THEY say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but behind the photograph 80-year-old Devshankar Joshi took with him to Stansted Airport in Essex on Friday last week (November 8), there is the whole story of the migration of Indians from the mother country to East Africa and then to the UK and finally, in many cases, back to India.
The black and white photograph that Devshankar held up was taken on September 26, 1972, at Stansted, when he had disembarked from the plane with his wife, Premkunvar, and their son, Mayur. A Swedish newspaper snapped them as they came off the flight from Kampala, just three from the nearly 30,000 Asian refugees who were given 90 days to leave Uganda by President Idi Amin.
Thanks to the intervention of Praful Patel, chairman of the India Overseas Trust, a plaque has been put up at Stansted commemorating the arrival of the first refugees from Uganda. It was unveiled by Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Lord Petre, while Prime Minister David Cameron sent a message of support: “The British Ugandan Asian community has made an enormous contribution to our society …this plaque and this celebration are a fitting reminder of a year of commemoration of the momentous events of 1972.”
Marcella M’Rabety, Stansted Airport’s corporate social responsibility manager, said: “We’re also pleased to be the home of the commemorative plaque that remembers this special anniversary.”
Praful was present when the very first flight touched down on September 17, 1992: “It was a misty, autumn morning, it was drizzling and the people were shivering – they did not have enough warm clothes.”
Among the 130 guests at the ceremony, 52 were former refugees. Devshankar Joshi tried to speak, but was in tears.
His son, Mayur, now an accountant aged 43, takes up the story for his father who was choked with emotion as he recalled how he had abandoned a flourishing accountancy practice in Mbale, 152 miles north-east of Kampala, and left with his family.
“The man in the picture is my dad, he was 39, with my mum, who was 34 – sadly, my mother passed away in January 2009 – and that’s me, aged two, wearing one of my dad’s shirts as a nappy,” Mayur said.
When a soldier snatched away Mayur’s toy chimpanzee, thinking it might have hidden jewellery, he threw a tantrum. His mother, though only 4ft 11in, acted as a tiger mum and flung herself at the soldier pointing his gun at the toddler.
Mayur’s sisters, Nutan and Bina, 15 and seven respectively, and his brother, Hamant, 14, caught a separate flight with extended members of the family.
After a transition phase in the Stradishall Resettlement Camp, the family settled in Cambridge because Devshankar had an abiding respect for Cambridge certificate examinations. Within a year of arrival, Mayur’s paternal grandmother, Jayanben, died in 1973; his grandfather, Shivshankar Joshi, lived on till 2001.
By and by, the household took in Mayur’s widowed grandmother from India. Somehow nine people fitted into a three-bedroom house, where chillies brought from Uganda by Mayur’s mother are still lovingly tended in the garden.
At college in Cambridge, Mayur took a first in business, finance & law in 1994, while most of his father’s seven grandchildren are also graduates.
“We came with nothing,” said Mayur, who married Daksha on April 13 this year, “with my dad acting as best man”.
When his father suffered a heart attack in 2010, Mayur took a year off work. In 2011, father and son undertook a long trip to India and tracked down the family’s origins in Gujarat. “We took Mum’s ashes to Rishikesh.”
