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of the losses caused by Nature's fluctuations. In a good year, farmers could sell their cotton, pay current and back taxes, and have enough left over to buy food. In a drought year, they had neither a food crop nor cash profits. Many people simply starved.

    It would have taken far greater power than a soothsayer's to stave off the seven years of drought that marked Motiram's childhood. Season after season, the skies remained empty, as if the gods of wind and rain had fallen into a deep, careless slumber.
    Even in relatively prosperous Navsari, hard times were evident. Hungry refugees from the rural areas poured into town at the rate of a thousand per day. Rice and millet doubled in price. The Milky Lake at Navsari's edge dropped to the lowest levels in recorded history; the Purna River slowed like the last trickle of blood from a dying man. Thousands in the region starved to death, and many more died of poverty-related disease.
    It was the worst famine in sixty years. For Motiram's generation, the calamity of 1899 was a milestone used for decades afterward to reckon dates, births, and fateful decisions.

    Historians used to speak of "push" and "pull" as the main factors in migration, principles as basic to human motivation as warp and weft are to cloth. Push begins at home; it is what makes you leave your motherland. Pull is the force drawing you elsewhere; it is what makes the foreign destination appealing. Though recently this mechanistic model has been replaced by more subtle theories of human motivation, the simple version retains a ring of truth. Despite the complexities involved in Motiram's story, perhaps a strong push was required after all. If so, the famine of 1899 might have been the spark that led Motiram and his kin to look, for the first time in more than four centuries, beyond their town's borders.
    As weaving became less and less sustainable, among the Khatris it was more and more the province of women, who could stay home and weave while still cooking the meals, watching the children, and sweeping the floors. By the turn of the century, it was common for men to branch out, seeking related work as tailors in Surat, Bombay, and other cities.
    Perhaps, for a young Khatri man in such times, the move to Fiji seemed like just another step.

    The remote archipelago once known as the Cannibal Islands was an unlikely choice. Early Hindu travelers from Gujarat were likely to follow the westward routes to Africa and the Middle East that had been established by their Muslim countrymen. Three of Motiram's brothers tried those routes, traveling overseas to Africa and to Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. Of them, only their passport photos remain, and their names: Raghnath, Daahyaa, Gopaal. Eventually they would die or disappear abroad, leaving no children, only their child-brides at home—stunted limbs on the family tree.
    The Fiji Islands, much farther and in the other direction, were not on anyone's lips. Until, in 1901, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company of Fiji recruited twenty Gujaratis with needed skills. Soon a couple of Gujarati jewelers followed; they found themselves in great demand as the indentured laborers, the girmityas, chose to preserve their savings in gold and silver. Fiji gained a reputation as a place where it was easy for men with talent to thrive.
    In 1908, a member of Motiram's caste went to ply his skills as a tailor.
    A year later, Motiram followed.

    To pay for his passage, he mortgaged the ancestral land. He left two brothers, his mother, his wife, and two sons at home. The year was 1909, and he was not afraid.
    Or: He was desperate. His father and three of his brothers had already died; he was the man of the house; he had to do something.
    Or: They had not yet died; he was carefree. He was young and did not think of his own death.
    Or: He thought of dying far from home. When he took his family's leave, none of them dared hope to see each other again.
    Or: They planned to meet in two years. He