MATCHBOX

Flowing south from Mandalay, the great Irrawaddy River turns sharply west at the city of Irawati’s birth. It makes a wide curve there, and then flows down through lower Burma (now Myanmar) to Rangoon, spreading into a wide delta before emptying into the Andaman Sea. This waterway is the road to Mandalay. Irawati was born there, in 1905, in Myingyan, a city at the river’s edge. Two decades before, in 1886, the British had repulsed massive attacks on its garrisons, survived raging fevers among the troops, and finally crushed a bitter revolt in Myingyan and the entire province of Mandalay, as they had in many parts of British Burma and India. So, when she was born, Irawati was born a British subject.

In the Indian tradition of giving girls the names of rivers, her father, Ganesh Hari Karmarkar, gave her the name Irawati, though no girl had ever been named for that particular river before. He might have known that his daughter, born after his four sons, needed a name that signalled her uniqueness to the world.

Ganesh Karmarkar himself was born in Paud, in Maharashtra. He was an enterprising young man with ambition, and when opportunity came his way, he found a way to grasp it. He applied for a job at the British Cotton Company, in Burma. When he told this story to his children years later, he recalled that as he sat outside the office of the administrator who would interview him, he began to think that there was a better than good chance he would not get the job. There were several young men seated on the long wooden benches, waiting along with him. They seemed to him somehow more confident than himself, possibly because they were qualified for the job. He knew for certain that they were better qualified than he was. The preferred candidate was an engineer, which he was not, or required at least some knowledge and experience in the management of factories, and he had neither.

Ganesh waited. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a man would come out of the office after his interview, the khaki uniformed peon would go into the office, come out, call a name, and the next person would go in. Ganesh noticed that all the hopefuls were shorter, and also darker-skinned than himself. It was only the idle observation of a wandering mind. When, after a wait of almost two hours, his name was finally called, he was startled. He picked up the mostly empty leather briefcase he had brought along to convey seriousness, and went into the office. The Englishman behind the big wooden desk did not look up as he came in.

‘Mr Harry Karmarkar?’ he said, unaware and unconcerned that he was hopelessly mangling the name, and continued without waiting for an answer or looking up for a nod, ‘yes, so, you are able to relocate yourself to Myingyan, then?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ Ganesh said, and then the Englishman looked up sharply. He gazed at Ganesh and then said with a big smile, ‘You are quite the fellow’ and nodded for Ganesh to sit down.

‘Get your looks from your mother?’ he asked, and Ganesh was momentarily confused, and then he understood. The man had assumed Ganesh’s mother was English, because of his height and fair skin, and his clear and very large light grey eyes that were not uncommon in his Chitpavan Brahmin community.

‘Yes,’ Ganesh said, nodding and smiling, ‘I do have my mother’s eyes.’

They talked for some time about the weather in Burma, and then the health of Viceroy Lord Curzon and of the Queen. Nothing at all was said about either the job or his experience, and Ganesh began to feel sure that the interview was a failure for him, when the Englishman asked him if he would like some tea.

‘You will be ready to leave by the end of this month?’ he asked, and Ganesh was at once relieved and a little bit guilty. When he was back home, he explained to his wife, Bhagirathi, that he himself had not so much lied as allowed the Englishman to believe that he was unlike all the other interviewees.

‘What do you mean,’ she asked, not understanding.

‘He thought I was Anglo,’ Ganesh said laughing, ‘and I didn’t say I wasn’t.’ And then, thinking about it, he said, ‘But maybe that’s not what happened. Maybe he just thought I was the right candidate for the job. Or, he just liked me.’

Ganesh knew, though, what had really happened. He had not divested the man of his misinterpretation. He knew it was his height, his skin, his eyes, and perhaps his gumption, that had got him that job.

As they waited to board the train, Bhagirathi pulled her saree tight across herself and tucked it into her waist. This way it would not flap about behind her or get in her way as she navigated the crowds on the platform, or obstruct her arms when she carried the two cloth bags, in which she had a silver mango-shaped box with her kunku, the jewellery that she had received from her parents and her in-laws on her marriage to Ganesh, her green wedding saree, and a few other precious things. These she had not packed into the large trunks with their luggage. When the train left the station and the city limits, it also left the limits of Bhagirathi’s known world. Everything she saw from then on as they were carried across the broadest part of the subcontinent was new to her. Landscapes she had never seen, huge rivers and wide plains in the distance, strange trees and shrubs closer to the tracks, and the people who got on and off the train—even they looked different from anyone she had ever seen. As they went further east, there were men, women and children with strange eyes and smooth faces and smooth hair, all wearing shirts made of pretty woven cloth. They all wore loose lower garments that could only be called pants, even the women. There were many British soldiers and civilians, some of them were with them the entire journey. She lost track of time and space, as the train rattled and vibrated for days and days. And as they went further and further away from anything familiar, and familiar-looking people were replaced by real strangers, she could no longer understand what anyone around her was saying. There was only her husband to talk to, and she slowly began to understand that now, aside from him, she was very much alone.

(Excerpted with permission from Urmilla Deshpande, Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Speaking Tiger Books).