‘Three Countries, Three Lives: A Doctor’s Story,’ Lindy Rajan Cartner’s memoir, is the story of a Tamil family’s journey across Burma, India, and UK, and the author’s ode to her mother
“‘One weekend, I was wearing a sari and we were sitting on the pier of Southend. A middle-aged woman approached us. ‘Why have you come to my country?’ she asked me. ‘Because you came to mine,’ I said. She walked away,’” writes Lindy Rajan Cartner, a Rangoon-born Tamil, who grew up in British India and moved to the UK in the 1960s, in her memoir, Three Countries, Three Lives: A Doctor’s Story (Aleph Book Company), which spans from 1870 to 1977. The book encapsulates her experiences of living in Burma, India, and England. A Consultant Haematologist who retired in 1997, she was a young witness to the Mandalay Bombing in 1942 after the Japanese conquest of Burma, a curious pupil during India’s independence, and an unapologetic woman claiming her space, and making a life of her own, in England in the face of blatant racism and bureaucracy.
Cartner’s career as a hematologist — she also served as Honorary Clinical Lecturer at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne — and her personality as a resilient feminist are like the two strands of DNA, entwining to form the life force she becomes. And these strands are nothing less than family heirlooms. Her Tatha, maternal grandfather, chose to convert to Christianity and was baptized at the age of 16. He went on to study medicine against all odds. In 1900, he moved to Burma to treat an endemic plague. Her grandmother, Paati, knew Tamil only but learned English and Burmese quickly to host English guests at their home in Burma. In fact, she set up her own small business, trading fowls to firearms and haricot beans to horses.
The India chapter: culture shock in Lucknow
Cartner’s life in India is told with the utmost enthusiasm of a child who loves mischief. She puts forth her experiences of the colonial attitude of her peers and teachers in school. The narration blends the personal with the socio-political through the behaviour and responses to the outside world that she notices in school. As an Indian Christian, formerly living in Rangoon, she was educated in Christian methodist institutions. Cartner studied in the girls’ Bishop Cotton boarding school in Bangalore. She was a keen observer of the British lifestyle juxtaposed with Indian values in her daily life. For instance, British and Anglo-Indian girls were often courted by British and Indian boys alike. They received letters while none of the Indian girls did, nor did they aspire for it.
However, the experiences of racial bias didn’t prepare Lindy for the culture shock that was to come when she moved to Lucknow to study at the girls’ Isabella Thorne College. The shock was nothing less than entering a new country with a new language, and etiquette. Having faced the superiority complex of British methodists in school, she was surprised to find that American methodists treated Indians as equals. Lindy was more interested in extra-curricular activities than studies. A remarkable athlete from an early age, she was aware of her strengths and weaknesses and could put them to use skillfully. As a student and a doctor, she wasn’t ambitious but was open to the advice of people around her which led her to explore various options available to her till she could decide the field she wanted to be in. She moved to England with her Anglo-Indian husband after completing her degree at Christian Medical College, Vellore.
Her mother: A formidable figure
There is a certain rhythm to the third part of the book where Cartner balances building her career, having a child, and moving houses multiple times as they move from place to place, including moving to India in between. From befriending British colleagues who helped her find her footing in the field to attending rigged interviews, from facing racism at work to confronting it with her mother-in-law, from making space for themselves in shared houses to hiring a white house help, the narration flows like a river. Sometimes despair turns into a storm but Cartner waits patiently and sails through, having built a resilient personality, holding up her mother as a role model.
Alice Rajan, Cartner’s mother, was a ferocious woman. She remained the North Star in Cartner’s life till her demise in 1977. A woman with a strong conviction, she separated from her husband but didn’t impose her experiences on her daughter. She studied English in Rangoon and chose to work there as a teacher till the Mandalay bombing in 1942 — the violence that affected Cartner at a young age. Upon her return to India, Alice Rajan became the matriarch of her father’s house in Madras (now Chennai), taking over running the household, and deciding the best education for her daughters even if it meant sending Cartner to Lucknow or Anne, her elder daughter, abroad to study nursing.
Alice Rajan was a woman of few words but always a woman of her words. She worked as a despatch worker for Britain in Rangoon during the World War. She proactively changed jobs as a teacher when her values didn’t match with those of the institution. She wasn’t restricted by the gender roles prevailing in the society. Cartner describes her mother as not being fond of men. Alice told her that men tended to be selfish, especially in marriage. She equipped her daughters to be financially independent, setting an example. And even in her old age, she had a childlike curiosity to explore England; she was passionate about English Literature.
The sum of her experiences
Cartner’s memoir refrains from preaching; instead, through each of her experiences, it underscores, rather clearly, that a person is a product of all the people and the experiences around her. At times, it might come across as a narrative of privilege, but through deceptively simple prose, she captures the adventures of her life — from train rides to and from Lucknow with friends to the camping trips she undertook with them. One is never sure what the next page holds, and that keeps a reader hooked.
Ultimately, the memoir is Cartner’s ode to her mother — a force to be reckoned with. It begins and ends with Alice Rajan, and in between, the pages carry the life of her daughter she had complete faith in to excel in life, despite the barriers of colonial biases and racial prejudices. Recounting her experience of the bombing, she writes: “There was devastation everywhere. Fires were raging. Huge green trees were burning fiercely and crashing down. The heat was overpowering. Suddenly, I realised I was alone. I had lost my mother. And everyone else. But I kept running and running to avoid the heat and falling branches. There were huge craters in the ground, and dead bodies and limbs and heads and blood everywhere. I just picked my way through them. I do remember being concerned that I had lost one of my flip-flops, and that my mother would scold me. I was certain I would be found by her, and that from somewhere she would turn up, as she always did. It never occurred to me that she might be dead. She had always been my security, not my father, who was often away touring and when we went to him for something or the other he would say, ‘Go and ask your mother’.”
