A British expat who has made Mumbai her new home recounts her journey of navigating a pandemic and a military coup in Myanmar in her new book
Milla Chaplin Rae began writing her book last year after she moved to be with her husband Dylan in Mumbai
Of all things that writer Milla Chaplin Rae loves about Mumbai, it is the city’s weather. “I am British,” she tells us, when we join her at a pool café below her Worli residence, “We are used to experiencing grey conditions for most part of the year. So, I love living in some place that’s hot.” The city’s extreme weather suits her, she confesses.
Rae, who is originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands, has had a peripatetic life—for most part of her 20s and 30s, the marketing and communications professional travelled to Beijing, New York and later, London. But it was in Yangon, Myanmar, where she truly felt she belonged. Months into moving, she met her future husband, Dylan, an Australian national. The couple married, and were blessed with a baby boy, Jasper, in December 2020, in the middle of COVID-19. If going through a pregnancy in the middle of a pandemic, and in a place in the back of beyond, wasn’t worse, the family found itself in the thick of a military coup two months later.
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On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military overthrew the democratically elected government. Days into the coup d’état, violence escalated, as civilians took to the streets with civil disobedience movements to protest the brutal military rule. Rae was barely juggling through motherhood, when this storm hit the family. It was unwise of them to stay, she admits. “But my son’s passport took forever… the second wave of COVID hit, and all the couriers were shut. I couldn’t send his documents to the UK,” she remembers. “My parents [back home] were very concerned. I wouldn’t say that we lied to them, but we put a very rosy tint on everything. We’d only share happy photographs of Jasper, while on the news, they’d be seeing explosions, violence on the streets. I think they were struggling to reconcile with what we were sharing versus what was really going on.”
Rae has documented this journey to hell and back, in a new self-published book, Not Quite to Plan: My Experience of a Global Pandemic and Military Coup with a Newborn Baby. Before Myanmar turned into an inferno, it was a place that was all heart. In the book, Rae shares how she loved the country. “I felt as though I was in on a wonderful secret,” she writes, “Myanmar was a leapfrog nation, a frontier market, and a bewitching travel destination. To Dylan and I, it was simply the place we called home.”
That Rae moved to the country, just months before the general election was held in November 2015, spurred renewed hope. But the coup changed everything. “We lived in a gated complex, which was far away from the city centre, so we were safe,” she shares, “But the atmosphere outside was one of fear, violence and vigilante justice. You didn’t know whom to trust.”
Rae, who worked on the marketing team of a bank, remembers learning about one of her teammates being put into jail. “She was a social media manager, and happened to be on the wrong street at the wrong time. She spent two months in jail,” Rae says. “There were a couple of foreigners who were detained and even taken off the plane for being suspected of having donated to the resistance cause. I feared the worst, even though I wasn’t political or making any controversial statements.”
During this time, journaling helped her make sense of her reality. “I started writing it in March [2021]. Life at that time was so strange, so absurd… there were blockades, soldiers on the roads. It felt like we were in an alternate universe.”
Fortunately, for the family, Dylan was hired by a leading construction company in Mumbai. Though he had never been to India, Rae had visited twice before with her father and sibling. Having always wanted to live the expat life, the couple took the plunge. But it would be several months before they reunited in the metropolis.
The book takes the reader through the family’s scramble to find their way together, as they travelled from Ireland to Jersey, all the way to Australia, before arriving in India. The strict visa rules here meant they had to wait longer than they predicted. There were many moments during those months when Rae broke down.
But, Mumbai has been kind to them. This is where she started writing the book in July last year, after dipping into her journals. “I think the biggest challenge I had was coming from Jersey, which is dead silent. There are no people. You have little country lanes, and people wander around.” Jersey, where she stayed for a few months after Myanmar, she says, was good for her recovery.
“But it made my transition to Mumbai harder, because I came from a very quiet and sleepy place. The thing that hits you about Mumbai is the noise. Everything here is loud—the food, the people, the traffic, the festival.” For her son, Jasper, who will turn three in December, there is comfort in this sound. “He loves it here, and thinks it is home. We call him the paratha-saurus, because he loves parathas. He enjoys dosas and khakras—our neighbours are Gujarati—and asks for pani, not water. Right now, he is going through a phase, where if I ask him a question, he goes ‘ha’ instead of ‘yes’,” she laughs, adding, “For him, India is home, and that’s what has made it easier for me. I like to see this place through his eyes.”
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