Bead Bai: Satpanth Ismaili Das Avatar Ginan

Avatars of Vishnu circle Sultan Mohamed Shah (Aga Khan III) in red turban.  
Notice Om above the imam's potrait.

Gujarati writing. 

Top લાંબી  ઇમામતના  જોમાંઘારી - Bearer (responsible one) of the long immate

Bottom: નુરમોલાના  સુલતાન  મહમદશાહ - Noor Mowlana Sultan Mohamed Shah

Bottom margin. Courtesy: Ismailia Association, Bombay, 15-1-1957



Extract

Chapter 17

Picture Darshan and the Song

After his morning chai, Dadabapa gathers all his grandchildren around him at Saheb’s framed picture at the shop’s corner altar. A slim garland of stale marigold roses and browned jasmine hangs on the picture that calls for veneration. Below the wilted loop are a handful of mung, a silver coin and a burnt-out incense stick in a peacock stand. A fresh tuberose. A broken tasbih. Some coins. Dadabapa replaces yesterday’s incense stick and lights a new one on the peacock’s head cast in silver on the incense holder. He lights another one holding it between his two fingers as if it were a long sewing needle.

“Remember life is a changing cycle of karma from yoog to yoog,” says Dadabapa measuring his words as he looks at each one of us in the eye. Thus begins the morning lesson, and the song.

“Satpanth stories are in the four colours of the yoogs. Each has its own persona in red or yellow, black or white.” I keep still, my eyes tightly closed. I thrill in the expectation of the rass of darshan seeping into my body, the devotional bliss in my ears, the magical picture in my eyes.

“I am at your feet. I offer this my aarti dua today,” Dadabapa speaks to the picture. Then he turns around and speaks to us. “Children! Sing with me! Let me hear your voices loud!”

I open my eyes gradually to the picture and my heart to the coming bliss. Dadabapa draws incense smoke in circles around the picture in which all the ten avatars of the creator as fish, animals and men stand before me. I look at each image, my palms pressed before me, my chants following Dadabapa, line by line. Shamshu mumbles by my side. He is impatient for his mind is elsewhere. Pictures of the avatars sing back to me. My eyes fall on them pleading darshan. Awe fills me when the chant of the fish-animal-human god avatar in the ten descriptions becomes one prayer to our unison universe. Behind the children, Ma Gor Bai and Kaki Bai auntie stand at a distance with their hands folded, eyes closed, all singing together. My father stands in the opposite corner, also with his hands folded, eyes closed and singing. Only Noordin Kaka uncle is not there.  Even Hawa joins us.

I am Vishnu’s machli avatar, the giant fish

I saved the Vedas from heinous demon

Behold! I am the Lord of the age

When he comes to ‘I am’ in the end verse, Dadabapa raises his voice.  Repeating after him, we would call out ‘I am’ in a chorus, shouting at the top of our voices. He would smile aside without looking at his grandchildren imitating him.

I am Vishnu’s kurma avatar, the turtle

I deliver life when oceans whirl

Behold! I am the Lord of the age

Awe grips me, so vast a divinity in the picture before me. So vast the story of Das Avatar. So vast the creation.

About the book called Bead Bai:

The first paragraph:

One day I saw two elderly brown women climb into Bus No 144 at the Sperling Sky Train Station in Burnaby, British Columbia. They disembarked at the first stop on Sprott Street. Opposite this stage, behind some green trees and bushes, is the Ismaili jamat khana or the prayer house. In their bare hands, the Bais (we call women Bais in the community) held white plastic bags slumping down with weight. One woman was wearing a long dress under a brown artificial fur collared blue jacket and boots that seemed awkward to walk in. It was a murky grey winter evening and sleet rain.

The plastic bags made me nostalgic. In them they carried a lot of history hidden from the view of fellow passengers in the bus. I wrote a paragraph about the Bais that night. The lines came together over time and the story of Bead Bai emerged:


For a hundred and more years, the two bais' mothers, grandmothers and aunts came to the jamat khana about the same time, around seven in the evening, at the equator in Africa between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. In the plastic bags, wrapped and carefully packaged so no spicy fragrance escapes, is the day’s offering, a portion of the family meal they have prepared that day, a prayer of thanksgiving for the day’s nourishment, for peace of the ancestors buried in Africa, for those who died in Canada after their second epic migration, and for blessings of contentment and gratitude that you often hear the Satpanth Khoja whisper, “santosh” or “shukhar”.

