Under the Shade of an Amli Tree Amongst Beautiful Souls:
Gratitude for My Childhood in an Indian Village
Approximately 14 billion years ago with the sound of AUM (OM), the universe and its billions of galaxies came into being. Our galaxy is known as the Milky Way with its approximately one billion stars, including our star, the Sun, with its nine planets rotating around it at tremendous speeds for about four to five billion years. Our planet is called Mother Earth and the life on it came into being approximately 100 million years ago, growing from a single cell amoeba into the complex entities we call “human beings.” Since then, an estimated 70 billion human souls have come and gone on this earth including those of our very close relatives.
I have always wondered how my soul knew to seek out such a loving and compassionate family within such a vast universe and how it set about finding the answer to this yearning a few hundred kilometres north of Mumbai, India, in a coastal region in the state of Gujarat, in the town of Dhamdachha, in the small orchard farming community of Doriyavadi, which, in the year of my birth in 1946, had a small population of less than one hundred other souls.
So began our family story of souls with like samskaras and shared journeys. Our father’s name was Bhimbhai (whom we called ‘Nana’ as he was a younger brother) and our beloved mother’s name was Rami. My memories of my parents are precious but unfortunately very limited, for by the time as I was 13 years old, we had lost my mother, and by the time I was 21 years old, my father. But I recall that our parents were pious souls. My mother Rami had so much love and compassion that she did not see any difference between Hindus and Muslims or between those of the so-called ‘untouchable’ caste and others in our town.
We were a family of five brothers and five sisters and all were good souls then and remain so to this day. My other siblings have written in detail about our carefree and magnificent childhood. I was number 9 in the pack, and my youngest sibling, Dilip, was number 10; I was dubbed ‘Bhulo’ (ભૂલો), likely because I was forgetful, and my younger brother was nicknamed ‘Galo’ (ગલો). With only two years difference between us, we were a tremendous ‘jodi’ (જોડી) in town as we were always together. I was the more emotional one and my brother always seemed to have so much joy about life. Of my older sisters, I unfortunately remember much less, except that I always seemed to be thirty and they were always there to provide some water for me (“બુલીય ને પાણી આપો”), for which I was always so grateful.
So many other relatives visited us at every vacation that my childhood memories are not only of my brothers and sisters, and later their children, but of all of our aunts and uncles and cousins and other relations. Our sheer numbers, boosted by our beloved farm workers, alone generated so much fun growing up, that it sometimes seemed as if we played an everlasting game of cricket under the shade of a giant, loving Amli tree as we always had more souls than needed to form the requisite teams.
One story in particular stands out to me as being emblematic of how much love these souls had for each other, which was told to us by our father, Nana, about his Pitrakaka named Harikaka. A powerfully built farmer, Harikaka was much older than our father and his brother, our uncle Gulabkaka. One day, when a tremendous flood flowed from our Ambika river, the trio found themselves caught while crossing it and were in fear for their very lives. The younger boys clung to Harikaka’s shoulders as he dog paddled to shore and saved their lives. Such was the power of the stories that I was told as a child that years later, as a sometimes homesick young university student in America, the trio’s watery image came to my mind as a television relayed the story of JFK’s heroic efforts to tow his fellow marines to safety after their patrol boat PT-109 was torpedoed in WWII. Harikaka had unconditional love, and I now realize that if it were not for him, I would not be here writing about the lives of the souls that followed his in our family line.
Another detail I recall is that my father, Nana, and his brother, Gulabkaka, constantly had ‘Gula’ fights; however, at the end of each, they would go out together as if nothing untoward had happened, something that would continuously astound our neighbours. But both brothers, for all their quarrelling, had unconditional love for each other and cared for each other.
So how did I come to leave this leafy sanctuary? In the late 1950s or early 1960s, when I was about 18 or 19 years old, I came to know about a friend of my eldest brother who was going to the United States to study at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, a happening which brought tremendous excitement to our town where he was honoured by prominent leaders and gave inspirational speeches about his achievements. Around this time, I realized that our farm could not sustain all of us brothers and that at least one of us would have to leave home to make his future livelihood elsewhere. I subsequently persuaded my eldest brother, Motabhai, that I should follow the example of our illustrious townsman and I earned the grades needed to study Chemical Engineering at Wayne State and successfully applied, with the understanding that I would pay for my tuition by working on campus during school terms and in factories in the summers.
But how to pay the price of the airline ticket to get to the U.S., which at that time, if I recall correctly, cost around 22,000 rupees, much less safely travel with that kind of money to Mumbai by train? The astounding sum of money was given to me, like so much in my life, by my most loving and much admired eldest brother, Motabhai, who along with his young wife, Motibhabi, and my eldest sister, Motiben, were by then Father and Mother to us all. And it so happened that we had a close family friend and very good friend of my eldest brother, Ishwarkaka, whose nickname ‘Darbar’ referenced his tremendous personal courage, who agreed to accompany us wearing a hidden belt containing the unimaginable sum of 22,000 rupees to ensure that we did not lose the money to any thieves on our train journey. We arrived safely in Mumbai and I arrived safely in the United States of America at the age of 21 on March 26, 1968, thanks to my Motabhai’s unconditional love for all of us, and his wife, Motibhabhi, who always supported his efforts for his siblings 100%.
Upon graduating with my degree, I established myself in Toronto, Canada, where I was joined by my wife, Gita, whose mental strength and unconditional love I am so very grateful for; in a true blessing from God, we have had the fortune to be joined by three absolutely beautiful souls in the form of our daughters, Urmi and Pari, and our son, Devang, whom we love tremendously.
I shall forever remain eternally grateful to our parents, and all my brothers and sisters, especially my Motabhai, and his wife, Motibhabhi, and my eldest sister, Motiben, for their selfless service to our family throughout my life. I shall also forever remain grateful to my second eldest brother Amritbhai (‘Dadu’) for always encouraging us to face our challenges fearlessly, such as when I experienced adverse health challenges later in my life.
I have indeed faced many challenges in my life, but I truly believe that this is a wonderful life in which I have had a magnificent journey alongside the many loving souls I have journeyed with and for whom I am forever grateful for.
Navnit Desai
Toronto, Canada
July 2020
