Shanti Khusal

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Mum’s name is Shanti, which means peace. Her name is what she is – peaceful. Mum has an ability to put life’s hardships into perspective – into a peaceful state of being. Her philosophy for life is simply,  ‘Be happy, don’t dwell on the past, enjoy your life as much as you can – while you can.’ And that’s just what she does. 

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Mum is the heart of our family, with her calm manner and wisdom. She is acutely sensitive towards what others are feeling and will always go to great lengths to ensure that she never hurts anyone’s feelings. She is a quiet, intelligent woman: open-minded and interested in current world events. But– we have to add – there is another side to her. Mum loves Westerns and police shows on TV; she loves the action and a good rambunctious fist-fight! We laugh because this is so at odds with her peaceful nature. 

 

Shanti Naran was born in 1934 in a tiny farming village in Gujarat called Rupantalev. Mum still talks fondly about the lake covered with beautiful pink lotus flowers that was right next to her house, the dragonfly races they had as children and the giant, lush mango trees that grew in the village. 

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As Mum had six brothers, five younger and one older, she had to work extra hard and was responsible for most of the household chores. According to Mum, her parents were also calm and had gentle natures, just like her. They doted on her, their only daughter. 

As a young teenager, Mum helped her family financially by delivering milk, which was carried in an urn on her head, from her village to the main town of Navsari every morning (approximately 15 kilometres). She would get paid less than a  rupee for this (nowadays one NZ dollar is approximately 40 rupees). But Mum says she enjoyed this job as she had fun, walking with her friends, singing and giggling along the way. Another job Mum had was gathering salt on a beach near the famous Dandi Beach, where Mahatma Gandhi held the Salt March against the British. 

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While Mum was growing up in India, our dad had gone to live in New Zealand, at the young age of ten. His father had lived here for a while and returned to India to take his son back with him. Dad’s mother never lived in New Zealand, as immigration restrictions at the time made it difficult for wives of Indian immigrants to gain visas.  Dad went to school until he was fourteen. While still a teenager, he found himself working in appalling conditions until he was rescued and asked to work for Mortiram Wallabh at a market garden on Pukekohe Hill. 

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So Pukekohe was where Dad eventually settled. In 1952 he travelled back to India to find a wife (arranged marriages were the norm in those days). He went to Mum’s tiny village where the father of the girl he was meant to meet up with wasn’t home, but Mum was home and so was her father! Mum had an adventurous spirit and when this striking young man provided her with an opportunity to live in New Zealand she readily agreed to marriage and so changed her life, and the lives of future generations forever.

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In 1953, at the age of seventeen, Mum left her home and her much loved family, not knowing that it would be 20 years before she returned. When we asked her what she was thinking at the time—leaving her home and family to live in a country on the other side of the world—she simply said she imagined it would be an adventure.

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The adventure started with twenty-two days on a ship from Mumbai to Sydney, during which she looked after another family’s children, and then a seaplane flight from Melbourne to Auckland. She was carrying a huge, heavy pile of Indian classical and Bollywood LPs for our dad, who loved music. Mum says that throughout the journey, she wasn’t scared, she was excited. She was collected by Dad in a truck and driven to her new home on Pukekohe Hill. When she arrived, her adventure turned into disappointment as she realised that a Pukekohe market garden looked not much different from her farming village in India.

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For a while Mum and Dad lived in a small shack behind Mortiram Wallabh’s house. Mum found that not only did she have a new husband to care for, but also his youngest brother, who was only about six years old. Mum was very homesick at this time but she stoically decided that there was no point in being sad. 

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Dad eventually managed to buy a nearby property and set up his own market garden business, bringing together his father and two younger brothers to live with them in their first home. Their house was a tiny ex-army hut. It had crumbling floorboards, only two bedrooms and an outside long-drop toilet. Dad bought two draught horses to plough the fields.

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The house had no washing machine so laundry was done in a huge copper over an outdoor fire. Mum’s workload was heavy, even before she had children. She had to cook and keep house for Dad, his younger brothers and our grandfather, who was a heavy drinker by then. She also worked on the market garden, weeding and helping with harvesting. Her first baby, Kalavati, was taken to the paddock while Mum worked. 

