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ART E LITERATURE 49
Mogul Street with his wife and two children in a tiny railroad flat. There is almost no furniture, just an old Art Deco-style teak desk, a glass-door cabinet in which a modest collection of unremarkable china and glassware is as much stored as displayed, a couple of straight backed chairs and a Toshiba television set hooked up to the neighbour's illegal satellite receiver dish to catch Indian programming. They've built into the long rectangular space a private bedroom, just big enough for a double mattress, a dresser, a couple of wardrobes. Next to the tiny kitchen in the back is a toilet. One washes one's hands in a small sink next to the door to the toilet in the kitchen. By American standards, they are living very poorly indeed, yet these are educated people, clearly intelligent and possessing a high degree of social grace and a higher degree of generosity. They are a mixed couple: she is a Hindu. He explained that his parents were committed to the idea that he, their only son would marry a Jain, but due to the near total lack of eligible Jain girls in Rangoon when he came of marriageable age, a compromise was finally accepted. He and his wife appeared a very happy couple. She is lovely, a devoted mother and a warm and welcoming hostess. Though I'd already eaten, I couldn't refuse the meal they offered me in their home. Actually, I was comforted by their familiar Gujarati vegetarian fare: thin tender chapatis, 'drumstick' curry (a name for a fibrous, celery-like vegetable, not severed chicken leg), and fresh lassau (garlic pickle). They fed me at a small table in the kitchen. My Jain host was born in Rangoon. He has never even been to India, never even been out of Burma. He told me he was afraid to go to India, afraid that if he met someone who claimed to be a relative, he'd have no way of knowing whether or not the person really was a relative or was only a con man trying to trick him. He was not happy that his children had to go to nationalised schools where the medium of instruction is Burmese. His older child, a daughter,
receives private tuition' in English after school. He and his wife speak Gujarati at home, so the children will learn their 'mother' tongue, though they confess that their Gujarati has become 'all mixed up', shot through with Urdu and Burmese, after living in Rangoon for so many generations. The women and paterfamilias from my Muslim host family accompanied me to dinner at the home of another of the five Jain families in Rangoon. They claimed to like the strictly vegetarian Gujarati thali of puris, vegetables, the yoghurt-based soup called khadi and rice. At dinner, the women talked easily in a mishmash of Gujarati, Burmese, and Hindi/Urdu. But their appearances were strikingly different. Whereas the women in my host family looked typically Burmese in their longyi and Southeast Asian features, long glossy hair, the Jain women looked absolutely Indian dressed in saris with coordinated jewellery. On another day, I was invited for tea at the home of a pure Surati Muslim family. My first Jain host escorted me there. In deference to him, perhaps, we were served only vegetarian pastries and fresh fruit with small cups of strong, sweet tea. The members of this family have the regal features of the Mughal imperial court of Badhur Shah Zafar. The women wear salwaar kameez in typical north Indian or Pakistani fashion, and always put on a head scarf and a black robe over their clothes when they go out in public. In Rangoon, I found myself for the first time in my life outside the rarified circles of the Westernised intellectual elite of New York, New Delhi or Bombay. in a world in which Hindus, Jains and Muslims mix comfortably and even affectionately in each other's homes, over meals no less. In Gujarat, this kind of easy mixing in people's homes would be quite extraordinary. Though Hindus and Jains and Muslims may be good friends in public domains, it would be unusual for them to get together in the private sphere of their home. Hindu and Jain proscriptions regarding food, especially food prepared by the wrong
caste of person or non-vegetarian food, make it extremely difficult for the religiously observant to casually accept or extend dinner invitations. Then there is the matter of protecting the family's women, carefully sheltered at home, from exposure to people 'not in our community. I found none of that in Rangoon. And as people brought out their wedding albums and photographs of important community events, it became clear these lose relationships across religious lines go back many years. Perhaps because of Burma's isolation from the rest of the world, the 'identity politics that rage in India (and elsewhere) seemed entirely absent among Indians there. There was an easy camaraderie between Gujarati Jains, Hindus and Muslims. The Gujarati merchant community in Rangoon is tiny compared to what it once was. Everyone knows everyone else. They have lived through some terrible difficulties: war, threatened expulsion, expropriation of property, summary arrest, torture, and even the ever-present possibility of execution. If they have survived, it is by trusting each other. Yet it was extraordinary that these people welcomed me, an American who looks White and speaks little Gujarati, as if I were a long-lost member of this close-knit group. Purely on the basis of my indisputably Gujarati name; my relationship to the Khara family, some members of which were known to some of the people I met; and an appreciation of my interest in the history of the community in Burma, I was treated with the utmost generosity and affection by one and all. I was a rare emissary of a piece of the community that had gotten away and they were what was left of the piece left behind, and so my entire stay had the feeling of a reunion among long-lost family members, although was related to none of them even by a drop of blood.
Mira Kamdar is a writer and broadcaster in Washington, USA. The above article is an extract from 'Motiba's Tattoos.' Mira Kamdar, 2000
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