Life in Four Continents

By Prakash Vinod Joshi

The highest accolade I can give Prakash is to say he is a humanitarian. He has great empathy for all kinds of people he encountered in east Africa where he grew up, in the United Kingdom where he studied Industrial Chemistry, and in Canada where he makes his home today and works with Metro Testing and Engineering Services Limited as a Senior Materials Engineering Technologist.

He is also an internationalist who seeks to understand the richness of the human spirit through great spiritual leaders past and present like Mahatma Gandhi of India, Dalai Lama of Tibet, the Reverend Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and Spiritual Chiefs of our Native North American Indians. He has given back to his community in Canada and is a respected member of his profession.

- Virgil Dias (From the New River Free Press International)

I have just finished your book while sitting by the pool. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. I like the way you presented the story and the honesty of the message. I can totally see you welcoming a stranger to your home as you did on several occasions to provide them with comforts at the expense of you and your family. In fact, the message you leave the reader with you is became richer for having the experience to assist one less fortunate than you. Well done my friend! Undoubtably you have taught your children and those close to you what it means to be a special person who demonstrates a real love for life.

All the best,

Rob Deverall

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469709451

Prakash Vinod Joshi

Prakash Joshi resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with his wife Darshana who spent most of her childhood in Mumbai, India, with her grandmother “a freedom fighter”. They have three children, Ronak, Tejaswini and Milan.

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Copyright © 2012 by Prakash Vinod Joshi.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-0944-4 (sc)

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Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/07/2012

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

The Early Days in East Africa

Back in India for Holidays

School Days in Uganda—

Primary School

School Days in Uganda—High School

Kololo A Levels and

Depart for England

Life in London and The Asian Exodus

Canada—Family Reunification

Career High and Break-Up

Man’s Best Friend—Kids and the Dog

My Wife—Darshana

The Family Grows

Conclusion—Canada

This book is dedicated with respect to

Vinod and Indu Joshi, my parents

Ronak, Tejaswini and Milan, my children,

who helped me gaze into the future

Darshana, my soul and best friend, who showed me

the meaning of love and commitment

Image_001.JPG

Preface

As my parents were getting older, I felt the time was right to record the interesting and often challenging events that had crossed our paths. This would also be my contribution to my children if they ever wondered about their past. The journey that my grandparents started, from India to East Africa, with their early setbacks and settlements in unknown and often harsh environments, was most commendable and is often taken for granted by the newer generation. There was talk about Indians exploiting Africans. Yet, my maternal grandfather was known to visit an African leprosy village to help the sick and forgotten Ugandans and my paternal grandfather was known to open the shop door in the middle of the night to assist African customers by providing emergency supplies. This was our new home, Uganda, but soon we fell victim to a leader who had a different idea; he gave us three months to get out of the country. The family was split, some ended up in the United Kingdom, some returned to India, one uncle went to Brazil, while some of us landed in Canada.

Life in Four Continents describes this journey with a sense of humour, which is often needed when everything else seem to go awry, especially when strangers in a new country are ready to land a hand and so-called friends and family take advantage of you. I am proud of my new country, Canada; proud of my heritage, Indian; proud of the country of my birth, Uganda; but sad about the 500,000 Ugandans, mostly Africans, who perished at the hands of Idi Amin.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to my wife Darshana who persistently encouraged me to write this book, and all the poems are entirely dedicated to her and the love I have for this country Canada, this province of British Columbia and especially to the parks of this beautiful city of Vancouver.

Following my appeal for information, my parents’ generous response after stretching their memories to the limit is most commendable. My love for my dear brother, Jyotindra, and his sense of humour has also helped me in the process of writing this book. I also thank my relations from as far away as East Africa (uncle: Ramesh Pandya), India (father-in-law: Major Krishnakant Vyas and cousin: Rajen Metha), and England (uncle: Rupshanker Joshi and Shirish Mehta) for providing me with the historical input and family information required.

My thanks to my friends Chris Hartnel and Jack Freebury who have assisted whenever they can to review my articles before they were published in newspapers or magazines.

