Identity and Home in Meira Chand’s Novels

by Anu Kumar

Meira Chand in Singapore, 2011. Photo credit: Anu Kumar

It is in the very first pages of ‘A Different Sky’ that we encounter the three main characters whose destiny unravels across this book.  In the process, we find it is as much the story of Howard Burns, Mei Lan and Raj Sherma as it is about Singapore during the crucial years between 1937-1955, and the Second World War that came in between.   

The story begins one hot afternoon day when the trolley in which all three are travelling finds itself in the middle of a demonstration by a Chinese communist group on Kreta Ayer Road in 1927.   These demonstrations and the violence that followed form an actual incident and the narrative  came to Meira Chand late one night as she thought over how to begin the book. 

In 1997, Meira Chand had just moved to Singapore.  As she says, the idea for the book came to her on the suggestion of the city-state’s president, S R Nathan.   As she gathered material, her objective was to explain Singapore’s history to a new generation, in a manner that would bring it alive; the narrative constraints imposed by history  and the demands of the imagination however ran counter to each other.   And so the lines and image that came to Chand at 2 a m one night had an epiphany  about them.

Identity

Howard is of Eurasian descent,  a mixed people who are looked down upon by the whites.  His painful awareness of himself  as  an ‘outsider’   came early to him when he was evicted from a ‘whites only’  men’s room  at the Great World amusement Park.   He is always conscious of his darker cast of skin, which is a contrast to his sister Cynthia’s creamy appearance and her startling green eyes.  

His mother Rose has strains of Portuguese and Malaccan blood;  this makes them  a ‘people of shadows’ as Rose says.  The demonstration at Kreta Ayer that Howard witnesses, when the communists marched in memory of Sun Yat Sen, somehow stays in his mind. He is impressed with the daring they showed, standing up to the Malay soldiers and the British police chief.  It adds further to the sense of confusion he has.  He finds he has to serve the British who are happy to receive their loyalty and service but will do little to help the local communities to progress. 

Later, he finds himself discriminated against in his employment.  Merit, he realizes, had its ceiling for local communities.  He cannot win the Queen’s scholarship  that would have allowed him to study in England and Howard soon finds himself  engaged in learning the rights of local born communities.   Part of his education comes from the ill-treatment at the hands of his superior, John Calthrop.  Raj Sherma, a self-made Indian born businessman  tells him that the Japanese made better employers for they believed in the great Asiatic family, and that Asians should fight together against the ‘white colonial’ power.   As war breaks out in Singapore too, Howard wonders at the patriotism he sees everywhere, among the Indians and the Chinese, especially for a homeland that is far away. Inside him though there was only an emptiness.  He was ‘convinced he could lay down his life, if only he had something to lay it down for.”

His struggle as those of Mei Lan and Raj’s is part of Singapore’s story, as it moves from being a colonial nation to hesitantly seeking its own place in the community of nations.    Mei Lan is a little Chinese girl,  and she travels in this same trolley  with her ‘amah’ to the  poorer Chinese quarters of Singapore.  This is where Ah Siew is to meet her sisters, friends who came from the same village in China and promised to remain sisters.  And there is Raj Sherma, who is assistant to a cloth merchant and comes to the assistance of a local biscuit maker Joseph Ho.

The question of identity and the need to belong have always been central concerns in Meira Chand’s work. The colonial Singapore of ‘A Different Sky’ is a melting pot but the communities do not mix,  and the three of them wage their own struggles to find themselves in a country still making itself.   This is also evident in the stories of Joseph Ho and Lim Hock An, Mei Lan’s grandfather. As Arthur Boffort, a lodger in Rose’s hotel,  the Belvedere,  explains to the new guest, Wilfred Patterson who had spent his childhood spent in Malaya and is happy to be back after years in England, ‘Better be careful going all the way.  Its not done for the races to mix here, you  know.’  And then he warns Wilfred again, ‘Society here does not take kindly to intermarriage.  A man’s career is finished if he takes a dusky skinned wife.’

Some of Meira Chand’s early works have dealt with the outsider’s need to belong, or even to fit in.    In her first novel The Gossamer Fly (1979), Frances, a young British woman and her daughter, Natsuko are outsiders in very different ways.  Frances tries hard to make  herself at home in Japan,  but finally gives up unable to accept a society  totally different from the one she has grown up in.  There is a slatternly maid,  Horiko who has an affair with Frances’ husband, Kazuo once Frances leaves for England.   The affair deeply affects  the children Natsuko and her older brother Riichi.  Without her mother and a father who finds it difficult to understand her,  Natsuko finds herself too in a world she cannot figure out.  

The need to belong  was perhaps shaped by Meira Chand’s early experiences of growing up in England. She was  born in London, her father a doctor had moved from India in 1919. Her mother was Swiss, and her family had moved to England a generation earlier.  Meira’s parents found themselves in an England that was very different from the multicultural entity it is at present.  For them, the test was to settle in to a new country, one that was relatively mono-cultural, conscious of its superior empire status.   Meira Chand says her parents were trying to fit in and quite understandably couldn’t  pass on their culture to her or her siblings.  

