Formative years of an introvert (4):Transition from British Burma to Nipon Biruma

In due course, that is when his designated term at his post of Buthidaung-Maungdaw Township was up, my father was transferred to the small town of Myittha in “Burma Proper” as my mother referred to central Myanmar. No thanks to her Bagyi Pu. Any way, he was by then no longer the Prime Minister. The politics of pre-independence Myanmar prior to the Second World War were, to put it mildly, unpredictable to the extreme. Yes, I said “to put it mildly”. The clash of the Titans, sorry, I mean personalities, and party interests played the dominating role, changing the political scenario overnight as it were, not unlike the quick changes of background settings on the stage of a theatre. And of course, all the time behind the scene, there was always the Honourable British Governor.

It was while my father was in the town of Myittha that I came into this world, a time when the dark clouds of war were starting to envelope the blue sky of this lovely planet. A few days before I was born, my father took my mother to the city of Mandalay, to a private clinic. He left her in the care of her relatives in Mandalay and went back to his post at Myittha town. My father was a duty-conscious civil servant. After her ordeal of giving birth to me (I weighed in at nine pounds at birth), my father brought mother and son back to Myittha. It was while he was at this town that the Second World War reached my country.

With the rapid retreat of the British from Myanmar, there was no longer any proper administration of the country and in some places there was no law and order. But the inert gentle cultural traits of the Myanmar people kept the situation from turning into total chaos. Many administrative officers, like my father, had to desert their posts and take refuge together with their families in other safe corners of the country. They wouldn’t like the invading Japanese army to know that they had served the British in the country.

There was one good thing about British rule. Things ran smoothly, there was peace in the country, people could go about their own businesses freely without any restrictive and unnecessary orders, almost no corruption on the part of government officials, and so on. For laws, there was the Penal Code. the Criminal Procedure Code, and other Acts, well established rules and regulations. (These are still being used in the country). But on the other hand, British companies had the monopoly and dominated the economic life of the country, a gentle and systematic blood-sucking of the country’s abundant natural resources.