My special thanks to the former editor and publisher, Pramod Puri, of the newspaper The Link and its current editor, Paul Dhillon, who have always supported my writings.

I am deeply thankful to our family friend and co-volunteer at Initiatives of Change, Hilary Kariotis, for taking the time to edit Life in Four Continents.

My inspiration for sharing my thoughts and my sincere desire to improve the situation of people and our only planet comes from gurus like Shree Morari Bapu, his Holiness the Dalai Lama, the late Swami Chinmayananda, the late Rev. Pandurang Shashtri Athvale, and not forgetting our popular Canadian environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki, all of whom I have had the privilege to meet.

The special role of some of my very dear friends like Neil & Nancy McAskill (Burnaby, BC), Roland Heere (Vancouver, BC), Dayabhai Patel (Atlanta, USA), Greg Wilson (Coquitlam, BC), Arvind & Pratiksha Patel (Michigan, USA), Dineshbhai Patel (San Francisco, USA), Margaret Mubanda (Surrey, BC), Yutaka Hashimoto (Vancouver, BC), Dr. Cesar Chan (Illinois, USA), Raju & Divya Patel (London, U.K.), Sirishkumar Manji [Tabla Nawaz] (London, UK), Roy Naidu (Burnaby, BC), Sanjay Morar (Burnaby, BC), Pravin Shah (Burnaby, BC), Milton & Vallerie Carrasco (Richmond, BC), John Norohna (Toronto, Ontario), Azim Abdulha (Vancouver, BC), Yasmin Jamal (Karachi, Pakistan), Sachdev Singh Seyan (London, UK), Kalwant Singh Ajimal (London, UK), Dr. Dushyant Yagnik (Montreal, Quebec), Herman Desouza (London, UK), Peter Fernandez (Montreal, Quebec), Anwar Omar (Ottawa, Ontario), Dr. Virgil Dias (California, USA), Murari Dave (Burnaby, BC), the late Navin & Anila Tailor (Burnaby, BC), Vraj Sudra (Coquitlam, BC), Bob Gill (Vancouver, BC), Dr. Nemi Banthia (Vancouver, BC), Bhan Sinha (Burnaby, BC), Dr. Rajesh Desai (Coquitlam, BC), Kiran Patel (Burnaby, BC), Arvind Bhatt (Mumbai, India), Rahul Patel (Mumbai, India), Mohan Gandhi (Paris, France), Kesar Babra (Uppsala, Sweden), Avinash Kotecha (Viginia, USA), Punnag Hazarika (New York, USA), and plenty of others who have played an important role in my life to make this book worth writing. Many who were thrown far and wide, all over the world due to the exodus from Uganda, but who remain close to my heart.

Finally, I am grateful to National Geographic Magazine, to which I’ve subscribed since 1978, to help confirm some historical and geographical facts.

The Early Days in East Africa

In the late 18th century, Revashanker Joshi with his wife Dayaben departed from Patanvav (near Dhoraji) in the state of Gujarat in India to go to Africa. He was hired as an accountant by Alidina Vishram, a trading company. His journey must have taken him and his wife (my grandparents) a few weeks of travel by ship, from Porbandar, a town on the west coast of Gujarat on the Indian Ocean, to Mombasa on the east coast of Africa—the route taken for hundreds of years by Indian traders using dhows.

(It was in 1498 that the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, with his four ships and a crew of one hundred and seventy men, reached the Port of Mombasa. He was the first European to sail around Africa to India. Here he met with Arab hostility and departed, travelling further north to a friendlier port called Malindi. Here he noticed the first sign of Indian traders. Gama and his crew contracted the services of an Indian pilot who had the knowledge of the monsoon winds which allowed him to bring the expedition the rest of the way to Calicut, located on the southwest coast of India, south of the now famous Indian tourist resort of Goa.)

From Mombasa, my grandparents travelled by the recently built railway line. From Kisumu (in Kenya) a boat transferred them to a small town called Port Bell in Uganda. (Construction of the railway line started in 1896 from Mombasa and reached the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, source of the great River Nile, to a town called Port Florence, later named Kisumu in 1901. By 1931 the railway line was extended from Port Bell to the interior part of Uganda, now the capital city of Uganda, Kampala. The British had built the line, mainly with the help of Sikh labourers, to provide a modern transportation link to carry raw materials out of the Ugandan colony and to carry manufactured British goods back in.)

