Memories

By Dr Kamal Mazumdar

In 1960, Lashio, Burma at 3 am, a 10 year old boy woke up crying inconsolably. When his nurse asked him why, he said that his mother had just died. Unknown to him, a few roads away his mother was, at that very minute, losing her life.
Strange and curious happenings, prestige and paucity, moments of masti, achievements and brickbats – the stuff of ordinary life is narrated with frank vigour and charm in this exploration of a man’s life, career and relationships. We feel his alienation and loss at the death of his mother, the troubles of an adolescence without money, the setbacks as promised job opportunities turn to dust; we cheer him on his boyhood adventures and welcome the joy of a good marriage.
We travel on a whirlwind of memories from pre Independence Dhaka to Burma, Kolkata, and to every nook and corner of India. Enlivened with wit, insight and anecdotes, this journey also offers us an inside view of bureaucracy as we follow the ups and downs of the author’s career in the Ministry of Drinking Water, Government of India... and beyond.
Ultimately, like the author, we ask ourselves: Do we choose our path in life or does the path choose us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zorba Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9789385020902

Dr Kamal Mazumdar

"Kamal Mazumdar born in Kyaukme, Burma and holds a Master’s Degree in Environmental Engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, besides his training in Project Formulation and Appraisal from Bradford (UK). He earned his doctorate at Gandhigram Rural Institute, Tamil Nadu. He has diverse experience in Drinking Water Supply project formulation, implementation and on policy related issues. He has served under Government of West Bengal and has also served in the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and Urban Development (CPHEEO) under Government of India. He has represented the Ministry in Water Sector on various National and International forum including visit to USA, Netherlands, Philippines and South Africa on technical exchange programme. He has number of articles and book publications (technical) to his credit. At present he is retired and lives with his wife, Sankari in Calcutta and their daughter Sraboni has settled in Lucknow and Ajita is settled in Canada. "

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Prologue

Universally, there is an acknowledged perception that autobiographies are written only by those people who belong to an exclusive club - famous or notorious for whatever reason. As of March 2016, it is estimated that 7.4 billion is the world’s population currently living across the planet. Each one of us has a unique story to narrate based on what we have experienced in life.

In that context, I am an ordinary person who has had an opportunity to see almost all parts of this unique country India, from a different perspective, as I was born and partly brought up in Burma. I have always been a little unconventional compared to the standard ‘Bengali Bhadralok’ as prescribed by the society I was brought up in.

Initially I was a bit uncomfortable, thinking that this manuscript would turn out to be an emotional outpouring of my ordinary life and a piece of self-indulgence. But later, I thought it is worth describing the life of an imperfect human being with major shortcomings. Moreover, the famous quote: Don’t read success stories, you will only get messages. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas for success, by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has also inspired me to write this book. Though I will not define my life as a ‘failure’. It has been a very fulfilling life from all perspectives.

So far life has been simple but with some strange experiences thrown in. ‘Strange,’ based on my own interpretation of what happened to me in this humdrum life of mine. My journey started in a small town, Kyaukme, where I was born during a turbulent period in Burma’s history. My childhood was spent in the small sleepy town of Lashio in Burma. I migrated to India after a military coup in Burma and passed through rose gardens, endless hurdles, uncertain sharp bends, ditches, rough terrain, colourful fountains and snow peaked mountains - a passage that is exciting and beautiful

This journey made me realize that from germination to termination, the path of life is associated with three variables: time, place and person. We all pass through different phases of life and each phase has its own time frame. I presume human beings are the only living species aware of time in term of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. In fact time is not aware of its own existence analogous to the fact that maybe God, as described by religious institutions, is not aware of His own existence.

The most unique and interesting creation on our planet is the human species with infinite shades of character. Billions of people were born before; a billion alive and yet to be born; all transit passengers irrespective of what they have achieved and not achieved in life. At a tender age, I realized that happiness is a state of mind. Even adverse conditions can be altered by your mind to make you happy. To me, enjoyment does not necessarily mean a trip to Switzerland or attending a late-night party and dancing till the wee hours after consuming a bottle of vodka. To me, it is narrating to my family members, an interesting and funny conversation held between fish-sellers and a customer in the morning bazaar. Everything is in the mind and to be happy, the soul needs to be alive.