My name is Sultan Somjee and I am an ethnographer. Writing about the two Bais on the bus route no 144 in Vancouver brought flash backs from stories told to me while I curated exhibitions on the Satpanth Khoja and Asian African migrations and settlement in East Africa. I linked the old stories from India and Africa with the new stories that are now told in North America and the Western world. The stories from the three continents continue to create powerful images laced with feelings often stirred by family photographs and artefacts. These stories unfold overlapping layers of changing culture, politics, identities and styles of worship of the Satpanth Khoja who comprise the majority ethnic group among Ismailis in Canada. An estimate suggests there are about a hundred thousand Ismailis in Canada.

Bead Bai is narrated by Sakina who later came to be called Moti Bai. She narrates like the old Satpanth Khoja storytellers speaking in lyrical prose and verses, metaphors and anecdotes. Often their stories move into the realm of mythology. Their tender words merge with Saurashtra’s ancient oral traditions that have flowed over generations since the time of Buddha from parent to child and from elders to communities.

A Khoja Bead Store in Nairobi in 1920s. Notice the Bead Bais and the display of beads in the background. Shop's proprietor Janmohamed Giga Bhimji Khimji is seen sitting with his sons to his right and his wife and daughters to the left.

Photograph courtesy The Asian African Heritage Exhibition 2000 - 2005

The character of Moti Bai is inspired by lives of the ‘Bead Bais’. The Bead Bais like Jethi Bai and Santok Bai I knew, worked on ethnic beads in their family stores in the most remote places in Africa at the equator. The task of sorting out, counting, pairing, matching, stringing and displaying hundreds of beads of tens of different sizes, colours, lustres and shapes was tedious and back breaking. The men folk would not work with beads for this work required patience, meticulous concentration, beading skills and the eye of an artist. Sometimes the Bead Bais got children to help them.

Ma Jethi Bai. Drawing by her grandson Maqsood Jivan,Vancouver

Drawing by Nizar Kanji, grandson of Ma Jethi Bai. The arrow points to where she used to sit in the veranda. Notice panels on which were hung strings of beads for display, to view and touch. Attached to the store were family rooms and a courtyard. Behind the home was the market and in the background stood Mt Meru.

Author with son  and grandson of Jethi  Bai. Kassamali Mohamed Jivan and Maqsood

I first learned to touch and know African beads in my childhood at my uncles’ bead store in Arusha, Tanganyika, where their mother, Ma Jethi Bai, sat all day long sorting out and grouping beads and strings in patterns. Next to her sat Daudi, her Maasai assistant and mentor on beads. The Bead Bais raised many children. Today many of the descendants of the Bead Bais are first and second generation Canadians.

                               Photo by Yasmeen

                                   Author with Ramzan son of Rajan Laji

Ramzan Rajan Laji’s father started the first Bead Store in the main Indian Bazaar of Nairobi in 1905. Ramzan's grandmother, Fatma Bai would be among the first Bead Bais at the turn of the 20th Century, three years after the completion of the Great African Railroad. The Rajan Lalji Bead Store later became wholesale suppler of beads to mainly Ismaili Khoja traders in Nairobi and the interior. Rajan Lalji and Fatma Bai would probably not have imagined then how their pioneering venture would lead  to one of East Africa's largest art production employing hundreds of skilled bead artists and agents. Most importantly, today the continuous flow of beads to the most remote ethnic communities enables the indigenous and largely feminine art heritage of East Africa to flourish. 

Later in early 1950s when Ramzan Bhai started a family store in Kigali, he carried bead samples to test out preferences among the ethnic people of Rwanda and then began displaying and selling beads in Kigali among other things as his grandfather had been in Nairobi half a century ago.

 

Though inspired by real events and people, this is a work of fiction.