Beginning of life in the United Kingdom for one of the pioneers of Manipuri emigrants overseas
- Third part of the book: Dr Mohendra's Memoir to be published -

Dr Mohendra Irengbam *

BMA Annual Conference in Bournemouth 1989. Author (2nd from left) with Chairman Dr John Marks & wife

Come Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Demetrius ... The course of true love did never run smooth. True, it has not changed much in the past 457 years since the birth of Shakespeare. Likewise, life is full of ups and downs. So is my life. It is only interesting when I look back. My life has been a bitter sweet journey.

Nothing good lasts forever. All good things come to an end, but it is good to remember there is space again for other good things to happen. So, as it happened, I was transferred to the District Hospital in Churachandpur, with the arrival of Dr Pukhrambam Kumud from London.

With the news of his imminent arrival, I began to shift my mental gear forward and backward and it tweaked. Churachandpur, the next best place on earth after Imphal. Before I heard about my transfer from the horse's mouth, I preempted it. I wanted to whack myself somewhere less nauseous.

I talked to the Medical Director Dr Malhotra and I got myself transferred to Churachandpur District Hospital. The Bengali doctor I replaced, was not too happy. He would not speak to me when I took the charge from him. I did not blame him.

Churachandpur is a beautiful town with rolling hills and lush green of the vegetation. It is the second town after Imphal. Not too far, not too near. Many modern amenities were available. During the time I was posted there, it was like staying at a holiday resort and paid for. Nothing much to do.

A bachelor with some sort of party on most evenings, often just having whiskies with the SDO, a Punjabi IAS officer, deputed by Delhi. No friends, no relatives. Only girlfriends. I was not a bachelor by default but by choice. Only for the time being. I had a goal. I was oriented and confident that I would marry someone and have a shine on my life. But I was not quite sure how I could jolt back to normal settled life. I was feeling languish and lost.

While I was feeling uneasy about how this stage in my career could wrap up, I would often travel to Imphal and stay there overnight to attend parties. I had a jeep or Vespa scooter for transport. They were impish escapades. Soon, I became acquainted with Lt Col Jagdish, the Commander of the 7 Guards Battalion that was stationed at Churachandpur for counter-insurgency deployment. I was entertained with Government-issue Officers' rum, most nights at the officers' mess in a tent. Life was easy while the going was good, except that I was not in the Army.

I was also quite friendly with R B Saxena, the Chief Secretary to the Government of Manipur in Imphal and some other important Mayang officers. Having spent about 10 years in Hindi speaking North India, and articulating with almost perfectly modulated Hindi/Urdu, they would soon relate to me as 'one of them'.

On the roof of Dr Brajabidhu's Hospital at the Airport Road
L-R: Late Dr N Shyansunder, Late Dr N Sukumar, Late Dr M Samarendra, Dr Brajabidhu, Author, Dr L Jogamani

The practice of medicine at the District Hospital with 30 beds, was just basic. A good pharmacist could have done the job. Only that, rarely, I had to perform as an emergency, some surgical operations including Caesarean section or forceps delivery. They would bring down the patient in a homemade stretcher, walking for a couple of days. And they would refuse for the patient to be sent to Civil Hospital in Imphal by the ambulance car.

I was fortunate that a pretty-looking and talented staff Nurse Chingnu, who was trained at a Mission hospital in Assam, was an accomplished anaesthetist, using ether and chloroform. My life at Churachandpur was becoming dry and yellow like the foliage of deciduous tree in winter. It took a physical toll. The kind of body I inhabited became a mechanical one like the humanoid robots that staff a hospital in Wuhan in China - the probable birth place of Covid- 19 virus.

I was not being happy at work. I had no job satisfaction. I was not positively absorbed by my professional job. Besides, I was not being committed to advancing my career. My life then, was a wasteful one [for me] after all the years of education and training. There was no incentive to further myself.

Due to lack of cases - patients with a variety of diseases, I began to forget the basics of medicine. My life became an anachronism on escapism. That is, my existence there, was a mere window dressing and my thoughts rambled about finding a way to avoid it. I wondered if I was going to be a turkey that was voting for Christmas by choosing to be a doctor, who could not fulfil his ambition of being beneficial for society as a whole.