There is only a small portion of the planet we see as the sun rises, but a large chunk of the planet we are not able to see because of the physical limitation of the vision and the shape of the planet. Indian philosophy and mythology speak of the Third Eye which allows us to look within ourselves and the outer world, beyond the horizon, and that is the perspective from which I want to narrate what I have seen experienced and understood.

Queries about the unknown aspects of life trigger more questions and the mind gets into a constant search mode. I enjoy exploring such ambiguities - it is one of my major recreational activities. Sometimes, when my mind get fatigued, I console myself by rationalizing that when acknowledged geniuses like Albert Einstein, Socrates, Pluto, etc., could not find answers to the mystic of the universe and life, why do I strain my brain, particularly with my limited knowledge? But I can’t help it; it’s an integral part of my brain’s wiring.

The bulk of this narrative is based on anecdotes that took place during my childhood in Burma and particularly while travelling to distant parts of India while working with the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission (later renamed ‘Department of Drinking Water’ and upgraded to ‘Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation’), at New Delhi for twenty-three years. It is not fair to write about one’s life without being absolutely honest. There are many incidents mentioned in this book which involve others, if there are any errors or shortcomings in my description of these interactions, I apologize for them.

Whatever may be my perception about destiny, unlike great people I have this strange knack of the doing wrong things at the wrong place and at the wrong time. This makes my life interesting and inspired me to write an autobiography.

Like Mukri, who worked as a comedian in over 600 Hindi films from 1945 to 1995, yet cannot claim to be one of the all time greats of Hindi cinema, I too cannot certify myself as an extra-ordinary writer or novelist.

CHAPTER 1

Memories

The worst part of holding memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

— Lois Lowry, from her book, ‘The Giver’

The story of my life is incomplete without narrating the journey of my father. Father was born in Dhaka, Bengal in undivided India, on 15 April 1915, to a large family, just short of a dozen siblings. His village, Samsidhi, is now under a separate district known as Munshiganj, Srinagar Block. Earlier it was a sub–division of Dhaka district, called Bikrampur. Throughout my childhood, I recited, innumerable times, the phrase, ‘We hail from Dhaka, Bikrampur, Samsidhi’ - uttered like a domestic parrot, to delineate my roots of which I was inordinately proud. I respectfully acknowledge the statement made by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political leader and orator, that: A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Father hailed from a Zamindar family who had a huge Shiva temple, built by my forefather – Mahendra Nath Mazumdar, way back in 1243 as per Bengali calendar (the inscriptions on a marble plate at the entrance of the temple gate go back a 180 years). I had heard a lot, during my childhood, about the family-owned Shiva Temple, from my father, but he believed that it had been destroyed during the Second World War by Japanese bombing. I had the privilege of visiting my ancestral place in April 2009, when I went to Dhaka to attend an International Conference. It was an amazing experience. The landscape had not changed much from what father had told me; it still had a large number of river tributaries plied by small boats - the main form of transport in rural Bangladesh.

Mazumdar (Majumder) in India, particularly in Assam and Bengal, and in Bangladesh, is basically a Hindu and Muslim name meaning ‘record keeper/ archivist’. ‘Majmū‛ the Arabic word for ‘collection’ combines with the Persian suffix – ‘dār’ for ‘possessor’. The surname evolved from an official title. Ours was the title acquired by an ancestor residing, as Hindus did, near Dhaka, in undivided India.

The exodus of our family from Dhaka had its genesis in the 1940s when Jinnah emerged as a leader of the Indian Muslims and was popularly known as Quaid-e-Azam: Great Leader. In the Constituent Assembly of India elections of 1946, the Muslim League got a massive mandate for the creation of the independent state of Pakistan, with an implied threat of secession if this was not granted. The Congress, led by Gandhi and Nehru, remained adamantly opposed to dividing India. However, 1947 saw violent and bloody communal clashes between the two major communities in India. Bengal saw major clashes between the two communities before it was split into West Bengal and East Pakistan. A massive population transfer began immediately after partition and along with millions of Hindus; our clan also migrated to West Bengal from East Bengal.

That was the end of the Mazumdar Zamindar clan of Samsidhi – most of them migrated to West Bengal, a few left for Burma, my father among them – and as it turned out, he had other urgent and pressing reasons to leave Dhaka!