What Women Want

The question of women and their concerns, how they carve out their own identity,  and  find their  voice also forms a central theme of her work.  Mei Lan in ‘A Different Sky’  learns even as a young child of the injustice that accompanies women’s lives.   She learns how  her grandfather had taken a second wife cruelly sidelining his first wife.  And then he had bought three young slave girls, and later taken one of them as his third wife.  Mei Lan had seen her mother Ei Ling die, abandoned and ignored by her husband, Mei Lan’s father. 

Mei Lan’s world in the huge mansion that is Lim Villa is very different from what she sees in the ‘kongsi fong’, where Ah Siew’s ‘sisters’ live.     The sisters were women who made themselves “useful”  and thus did not bind their feet.   Her second grandmother in contrast had feet as small as a doll’s, an asset that had impressed Mei Lan’s  grandfather first.   In her time,  Second Grandmother bemoans, men looked only at the feet.  “If you had a tiny foot and an ugly face you could make a better marriage than if you had a big foot and a beautiful face.  Nowadays men judge beauty only from a face. Everyone has gone mad.’”

When grandfather Lim’s fortunes take a sudden tumble, the family has to move out of Lim Villa into a smaller cottage.  Mei Lan resents the fact that her brother can go away to England for studies.  But  Second Grandmother is determined that she get married,  and so Mei Lan cuts her hair and even perms it  in the terrible modern style that shocks grandmother and also Ah Siew.

Her first brush with politics happens from her work with the China Relief Fund set up to raise funds to help mainland China ravaged by  Japanese occupation in the 1930s.   As a Japanese invasion of southeast Asia becomes imminent,  there is also talk of a China volunteer force to fight alongside the British.   Mei Lan  gets involved with a communist group that makes her arrest and incarceration inevitable, and she is  subjected to unheard of horrors by the kempeitai , the dreaded Japanese military police,  and by an officer, Nakamura in particular.  Yet by sheer spirit and unflagging will, Mei Lan overcomes this and dreams again of becoming a lawyer. 

Woman characters in their own distinct way stand out  in all of Meira Chand’ s novels.   Mei Lan’s First and Second grandmothers are stubborn women,  they are creatures of the times they are born into, and yet they are master survivors, marked by  determination and loyalty.  Ah Siew who is Mei Lan’s amah,  is fiercely protective about her.   Then there is Rose, Howard’s mother,  who makes a success of running her guest home after being widowed early . Cynthia, her daughter, studies to be a nurse  and then bravely cares for the sick and the wounded in the face of the relentless Japanese onslaught.

Meira Chand’s second novel,  (1981)  The Last Quadrant takes its name from the contours of a  typhoon as it sweeps down on a  orphanage in Kobe.  This is a city on Japan’s coast where Meira spent several years of her adult life.  Japan figures prominently in her  novels but in this novel in particular, three women seek difficult answers about where they must belong, about loyalty and following one’s heart.  There is the  English doctor Eva Kraig who works in a home for orphaned children; Akiko is the daughter she has adopted and then there is sudden appearance of Akiko’s mother who decides twenty years later to “claim” her.  The young British woman, Kate in   The Bonsai Tree, Meira Chand’s next novel (1983) finds the role of a wife very  stultifying in Japan.  Wishing to confront her domineering mother in law, Kate looks for her own individuality and finds work as an interpreter.  But in her desire to ‘get away’  she discovers facets of Japan she didn’t know before :  Japan's race of untouchables called the ‘Burakumin’, the gangsters, the discarded of society and the areas demarcated for prostitutes which is a place like none other.  The remade modern miracle that is Japan seems a chimera to Kate then.  Burakumins were discriminated against for a long time. It was not difficult to deduce their ancestry because the Japanese  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koseki" \o "Koseki" family registration (Koseki) system was fixed to ancestral home address until recently. 

History and Duality

Issues of history and duality also figure in Meira Chand’s books. She is interested in how received history could well be embellished or simply be ‘one-sided’.   In looking at twentieth century Japan,  Meira’s novels ask several questions -  how a Japanese martial identity was shaped,  and the inability for the most part to confront its war guilt during the years 1930s and 1940s.  In ‘A Different Sky’, for example,  the Japanese characters are the most intriguing,  they are ambivalent and have a lot of mystery in them. 

Shinozaki, who is drawn from real life, is the  press attaché at the Japanese embassy in Singapore.   He is appointed adviser of defence headquarters soon after the Japanese forces invade but he is able in this position to help many Chinese prisoners escape, even those suspected of being Communist sympathizers.   Several Chinese men were rounded up indiscriminately because the China relief fund had been raising funds to fight the Japanese.   Shinozaki is somewhat reminiscent of Kenjiro Nozaki the Japanese diplomat who acts according to his conscience in her earlier novel, ‘A Choice of Evils’. 