Churachandpur was an up-and-coming postwar town, peaceful and serene, with distinctive geography environment. But my lifestyle was in a carnivallike spirit with a few shots of rum each night and the morning hangover, often with a frontal headache and nausea lurching in my stomach. As I was not eating much after the drinks I was losing weight. I was beginning to feel that I was sinking into the ground and it appeared to be progressing at a geometrical rate.

It was a personal conflict and yet, the phrase seemed too commonplace for the two opposing directions in whose clash I then, sensed a potential for disaster. I detested the idea that my career would end without cheers. My emotions seemed stirred to a thin, weary turmoil by the passing of days. And I kept my feelings to myself as I thought the problem could be fixed.

Wedding June 6 1970

It might well have been sensible to wish to duck the conflict by accepting to be a peripatetic graduate doctor, but that did not make mental explosions about loss of self-esteem going off all around me any less real. I was also unsettled by my delayed bachelorhood. I was nearing the watershed of 30. I had not responded to the call for a marriage as I was in a deep predicament. I was very lucky that three lady doctors wanted to marry me. Having such a large number of candidates was as hazardous as having none.

I was friendly with all of them and I would feel very uncomfortable to marry one of them and leave the rest crestfallen. We were living and working at close quarters. Though I have acted all my life as a tough guy I am a considerate person. I just could not overthrow the inner governor – call it conscience, call it ethics. Don't think me ungrateful. It was just that I was still in the phenomenon of prolonging adolescence.

To make matters worse, while in Churachandpur, I got acquainted with a very smart girl, daughter of a high ranking VIP in the Manipur government, with a view to tying a knot. Then, a question rumbled along the horizon of my mind that, once married, I would have the privilege of being sent to a colleges somewhere, for an MD degree on a government grant. That said, I was not trying to make diamond out of dust.

But it was a non-starter. When I lightly broached the subject about marrying her, my brother Gokulchandra was not very keen, for whatever reasons he had. And, I would do nothing against his wish. In addition to my father, the second family influence on me was him, right from early school days through to my medical education.

In any case, I was not that keen to get an MD Degree if I could help myself. I was hooked for MRCP from London. That was part of my ambition since I was an undergraduate. It would be a status symbol as it was for all my teachers in the medical College.

While I was on the subject of matrimony, my nostalgic mood lanced out a long-forgotten story of my youth with gnawing unease, followed by ethical and moral convictions. Poignant memories sometimes do not age.

Honeymoon at Lake Lucerne, Switzerland 1970

Once upon a time, about 70 years ago, I had a teenage-romance. It was the only one. It was as much the product of my youth as the time of my emancipation from the dreary schooling. It was full of excitement. I did not exactly understand the historical or evidential complexities of a romance. It was an enterprise for me. I had just finished schooling and saw this girl one day. She was slender with grace and elegance, which was pleasingly ingenuous to me.

I managed to pass on a letter with 3-4 lines. I cannot remember the words now. She responded favourably. I was over the moon. Intoxication was subtle, a tremor in the blood stream. As physical mixing of a boy and a girl was taboo at that time in Imphal, it soon became an epistolary romance, writing sweet nothings like 'I can't live without you'. We hardly met. In a month, I left for college in Bombay. And she went to study in Delhi.

Over time, our love affair became the talk of the town. Partly because of my flamboyance and partly because of her personality with a positive attitude, a balanced extroversion (ambivert) and confidence. It lasted 7 years, and I must have written a caboodle of love letters in the pseudo name of Tinkerbell Tendufla. I borrowed the name from a Tibetan girl of that name I knew at the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling.

Nothing lasts forever. Happiness is fleeting. The ethereal romance came to an end one day, because of misinformation or disinformation from a trusted friend. The drip-feed of gossip continued to find its way into the public domain. My pride was a bit wounded but my heart was relieved. A faint wrathful indignation unfurled in me with the storm of love that rocked the boat. I perhaps, misread the tea leaves. She might have had other irons in the fire.

I respectfully ended our affaire- d'amour with a final epistle – a 'billet-doux to Mon Cherie amour'. I was then a student in the medical college. She had her pride and did not barter. It looked like any romanticism of the lack of romance had taken all of seven years to part. She married a non-Manipuri Mayang and left Imphal. It turned out to be that we were not exactly Leila and Majnu, or Romeo and Juliet. Human emotions tend to have many ups and downs like periodic oscillations of sine waves moving across an oscillograph. It was a part of growing up.