When I visited our ancestral village in April 2009, I found that our ‘Zamin’ (land) had been forcibly occupied by local Muslims during the turbulence of the late 1940s, and what was left was the ‘Dar’(door) of a house built by my grandfather, Sashi Bhusan Mazumdar, in the early 1920s. Surprisingly, nobody had occupied that house - the reason being, to quote the locals – Zamindar used to live in that house, how we can step into it? That was the extent to which the local people were loyal, even after the death of my grandfather more than 50 years ago. Other houses which belonged to our clan were occupied or demolished and replaced with modern houses built by local Muslims.

Anushilan Samiti was an armed anti-British organization in Bengal and the principal revolutionary organization operating secretly in the region, in the early years of the 20th century. This association, like its offshoot the Jugantar, operated under the guise of a suburban fitness club. The members were committed towards independence of India from British rule and adopted the path of armed revolution. Calcutta and later, Dhaka, were the two major strongholds of the association. However, the group succeeded in penetrating rural Bengal and had branches all over Bengal and also other parts of India. Its activities included the making of bombs, arms training, and the assassination of those British officials and Indians whom they viewed as traitors.

Father, at the age of fifteen, was a member of one such revolutionary group. According to his narrative, he was assigned to shoot two British policemen who were notorious for practicing unique torture techniques on captured revolutionists. From father’s point of view, he was striking a blow for freedom. In any case, the attempt failed. One of my father’s innumerable nephews – Nirmal da, who was a year younger, was so proud of his uncle’s attempt that he boasted about the episode in full detail, to his friends. This resulted in a police raid on our house in Dhaka, where they located the country-made pistol, hidden in the toilet. Left with no option, father escaped to Calcutta and took shelter with his uncle who was a senior police officer with the Calcutta Police. He arranged for my father’s escape to Burma through his friend, Captain Dutta, who was in charge of a merchant ship traveling from Calcutta Sea Port to Rangoon in 1938. Father’s police officer uncle was in possession of a warrant against my father. It was a ‘shoot at sight’ warrant, which is generally issued to permit the use of lethal force when absolutely necessary to protect life during riots.

In Burma, father was hosted by a brother-in-law, who was a Station Master at the Mogok railway station, 200 kms north of Mandalay. The difference of age between my father and his second eldest sister was more or less that of a mother and son. Those days, girls were married off at the early age of 10-12, although child marriage was outlawed in 1929, under Indian law. However, in colonial times, the legal minimum age of marriage was set at 15 for girls and 18 for boys. After independence and the adoption of the Indian constitution in 1950, the Child Marriage Act has undergone several revisions. The minimum legal age for marriage, since 1978, has been 18 for women and 21 for men. We, Indians, care two hoots for such laws, as a result, the eldest son of father’s sister - Pijus Da and second-in-command, Kushu Da, were only a few years younger to my father. Later, both nephews became father’s business partners in Burma; Pijus Da operating from Mandalay and Kushu Da from Lashio.

The arbitrary entry of India into the war led by the Allied forces was strongly opposed by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected President of the Congress twice, in 1938 and 1939. Bose made his way ultimately to Japanese South Asia, where he formed what came to be known as the Azad Hind Government, a Provisional Free Indian Government in exile. There he organized the Indian National Army, recruiting Indian POWs and Indian expatriates in South-East Asia, with the help of the Japanese. Its aim was to reach India as a fighting force that would build on public resentment to inspire revolts among Indian soldiers and defeat the British Raj.

At a rally of Indians in Burma, on July 4, 1944, Netaji made an impassioned speech: It will be a fatal mistake for you to wish to live and see India free simply because victory is now within reach. No one here should have the desire to live to enjoy freedom. A long fight is still in front of us. We should have but one desire today- the desire to die so that India may live- the desire to face a martyr’s death so that the path to freedom may be paved with martyr’s blood. Friends! My comrades in the War of Liberation! Today I demand of you one thing, above all: I demand of your blood. It is blood alone that can avenge the blood that the enemy has spilt. It is blood alone that can pay the price of freedom. Give me blood and I promise you freedom.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose made this speech in the Rangoon town hall. My father, who had attended this meeting in his newly stitched white suit, was so inspired by the personality and content of the speech that he donated a considerable amount of money to the INA movement. Father had a photo taken in his white suit, with Subhas Chandra Bose at Rangoon, which was lost in transit when we all migrated to India in 1964.

