About the Rattan family
We begin with a man who left home in a hurry. In 1883, Mehi Sahu — known ever after as Mahilall — fled Haripurwa, his village on the India–Nepal border near Sarlahi, after injuring his sister-in-law in a fit of temper over a meal that had not been cooked. Hungry and hiding in Sitamarhi, he was offered food by a recruiting agent for the British colonies. Learning that Mahilall was Sonar by caste — a goldsmith — the agent promised him all the free gold he could want in South Africa. He boarded the Sophia Joakim at Calcutta on 9 June 1883, one of 418 adults, and reached Natal on 14 August as indentured labourer number 29 953. He was twenty-five. There was no gold. He was set to cutting cane on the Waterloo Sugar Estate outside Verulam, where for five years he asked where the promised gold had gone. When his indenture expired on 20 August 1888 he chose to stay. He married Bechuni Kalichurn, farmed at New Glasgow, and together they raised fourteen children. Their eldest son was named Rattan — and it is his name that the nine branches of this family still carry.