'No country is yours or mine alone'

KOLKATA: That he has been married to Aparna Sen for 20 years is the last line about the author. The jacket sleeve starts by saying that Kalyan Ray's family was uprooted from the Ganges delta — now in Bangladesh — by a combination of natural disasters, political upheaval and poverty. These precisely are the factors that took the Irish people to distant shores in India and America, after the Great Potato Famine of 1840s, as Ray's second novel shows.'No Country', launched by Bloomsbury first in New York, was released here on Tuesday, their 21st anniversary, with readings by Sen and Ray.
The 500-odd pages resulting from thorough research weave a compelling tale rooted in Irish history, British colonialism in India, and the Shirtwaist Factory Fire of New York. Far fetched? By no means, you realize once you start leafing through the volume. In fact, you'll be startled by the realization that O'Dwyer, Dyer and Tegart, all came from Ireland, primarily to curb Indian nationalists — who were greatly inspired by the Irish movement for self-rule.
Perhaps the biggest irony in the fascinating tale of migrations through generations and across continents is the life of the protagonist Padraig. The young man leaves his Sligo Bay home to participate in Daniel O'Connelly's movement in Dublin but lands up in India as an East India Company soldier. Little did the man who dies looking at landscape paintings of his birthland know that he was sired by Lord Palmerston, the British PM whose agrarian policies and curbing of trade were among the most brutal policies against both, India and Ireland.
But wait: No Country is no history book, it's a page turner whose characters, often, have their origins in Kolkata. Witness Madgy Finn, the filthy 'tramp' who always shows up in Mulaghmore with a child clinging to her bare breasts, is drawn from Ray's memory of "a 'pagli' who never missed a 'kangali bhojan' outside the Ganguram opposite our Bhowanipore house" in 1950s. Why just her? "Padraig's strong and beautiful mother Maire Aherne, is endowed with the quiet dignity of my Baro Pishi, beautiful and widowed," Ray realized after he'd finished the pen portrait.
And then, of course, there's Estelle O'Brian who later rose to fame as the famed beauty Merle Oberon. "It's a fact that she was an Anglo Indian (born of an English father and a Bengali mother who never acknowledged as more than an ayah) who schooled at La Martinere and recorded that Midsummer's Night Dream as her first play ever." Chats with Neil O'Brian weren't his only source of information — Ray researched even who was the headmaster of La Martinere in 1920s.
"Scratch the surface and you'll see, Ireland's all around us," says Ray who "loved to distraction Miss Doreen in Miss B Hartley's kinder garden: she too was Irish!" In earnest his absorption with Ireland started when he was in class V of St Lawrence School, with cousins and friends in Loretto, La Martinere and St Xavier's. "An Irish nun one day said, 'Our family had to go from pillar to post with a bowl, begging for food!" The graphic turn of English phrase wasn't the only imagery that lived on in the child's mind, the picture of poverty too refused to leave him.
Small wonder, "Kolkata contributed the biggest amount for relief to those affected by the Potato Famine — not the British crown nor America, which was crafted in large measure by early Irish immigrants," recounts Ray, a professor whose favourites include Yates, Swift and Shaw — "all Irish."
The facts, mind you, are only there to make history believable. For Ray's interweaving stories, covering varieties of poverty in India, Ireland and America, are meant to establish one universal truth: No country is made of gold. Everywhere, human beings are the same, no matter where he goes from, nor where he goes to, in search of bread, butter and better rules.