Even those drawn most starkly such as Nakamura, Mei Lan’s unrelenting tormentor who is reduced to a small, shrunken man at the time of the trial and his namesake Takeshi Nakamura, who is a Japanese teacher and also a spy,  have shades of vulnerability drawn into them. Yamaguchi, who is another mentor to Raj,  is Japanese too, and is punished by the British as the Japanese forces advance towards  the Malay Peninsula. Both Shinozaki and Yamaguchi came from different worlds, and yet have  something in common. As Yamaguchi explains to Raj, ‘We have both roamed the world for too long. We no longer know exactly where we belong.”

Meira Chand moved to Japan in 1962 soon after her marriage. She  lived in  Kobe for several years.  She remembers the isolation of the times and how very closed the Japanese society then appeared to her.   As Paula explains to Kate, in The Bonsai Tree  as is about to marry a textile heir in Japan  – ‘Japan is a rigid insular society, you can’t imagine how different it is.’

Her books bring out in large part the complexities of 20^th century Japan.  A Choice of Evils is a difficult novel that deals with the 1930s and the period of the terrible Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It  is a story told on several levels,  employing various characters: There is  a  young Russian researcher Nadya Komosky  who loves a British journalist Donald Addison and yet  has  an overwhelming passion for a liberal minded Japanese diplomat, Kenjiro Nozaki.  There is Tilik Dayal, an Indian nationalist working for Japanese intelligence,  a Chinese professor who has secret communist sympathies, an American missionary doctor and a Japanese soldier and they all come together  dislocated by the war experience.  The violence   each in turn witnesses brings out in some ways their ability of survive against odds.   

Meira’s work also reveals her fascination with some relatively unexplored aspects of history,   the incidents that somehow slip through the gaps of history.   

The Painted Cage written in 1986 is based on a real life incident that occurs in Yokohama in the late 1890s, when a young British woman is charged with the murder of her husband, Reggie.  She marries him against the wishes of her parents, but within months after leaving England discovers her husband’s philandering and his addiction to arsenic.   It is in Japan that Amy seeks out her independence but she also makes enemies. And when she is implicated in her husband’s murder, too many people are willing to believe her role in it. 

The Far Horizon (2001) takes on the story of Chief Magistrate Holwell who wrote of the Black Hole incident of Calcutta in 1756. Holwell himself bore grudges against the East India Company and thought he had been unfairly passed over for governor twice.  As he travelled down the river from Murshidabad to Calcutta he wrote his account depicting the ‘Black Hole’ and embellished it over time in the course of his trip. Once it was published, this narrative of the ‘Black Hole Incident’ created a furore in England.  

 Stories set in India

It was during her stay in India during the early 1970s, that Meira wrote several short stories.  Her first novel set in India though appeared in 1989, and is called ‘House of the Sun’.  It features primarily the Sindhis, a refugee community from the province of Sindh who moved to Bombay following Partition, hoping to make a new life for themselves.  There is the Hathiramani family, the wife obsessed with astrology and the husband, who is an inveterate diary keeper and is also involved in the project of his life – to tell the world the story of the Sindhi poet-philosopher Abdul Latif that would bring alive the contribution of the entire community to the world. The novel has a personal touch, because Chand’s husband is from the Sindhi community who moved from Sindh to the Punjab and then to Britain in the chaos that followed Partition.  

 This effort of individuals remaking themselves as part of their community or country appears most in the character of Raj Sherma in ‘A Different Sky’ again.   Raj is an orphan as he sets sail from Southern India to Singapore.  Yet he works hard, finding mentors unexpectedly and in a   variety of circumstances.  He makes a new life for himself in a new land, almost a contrast to his brother in law Krishna, who cuts a tragic figure; for in his search for India, he never belongs to the country he lives in, i.e., Singapore.   The search for home that Krishna or even Teddy Desouza, Howard’s older Eurasian colleague at work, are engrossed in becomes a thankless struggle. Home is not what you go looking for, home is where you already are, Meira Chand seems to say. 

  Meira Chand stayed in India for five years in the early 70s.   She says she felt a sense of completion when in India though she never really belonged here.  As she says, ‘in India, she was considered a British writer, and in Britain, a writer of Indian origin.’  It is this position of outsider that lends her novels a remarkable acuity and depth.   Her writing reflects her own position and as she has said before, she is not from the margins but someone writing from ‘cracks between cultures’. 

Meira Chand’s short fiction is not so well known, but a collection is due next year.  In the recent Sunday Times Short Story Competition, her story ‘The Pilgrimage’ was long listed along with a few others in a competition that saw several hundred entries.   A recent piece also appeared in the Asia Literary Review.  This new collection  will feature stories that Meira had worked on while in India and some have been reworked for this collection.  It should be something worth looking forward to. 

Anu Kumar is an author whose writing includes fiction, historical and current nonfiction, children's books, short stories and novels.

More about Meira Chand
South Asian Women Authors
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