With hindsight, when I go philosophical, I know life is unpredictable. Often a terrain of tragic miscalculations. ("Wheeling and dealing."). A small event can change the direction of your entire life. As the old proverb says: There's a many slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Things can still go wrong while the conclusion seems certain.

On the other hand, sometimes what looks like a very bad day can be just clearing the way for good things to come. Much of what happens to us in our later life are the consequences of choices we made before. Karma in Hinduism. That is how I am here, writing the story.

I only became philosophical late in life, because of my sets of beliefs, prejudices, convictions and spiritual laxity. Like many young people, I am not very much into the existence of a God. Existence of God is a philosophy. Philosophies after all, are points of view of different people about a sceptical subject.

In any case, I had no more airy-fairy romances. But I did have small flings, such as a Muslim girl, Aftab Alam from Chandni Chowk in Delhi, among others, who wanted me to become a Muslim so that she could marry me. Life is a conundrum of esoterica.

Now back to Churachandpur. As I was woken up by memory, vignettes did come back to me. My mind became a labyrinth of slum through which I could not thread my way out. I began to suffer from all the self-doubts that came from being a non-specialist in Medicine. I detested the idea that my career would end without cheers. Without a postgraduate degree I would forever remain persona non grata, with a blunted ego, in the higher echelons of Meitei society. I was not ready for a life on the downward slope.

While I was at this crossroads, but with undiminished confidence, navigating my mental iceberg in trying to find a direction towards a larger understanding of my life that lay ahead, a reminder to come to London, arrived with a voucher from nowhere. To rephrase it, something I have completely forgotten appeared like bolt from the blue. It seemed it was when the penny dropped. I quickly sieged my good luck. With the stench of my egos burning, I revved up with a buzz of a big moving story.

The reality had kicked in. I saw light at the end of the tunnel. I lapped it up because that was all what I got. Though I was not a believer in the idea of manifest destiny, that little piece of paper became a metaphysical pivot that changed my life forever. Armed with a little imagination to steel myself against the predations of the past 2 years, I quickly zeroed in on my personal and career ambition. I had the good fortune at that time, of knowing Dr Longjam Jogendra Singh from Kongba, who was then in the UK. He wrote a couple of letters asking me to come to UK.

Dr Longjam Jogendra with Sonia (Philippine wife of late Chongtham Sarat) and Margaret behind, at his home in Nuneaton near Birmingham, opening a bottle of champagne.

With a clutch of expectancy at my chest and arrogant confidence, I at once, decided to go to London for study cum work, and also to sample the British way of life. I wanted a fair crack at the whip. I wanted to be respected. I did not want to spend the rest of my life with bellows of frustration. I promised my doting mother that I would come back home in 3 and maximum 4 years.

I got my Indian passport with the visa to travel to any country in the world except Portugal in a matter of a few days. I knew RB Saxena, the Chief Secretary of Manipur Government as a friend. He made it easier for me to get a passport by issuing a no-objection letter on behalf of Manipur government (I was a government servant).

It became convenient that I did not avail of the Manipur government scholarship to do my MBBS, which by contract, I would have been tied down for 5 years, with postings to ungodly places where there was no motorable roads, electricity, tapped purified water or proper food.

By a stroke of luck, the late Dr Khuraijam Jatiswar, a friend of mine, who retired as the first Gynaecologist of RIMS, had just come back from London after doing his FRCS. He gave me 25 pounds in exchange for rupees. He also gave me the address of a place to stay in London.

Dr Jatiswar was a very confident person. It worked that way for him. Before I left, he asked me as a friend, whether I would let him know who I was going to marry among those single lady doctors. I didn't say anything. I was not sure about my immediate future. It was, at that age, when I just accepted everything as a new adventure and that uncertainty was an unavoidable part of daily life, while being quite positive. We continued to be friends until he died.

Most people like me needed ambition in life to advance and accomplish the desired goal, which for me was more for respect in society rather than economics. The lack of which would knock the stuffing out of me. This however, is a view, which occasionally gets an airing whether it is a big fuss over nothing. My personal ego was the rocket fuel for my career. When I die, that will be my dearest memory.

In my case, whatever happened, I was cheerfully optimistic that it was a well-defined step that transcended the specifics of my goal.

I made up my mind to go to London.


Author's website: drimsingh.com