The Rakhit family had a well-established business in Kyaukme dealing in all sorts of spices and tea. My father was employed by the Rakhits and was offered food, shelter and a token salary. Father declined to accept a salary as he was keener to learn the art of trading. Once he had mastered the nitty-gritty of trading in that geo–political environment, he quit his job and settled down in Kutkhai, a small town in the Northern Shan State. Shan State became a major Christian area of Burma from the mid19th century. Kutkhai was an important center for the Church and was visited by missionaries from 1936 to 1942. During World War II, Kutkhai was occupied by the Japanese.

On September 10, 1944, the Chinese Fourteenth Air Force bombed Kutkhai along with the towns of Tunganhsien and Tunghsiangchiao. The town surrendered without a fight when the Chinese reached it on February 19, 1945. The resulting war between the Japanese Army in Burma and the Allied Forces during the fag end of World War II saw a large number of lives lost and the areas surrounding Rangoon, crammed with refugees of all castes, creeds and religions. It was from one of these refugee camps, that father escaped to Calcutta by ship. This was his second such journey by ship, to and fro Calcutta to Rangoon, and his last one indeed. In both cases he had to escape – first, from being arrested by the British Police in Dhaka and subsequently, from the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1944.

Finally, on 15th December, 1965 father migrated permanently to Calcutta along with my stepmother and three sisters, because of the military coup. While Indians have lived in Burma for many centuries, most of the ancestors of the current Indo-Burmese community immigrated to Burma from India, at the start of British rule in the mid-19th century till Burma separated from British India in 1937. During the British era, ethnic Indians formed the backbone of the Burmese government and economy, serving as soldiers, civil servants, merchants and moneylenders. It was rumored that Ne Win (Burma’s foremost military commander), had tried to set up a business venture in the early part of his life, and blamed its failure on the monopoly enjoyed by the Indian business community. This may have contributed to his hatred against all Indians. After he seized power through a military coup in 1962, General Ne Win ordered a large-scale expulsion of Indians, who became a target for discrimination and oppression by the junta. This, along with the wholesale nationalization of private ventures in 1964, led to the emigration of over 300,000 ethnic Indians from Burma. Indian-owned businesses were nationalized and their owners were given 175 kyats for their trip to India. My family was one of those immigrants who travelled from Burma to India during 1964-65. Human migration from one place to another has been part of human history since time immemorial, but that was in search of better life. Expulsion by force, after the seizure of all property and wealth earned after a long struggle, leaves a deep scar in one’s mind, as it did in ours. The transition from a lavish life in Lashio, a land of dreams, to struggling day to day in Calcutta took its toll, but it was worth it; it gave me a new dimension on life.

Father had always been admired for his kindness and benevolence. Large-hearted, he took care of all the people around him and was the darling of the Indian community in Lashio, and of our relatives in India. He was fearless, had infinite energy, and spread positive vibes all around. But he had one major shortcoming: he was short tempered and didn’t believe in mincing words. He was opinionated and headstrong, and it took a lot of convincing to make him change his stance. But all this was when he was in Burma and before the death of my mother. The death of his wife and migration to India leaving behind all the wealth he had acquired in Burma and the burden of making ends meet and providing for a family of seven in Calcutta, transformed him into a disillusioned and dejected person. Later, when he was struggling to keep a clothing shop running in Calcutta, his frequent question to me was: Overnight have I become a fool? My standard consolation was: Your luck has run out Baba. At the end of the day, father was a good soul–I have inherited some of his virtues and some of his shortcomings as well.

Father escaped from Kutkhai to Calcutta leaving herds of cows and horses and a flourishing business in 1944 and returned to Burma only at the end of 1948, along with my mother and my brother, Kanoj, popularly known as KK, who was born in Calcutta on the day of Burma’s Independence- 4th January 1948.

To summarize my father’s life: he was born in a rich Zamindar family of Dhaka; he left for Burma via Calcutta penniless, during the late 1930s and acquired considerable wealth doing business in Kutkhai; he left Burma almost penniless in 1944 after Japan invaded Burma; returned to Burma in 1948 and was one of the wealthiest men in the Northern Shan State, with fleets of trucks and a trunk full of Chinese gold, till the military coup in Burma in 1962. Meanwhile, in the late 1950’s, Father had acquired a large piece of land in South Kolkata (Kasba), which was sold by a lawyer friend of his youngest brother, Bhudeb, who had been given all the relevant papers so that he could pay land tax on behalf of my father. My uncle was deceived by his lawyer friend and my father lost this huge property, whose value at present market rates would have been phenomenal.