It was in the small town of Mpumu (another coastal town on Lake Victoria near Port Bell) that my father, Vinod Joshi, was born on September 8th 1928, the youngest of four siblings. He had an elder sister named Manglaben (full name after marriage: Manglaben Mohanlal Shukla), and two brothers, Labhshanker and Rupshanker Joshi, who both apparently worked for the East African Railways in later years.

My dad has fond memories of visiting his favourite uncle in a nearby small town called Gilgil where the Italian Prisoners of World War I were kept. The British later used them to build beautiful asphalt roads throughout East Africa.

Revashanker Joshi, after leaving the Alidina Vishram Company, opened his own shop in Buligami, near Mpumu. From Buligami, the brothers commuted on foot to the Old Kampala Elementary and Senior Secondary School, which was about seven miles away. My father remembers going to school with his good friend and neighbour, Mazar Ul’ Haque, taking this meandering path surrounded by tall elephant grass. It was at Bulimagi that the two elder brothers were thoroughly beaten up one day, by some Africans, on their way back from school. Somabhai Patel, a railway station master for Kampala Railways and also the cricket captain for Kampala Railways Cricket Club, liked Rupshanker Joshi, the middle brother, as a cricket player and wanted him to play for his team and so not only did he recruit him in his team but also found him accommodation at the Patidar Samaj Building on Kampala Road. Furthermore, he gave him a job at the Railway Station. Later, my dad joined the same club too. Another tragic incident that suddenly took the family by surprise was the shop accidentally going up in flames and causing my grandfather and his sons to move to a new location across from the Railway Station called the Ashok Building. Labhshanker Joshi, the eldest brother, joined the East African Railways too, but in Nairobi, Kenya. My dad was only 12 years old when his father passed away at Ashok Building in 1940 and a year later he lost his mother (Dayaben) too.

It was in these early years that the true personality of my father, called Natu for short (full name: Vinodrai Revashanker Mayaram Joshi), was developed, and he was noticed by the whole family to be the most fearless, bravest, adventurous child, able to bear extreme physical pain and was also the most mischievous. The incidents and the accidents that he got involved in are still talked about by the extended family over and over again at family reunions. He loved animals and showed extreme kindness to people from various ethnic backgrounds.

Here are some of the incidents, which are both tragic and, at times, extremely funny, that portray his true character and makeup:

•   He was hardly ten when, after watching a Tarzan movie, he decided to leap from a second storey building, landing in a ditch and totally fracturing his right arm. With a broken arm literally hanging from the elbow and without a tear in his eyes, afraid of being scolded by the family, he went to a Sikh family friend who helped in healing broken bones. He tried to quickly lock the bones together, rubbed in some ointment and bandaged my dad’s arm. The healer was in complete shock when the child did not show any sign of pain. The damage caused by the compound fracture still remains as he cannot completely rotate his arm.

•   A few of his uncles and an aunt used to narrate an incident when my dad, who was only about 13 years old, decided to give some neighbourhood kids a treat by giving them a ride in a truck. The whole bunch of them were ordered to pile up at the back and the driver released the brake and the truck rolled down the hill and crashed against a tree. A little damage was done to the truck but the kids came out of the roller coaster ride unscathed.

•   Realizing he was shorter than an average kid, he decided to do some pull-ups, hanging from a water pipe which ruptured and caused the house to flood.

•   Always ready to give a helping hand, he decided to give a friend a ride on his bicycle after school. There was no rear seat, so the friend stood at the rear with his feet on either side of the stand mounted on the wheel axis with his hands holding firmly onto dad’s shoulders. They sped away down the hill. Suddenly dad realized a truck in front of him had come to a stop and was trying to turn at the intersection. He shouted to warn his friend to hold him tightly but it was too late. As he braked, he was in full control of the bike, just swirling a bit, but the poor friend flew over his head