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The chilling New Zealand winter was such a contrast to the warm, tropical climate of home. During this time Mum felt quite isolated. She had left a tight-knit community to live in a rural New Zealand town where homes were far apart and she rarely saw other Indian women. She worked long hours every day. She says her babies saved her from being lonely and she absorbed herself in caring for her family. 

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Mum had five more children after Kalavati. The only time she ever got to rest was during the few days recovering from childbirth. The nurses insisted Mum stay in care for two weeks after each birth, as they knew she needed the rest. Each time Mum returned home, she found that the men had saved all their dirty laundry and that of the other babies for her. 

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Mum and Dad had five girls and one boy in the space of eight years. In Indian culture, boys are usually more highly esteemed than girls but Mum always maintained that her daughters were just as special as her son. However, all of us totally spoiled our brother, simply because he was the youngest and therefore the cutest!

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All of us kids were only a year or two apart in age, so this was a very busy time for Mum, especially with four men to cater for as well. We all lived together in the tiny two- bedroomed house—eleven of us: Mum, Dad and the kids slept in one bedroom, Grandfather in the other, while our two uncles slept in the lounge area. We lived like this—with Dad gradually adding on rooms to the house as we grew older—until our grandfather went back to India to see out his last years and the uncles moved into homes of their own when they got married. 

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Even though we lived in such a small space, we were happy as this was all we knew. Throughout these years Mum looked after and nurtured the whole extended family. There were times when our grandfather was being a quarrelsome drunk and Mum would have to gather us all into our room to keep us away from him. On one occasion our grandfather got so annoyed with Pali, he hit her soundly. Poor Mum was distraught! Even though we were a lively bunch of kids, our parents did not believe in smacking. 

Every morning before school, Mum sat us down before her, one by one on a little wooden nail box, so she could comb our long curly hair, inherited from our dad. Pali’s was as thick and frizzy as  a ‘brillo pad’!  Our unruly hair was styled into two tidy plaits and tied with pretty coloured ribbons. Mum told us that in the early days she never attended weddings or community events because getting us all ready was
too difficult.

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As the market garden developed and the older kids went to school, Mum worked in the fields more often. Always wearing a sari and with gumboots on her feet, she was the one who would mix the sprays and ready the fertilisers while Dad drove the tractor. During the potato harvest, she would tie a piece of twine around her waist as a belt, hang a bunch of twine off it and with a giant needle in hand spend the day in the hot sun sewing the tops of the potato bags closed, one after the other. 

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Even after working in the fields all day, Mum would have to prepare lunch and dinner for all of us. Sometimes there wouldn’t be enough food in the cupboard to cook for  twelve people so Mum would create an appetising concoction from whatever she could find. Bunches of puha and potatoes in the gosht (curried lamb) went a long way, as did a thick sauce of fried onions and tamarind on a bed of rice. Dad was very sociable and so we often had guests (Dad’s drinking buddies) at our house. Mum was expected to quickly whip up Indian nibbles and treats such as paatra (deep-fried taro leaf wraps)  for the visitors and also make dinner for the rest of us. Luckily Mum has always been an enterprising and inventive cook. 

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Sunday lunches were always curried chicken, which was usually caught and cleaned the day before (we had chickens running around outside). Dad didn’t always work on Sundays so while Mum cooked, he would play his Indian music so loudly our tiny house would shake. Now, to us, the sound of Indian music is forever associated with Mum’s spicy chicken.

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Mum followed the Indian tradition of allowing men and children to eat first. After cooking our lunch or dinner, she would be the last to sit down to eat—always—after she had served everyone else. We would say, ‘Mum, sit down and eat with us!’ but she wouldn’t; she didn’t feel right about doing this. Recently we have convinced Mum that women don’t have to eat last. This tradition was so ingrained in her that it is unsettling for her to eat before others even now. 

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Mum tended a vegetable garden­, which was at least  half an acre full of peas, corn, tomatoes and Indian beans. During summer, we harvested the peas into sacks. Then, while watching TV in the evening, we hulled mountainous piles of them. Mum would blanch, bag and freeze all the produce. With the tomatoes she would make a scrumptious sauce and bottle it in old soft-drink bottles. It was lovely, thick and spicy and would be a hit in cafés nowadays but at the time we longed for store-bought tomato sauce! 

