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

How much of what we do at age fourteen or sixteen is a decision? And how much is a simpler drive for survival: an unspoken, interior understanding of what will help us to become ourselves, and the instinct to reach toward it—a tropism, like a plant that bends toward the sun?

Others targeted black Africans, who were barred from entering the cities without passes, being on the streets after certain hours, and—most significantly for Ganda—eating in restaurants. The date of this change is uncertain; it may have been a strictly local ordinance, or an old regulation being freshly enforced during one of many periodic attempts

caste system back home, objected to neither racial separation nor racial hierarchy—only to economic inequality and the indignity of being assigned to a place near the bottom, near the Africans.

By the winter of 1909, when Motiram boarded a ship, a typical cargo to Fiji consisted of 750 to 1,200 indentured Indians. A contemporary contract shows the British government of Fiji paying the firm of James Nourse Ltd. five pounds and fifteen shillings sterling "for each adult Indian (male or female) of the age of ten years and over landed al

The elders blamed the younger generation for abandoning traditional ways; the younger men blamed those who failed to adapt with the times.

Vaasudeva kutumbukam. The whole world is one family. —Ancient Sanskrit mantra

A work visa seemed out of reach, particularly given the sudden bursting of the Internet economy's bubble; the trend now was toward outsourcing and "reverse migration," with H-1B holders going home and Indo-American entrepreneurs heading back to the subcontinent to make their money. The United States was no longer rolling out the welcome m

Each time we move, we must leave something of ourselves behind; perhaps then the map of a diaspora consists, like a constellation, mainly of gaps. And these distances gape in our memories, as in our personalities; we lack the physical objects, buildings, people whose presence might remind us of what we once were, might lend us some continuity.

By one estimate, sixty thousand people were jailed across India for gathering, making, or rallying around salt.