Daxa Popat

I speak English, Gujarati, Gujarati’s our mother tongue, and Hindi. I speak three languages. And I did know Swahili. But, coming here, not keeping in touch with Swahili, I’m not fluent with Swahili to be honest with you, but I can get away, get by with Swahili, using sentences and words…

My grandfather came to Uganda to do business when he was in his, I would say, about, thirties, and my father was born in Uganda. My grandparents came from Gujarat to Uganda. My father was born in Uganda. All my siblings are born in Uganda. My mother is born in India and she came to Uganda when she was eleven…

We were Ugandan. We were all born there so we were all Ugandan citizens, except my mother, she has Indian passport. She was born in India.

He [Idi Amin] got a dream saying that you want to expel all the Uga—all the Asians from East Africa, Uganda and this was in September of, 1972. And then, in—But we were Ugandan citizens, all of us, so he wanted to keep the Ugandan citizens to stay there for the business and to grow for the community. And so, we were the last ones to come to Canada, and we didn’t know at the time that we were going to come to Canada or go to India. We can’t go to England because we didn’t have the British passports, so we had to wait there, make a choice, go to India or come to Canada, but my uncle lived in, in, Sarnia, at the time, so he sponsored us, and we came to Canada.

My uncle drove us from Kamuli to Kampala and we left everything behind: our store, we had two cars, the house was full furnished, you know, with everything that, you know, every family has, you know. We left everything as it is and we closed the doors, you know, but left everything behind and came to Kampala and my uncle drove us to Entebbe Airport.

So after he retired in 1984, we came to my—we opened a store in ‘82 but he took two years off. And then we opened a store in 1982 and we bought a location on the corner of Dublin and Summit. You might recall that, I’m not sure, “Popat's Grocery.” Yes? And we had the store for eleven years and we kept the store, and we bought the, we brought in all the spices from Toronto all the spices you can think of. And we used to make samosa, pakora, laddu, all the sweets, you know.

And it was convenience store, Canadian grocery and Indian groceries. So, my dad said, “That my dream was to open the store.” So, I worked in the store, my sister-in-law worked in the store. And after my dad retired, from ‘84, we used to go back and forth—from ‘82 to ‘84—from Bridgewater to Halifax. And then he came to Halifax in ‘84 and then he worked full-time in the store.

We like it here; this is our home; we love it. We decided that we going to live here, and we’re not going to go back—if we go visit, fine. I visited once, but at that time the new government came they were giving your property back, or your money back—whatever you had in the bank, you know, whatever you had in Uganda. They said, “You fill out the forms and you can get it back.” They’ll give you money back.

But my dad didn’t even want to do that. He said, “I don’t even want to fill out the forms or get anything back. I want to just not think about that—you know, just leave everything as it was.” We left our cars and our homes, our nation, whatever was in the bank. It was a big, big money, big amount, but we left it there. My dad didn’t want to go into that—filling forms out and going back to, you know, that situation. So, we didn’t, we didn’t fill out the forms or get money back, you know. We just have, whatever we have here, we are happy, you know. My, we are settled, you know working and doing well and so, and we are happy here, so we didn’t want to go back and think about that.