Perhaps one of the most evocative phrases ever written by an Englishman about Burma belongs to Kipling's poem 'On the Road to Mandalay':
'Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!'
Which makes it all the more curious that Kipling never went to Mandalay and that he visited Burma in 1889 on a ship en route from Calcutta to Japan, and stayed only three days. He spent one of those days in Moulmein, and 'Mandalay' is based on a pagoda he visited there, the Kyaik-thanlan Pagoda.
When Kipling visited this pagoda, however, he had other things on his mind: 'I should better remember what that pagoda was like had I not fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with a Burmese girl at the foot of the first flight of steps,' he wrote in his travel journal. 'Only the fact of the steamer starting next noon prevented me from staying at Moulmein forever ...'
Which is perhaps why Kipling begins his poem with the words:
There's a Burma girl-a-settin', an' I know she thinks o' me.
I came to Burma in 1975 and, like Kipling, fell in love with a Burmese girl but unlike Kipling, I stayed for a whole year and married the girl, Khin San Myint.
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay
... and for that matter, there are no buses from Batemans Bay either!
"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!" [from John Irving's 'A Prayer for Owen Meany']
P.S. The ‘road’ to Mandalay in the song is in fact the Irrawaddy River – which makes some sense of the 10 lyrics about flying fish.
