A Tale of Migrant Childhoods from Tamil Nadu to Malaya | Excerpt from Crossings

Samy arrives late to the store that night. At the end of his shift, he’d run to check on Chithappa; still sleeping. The nurses had given him strong medicine for the pain.

Ramalingam waves to him and he sits down next to his friend, but he’s still thinking about the leaflet. Periyar: Samy recalls his photo from the centre of the leaflet and can’t get his face out of his mind—a shock of white hair, thick white moustache and cane in one hand. Periyar: the men are talking about him. Has Samy heard the name before?

Periyar has come from India, sailed across the Bay on the same ship Samy came on years ago, the Rajula. He’s going to speak at rallies in every bigtown: in Ipoh, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and in many small places Samy has never heard of before.

Periyar has a message for workers, for people like Samy and Ramalingam, for Muthu and even for Raju Chithappa if he wants to hear it.

“Why suffer the throes of casteism in a land where everyone has the chance to be the master of his own destiny? Forge ahead. Seek education. Strive for economic strength. That’s all that matters.”

The voice startles Samy. It’s not a voice in his head. Muthu is speaking, reading from a paper. There’s a hush over the group. The men are listening, gossip and banter put aside.

‘Is it true the Brahmins tried to stop him disembarking in Penang?’ one man asks.

‘True, true,’ says another. ‘They asked the government to ban him from Malaya.’

‘Why?’ asks Samy, before he can stop himself.

‘They don’t want us to hear him. They don’t want us to realise how much we are exploited, how much the Brahmins trample on everyone beneath them.’

‘Is he really an atheist, as they say?’ asks another voice.

‘No! They’d say anything to run him down. They call him a troublemaker. All to stop us being educated, learning for ourselves.’

Is this what Raju Chithappa is afraid of for him? Samy doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand everything he’s hearing, but he likes the sound of Periyar’s words as Muthu reads them out again. Master of his own destiny. Samy likes the sound of that a lot.

✴

‘We are going back home, Samy, home to Palaiyanallur,’ Chithappa says one evening. He was released from the hospital weeks before, but it’s taken this long for him to be able to get up and hobble around. Samy has been taking care of his uncle in the evenings when he’s finished work. ‘We’ll get a ride to the port and find a ship to take us. I can’t work. There’s nothing here for us any longer.’

‘But what about Amma? And the kangany?’ Samy knows Chithappa’s debt is building again, every day that he doesn’t work.

‘We’ll have to sell something. I’m not earning here. It’s time we went home.’

‘I’m earning, Chithappa.’ Samy is hoping to be promoted soon, he might get to be a machine worker with Ramalingam.

‘I know, Samy. But this is no time to be here. All the talk about bad times coming. No work for me. We’ll go home.’

Samy imagines the journey back: his sick uncle, no gold bangles for Savitri. Amma’s face. The village again, the fields and trees he knew. He thinks of the burning sun on his back, the ache of his fingers twisting the knife, the sharp stink of the sap. Muthu and the men. Evenings at the store. His hope of working the machines with Ramalingam. The money he might earn. The theatre. The foreman’s whistle.

Periyar’s words in Muthu’s mouth, in Samy’s mind. A bicycle like Muthu’s. A newspaper from a shop. A man behind the counter, selling papers and sweets and cigarettes. A man they call Samy.

‘No, Chithappa. I’m going to stay here. You go. And give my love to Amma and to Savitri. And tell her my remittances will come soon. I’m going to stay here, in Malaya. I’m going to stay. I’m going to have a bicycle and a shop and wear shoes. You’ll see Chithappa. You’ll see.’ ‘

(Excerpted with permission from Tara Books; The book will be released on December 19.

Sunil Amrith is a historian at Yale University. His Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants is a pioneering work that looked at the contexts and circumstances ofmigration during colonial times, especially from Southern India to South-east Asia. Crossings is loosely based on some of the stories Amrith explored in this book.

Ruth Coffey teaches at Yale Law School and pursues her interest in writing, and in reading books for children.

Matthew Frame is a London-based illustrator. His emphasis on hand-drawn imagery and analogue production techniques, inform his design outlook and underpin his distinctive approach to illustration.