, these four propagated a new race of warriors and kings, repopulating the Kshatriya caste. One of the four, named Solanki, became a great king, head of his own tribe—our tribe.
    ***
    Listening, struggling to follow the complex narrative twists with an imperfect understanding of the language, I feel the nausea of my recent illness and the skepticism of my journalist self fade away. The poet-mystic in me is captivated. Even as I enjoy the childlike comfort of storytime, I begin to sense that these odd, otherworldly stories may indeed be the ones I have come to find.
    The girl goes into the back room and brings out glasses of water, which we accept but dare not drink; our American stomachs are sensitive to anything but bottled water. The genealogist takes a sip, then continues.
    "The Solankis ruled for many years," he says. "And then, seventy-one generations ago, they were defeated."
    My father asks, "How many years is a generation?"
    The storyteller looks puzzled, shrugs. In those days people lived to be a hundred years old, so maybe three generations per century? Or four, five, six? He has never thought about it.
    In any case, our ancestors fled south. They took refuge at a hill fort named Champaner, not far from where we sit, a few hours by car. There they remained for some time—a generation, several?—until one Mahmud Saahib Begada attacked the town with a fierce and powerful army. At the most desperate moment of battle, our ancestors uttered prayers. Divine intervention came once again, in an odd form. The Goddess of Asafoetida—a spice—appeared before them.
    "Please help us," they begged her. The nature of her powers was unclear, but asafoetida is certainly an acquired taste and smell; perhaps they hoped she might smoke out their enemies with its pungent aroma.
    "Stop this fighting," she said.
    "But we are warriors," said they, who had sprung from the palm of a previous deity in order to do battle, and knew nothing else. "How will we live? What should we do?"
    The Goddess of Asafoetida replied in keeping with her domestic concerns. "Take up the craft of weaving," she said. "The sages have no cloth; they are forced to wear skins and leather, which is a sin. You must weave for them."
    And so the warriors became weavers: they laid down their arms and retreated farther south. The five royal Solanki brothers each settled in a different village, so our people became the Kshatriyas of the five villages. They retained a separate caste identity. Over generations, only the pronunciation changed slightly, to match the local dialect: instead of Kshatriyas,
Khatris.
    For hundreds of years, nothing happened. Living quiet lives as weavers, they would wait out the centuries until the next great scattering—recorded in the genealogists' books not as myth or legend, but only as a series of emigrations, guided by forces nearly as mysterious as gods and demons.

    I spent the next few days trying to readjust to solid food, and to reconcile these stories with history. At first glance they resisted being placed in historical time; then again, the seventy-one generations and the place names seemed like tantalizing clues. My father and I visited the library for a history lesson.
    From the fragile pages of an old Gujarati text, my father read and translated aloud the history of the Solanki dynasty and the story of their origin in the sacrificial fire at the Lake of Nails. They were indeed great kings, reigning over a large swath of western India for almost three centuries, from 961 until 1242, when a rival tribe ousted them from their northern capital.
    I found no book, then or afterward, that told where the Solankis went next. But