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No vegetable went to waste with Mum around. Our biggest crop was onions and our school holidays were usually spent either harvesting onions or grading them. Mum was always there working alongside us, standing for long hours, spotting the onions that were rotten or sprouting. Sometimes she would go through the piles of onions that had already been thrown out and pick out the ones she thought could still be used. We would all have to help. It was an awful, smelly job but Mum would sell these onions to make extra cash for housekeeping expenses. 

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Mum sometimes sent money home to her family in India as well. To send the money easily, she had to get postal notes from the post office. Only one postal note was allowed per person so Mum would make us all go and stand in the line and get a postal note each. 

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We never had bought clothes as Mum sewed all of our dresses, making a special one every Christmas. Dad would buy a huge bolt of fabric and with only one pattern Mum would make five dresses. As Vasanti was the youngest, hers was made last. Sometimes, by the time Mum had made four dresses she would run out of fabric. She would then ingeniously make Vasanti’s dress out of two or three odd pieces of scrap fabric, cleverly combining stripes with florals or florals with other florals that wouldn’t normally match. Vasanti credits her wayward sense of style to these artfully mismatched dress fabrics!

Our mixed-up Kiwi-Indian Christmas is amongst our favourite of memories. On Christmas Eve, Mum would marinate an enormous amount of lamb chops and meatballs with Indian spices. The meat was then skewered onto long wooden spikes (shaved barberry hedge branches that were soaked in water overnight). These kebabs were cooked over a pit filled with tea-tree charcoal dug into the dirt floor of the packing shed. Dad later invented new methods for cooking the kebabs, which still retained the great barbecue flavour, but we reminisce about the taste of the original. We didn’t have any presents, but the simple pleasures of special food and the fact we were allowed soft drinks that day was enough. 

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We would usually spend the day with family friends who lived nearby; the Rama Haris and the Parbhu Narans. Others were included as we grew older. Eventually we would all help out at Christmas and the food preparations on Christmas Eve became a lively family  ritual. 

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Mum had a few close friends that visited from time to time and whenever Mum got together with other women she was usually the quietest one—except for when it came to singing at weddings! Mum has always loved singing. When she was younger, back in her village they called her ‘Radio Shanti’. At home Mum was always singing while she did the laundry or any other mundane job.  During wedding celebrations Mum was especially happy to be among the noisy, jovial bunch of women who would sing and banter together. While they sang, in Gujarati, in a nasal tone, the women would invariably break out into shrieks of laughter, joking and giggling. As children we didn’t understand what any of it was about but it looked like fun. 

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In the late 70s, Mum and Dad finally built a new house, just across the road from our old house. We all lent a hand in painting and wallpapering it. The jungle mural we painted on the wall of the stairwell is still there today. Our new house was a huge, white-bricked, two-levelled home with a bedroom for each one of us and all the mod cons in the kitchen. Mum was finally able to enjoy the comfortable home she had worked hard for. She loves this home, but reminisces about the good times and the bad times in the little army hut that we all grew up in. 

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Mum is now eighty-two (at the time of writing this). She has been through hardship and grief. When we were younger her mother, father and later her favourite brother died in India—while Mum was thousands of miles away. It was a very sad time for Mum but she never revealed her grief to us children. Out of six brothers, Mum has now only one left. Dad passed away when Mum was only fifty-eight years old and our brother, Mum’s only son and youngest child, passed away recently in 2011. We can’t even imagine how hard that would be for her. 

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These days Mum is as active as her age allows her to be. She still enjoys gardening and pottering around doing household chores. Thankfully, Mum relaxes more by watching Hindi movies, soap operas and reading. She devours Gujarati books, a pleasure she never had the time for before.  Mum still loves to cook and cooking for her family is one of her greatest joys. Even though we tell her not to, she won’t listen. Her response is, ‘I’ll do as much as I can, while I can!’ Her favourite times are our noisy family get-togethers, which have grown in number as our family has multiplied. Mum is always humble, but she speaks with pride of her thirteen grandchildren and one (so far) great-grandson. 

Mum continues with her ever-hopeful outlook on life. Her manner is never one of resignation or defeat; she has a genuine, sanguine view of life, which keeps her going. Just to know her gives us strength.

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By the ‘Khusal Girls’: Kalavati Narsai, Madhu Hari,
Pali Pancha, Niru Patel and Vasanti Unka

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