In 1965, father left Burma for good with 175 kyat in his pocket. He did reasonably good business in Calcutta with money received from the maturity of an LIC policy. He bought 20 bighas of prime land at Patuli, which is about 26,660 square meters. 19 bighas of this was acquired by the State Government for Patuli Area Development. Out of 20 Katha (1 bigha) left; 10 Katha was forcefully occupied by the local CPM party cadre and 5 Katha by the local Congress leaders leaving 5 Katha for my father. In 1974, father fell ill and with that, gradually the business sunk. He died with a meager bank balance in his saving account. Yet; he was content with whatever life had given him, despite all the ups and downs. He died relatively happy.

It’s so easy to summarize his life in a few paragraphs, but what he had undergone during the turbulent phases is something only I knew - he never shared his despair with anyone. Father had the tenacity to face adverse situations with a grin and accept huge financial losses, time and again, with new determination. His life taught me that ambition and inspiration are necessary to achieve something big but they can be deceptive as well.

Father told me that during the Japanese invasion of Burma (WW2), he had almost died when a Japanese fighter plane started bombing the passenger train he was on. The incident took place near Gokteik Viaduct; a railway trestle in Nawnghkio, western Shan State, spanning a deep gorge of around 300 meters. The viaduct had been constructed in just nine months and at the time, was the 2nd longest bridge in the world. Before the train reached the Gokteik Bridge, a bomb from the fighter plane hit one of the bogies of the train. Father rushed to the exit of the compartment he was traveling in and was about to jump out when he was pushed back by a Burmese fellow who jumped instead, crashed onto a rock bed and died. Was it destiny or some strange impulse that lead to the death of the poor Burmese chap, who inadvertently saved father’s life? Maybe what John Lennon said is true: There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be... or what Gautama Buddha said in a different context - No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. In this context, the question I ask myself frequently is: Are we born with a destiny or are we the architects of our own futures?

Life is full of surprises and contradictions – isn’t it?

CHAPTER 2

Childhood

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

― Julian Barnes, British Novelist

To answer the basic question on destiny I have to narrate all that happened in my simple but strange life. I use the word ‘strange’ because most of the incidents that occurred in my life appear to me as unconventional. Maybe strange things happen to strange people or strange people make strange things happen. All that I can say is that I was never given an option by ‘Nature’ or ‘God’, as to what type of person I wanted to be. I was just born to a particular Bengali couple who came to be defined by society as my parents. As a consequence, relatives and acquaintances, including siblings; I have inherited, without much of a choice.

Every individual’s life is a story laced with different shades of colour and as the saying goes: the world is a stage for all of us to act out our scripts. If everything in our life is as per a script, it is difficult to imagine someone (God), writing scripts for millions of years for billions of humans, and if all living species are included, the scripts could run to a few thousand trillion.

Our life begins with being born to a particular set of parents; a series of anecdotes follow which form the substance of our life and one day, one leaves this world permanently; that’s the end of the story. Physically all of us are born to perish and as such, there is no point in contemplating death; it will come on its own terms and conditions: better to accept it and forget it. I realized this when my mother died when I was ten years old; after that, the subsequent death of my father and in-laws didn’t affect me to that extent.

The journey of my life began the day I was conceived by a Bengali woman in Kyaukme, Burma. My DNA was registered and destiny defined, as they say in the Arab world, by Maktab. From a mystical point of view, Maktab signifies that everything is already known to God, and we are born with a ‘Destiny’.

Fortunately, the creator made me a bit unconventional, as per the standard norms set by society. Not to have a firm perception about anything has been the cornerstone of my character. Souls of a select few touched me immensely and inspired me into building positive energies in all spheres of my life. Relationships, although very few, are milestones in my life’s journey; I have tried to sustain them by ignoring things which may result in the breakup of bonding. Not to accept what doesn’t suit me without expressing it, helped me cultivate an atmosphere of understanding, acceptance and tolerance even with people of divergent views and nature.

In the midst of civil war, I was born on 6th April 1950 in Kyaukme, a town in the northern Shan State of Burma situated on the Mandalay-Lashio road. I was reminded by my father, on a number of occasions that he had to change six houses within a span of one month after my birth. As a last