Ma Pu and Ma Yi
Ko S'la's two wives — the gaunt, hard-faced first and the fat, lazy 'little wife' some years younger. They quarrel every morning that Flory is in headquarters, and briefly make peace to bring him a pot of something they insist is good for cuts.
The book
At a glance
- The two wives of Ko S'la, Flory's servant
- The first wife; gaunt and hard-faced, with many children
- The second wife, called the little wife; younger, fat and lazy
- The servants' quarters behind Flory's bungalow
- Chapters 6, 9 and 16, with a mention in chapter 25
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMa Pu and Ma Yi are the two wives of Ko S'la, the Burmese servant who has looked after John Flory, the English timber merchant at the centre of Burmese Days, for fifteen years. The whole household lives in the servants' quarters behind Flory's bungalow in Kyauktada. Ma Pu is the first wife, thin and hard-faced and worn down by having had a great many children. Ma Yi is the second, whom the book calls the little wife: younger, fat and lazy.
They cannot be in the same place without fighting. Whenever Flory is at his headquarters rather than out in the jungle, and the household is therefore all together, the two of them quarrel, and George Orwell reports it as a fixture of the morning. The first sound of it in the book is a sharp grating scream from the servants' quarters that sounds like "Kwaaa!", followed by the deeper voices of the men trying to break it up.
Ko S'la gets the worst of it. On one occasion Ma Pu chased him with a bamboo, he dodged behind Flory, and Flory took a heavy blow on the leg.
They appear in the crowd scenes of the servants' side of the house, and their sharpest moment is a small piece of business over a hairpiece. When Flory pays off and dismisses Ma Hla May, the Burmese woman he has been keeping as his mistress, the cart is loaded and a screaming row breaks out at the gate, because Ma Yi and Ma Hla May both claim the same switch of false hair. Flory settles it by giving the hairpiece to Ma Yi and two rupees to Ma Hla May.
How the book draws them
- How the book draws themMa Pu is gaunt and hard-faced, stringy from years of child-bearing. Ma Yi is fat, lazy and some years younger. Orwell gives them no other description.
- The morning quarrelThey fight constantly whenever Flory is in town and the household is together. Flory hears it start from his compound as a grating scream, with men's voices trying to stop it.
- The bambooMa Pu once came after Ko S'la with a bamboo. He dodged behind their employer, and Flory got a nasty blow on the leg.
- Watching the EnglishwomanWhen Elizabeth Lackersteen, newly arrived from England, sits on Flory's veranda, the two of them join the crowd peering between the rails at her: the cook, Ko S'la's four eldest children, an unclaimed naked child and two old women who have walked down from the village to look.
- The hairpieceThe fight at the gate on the day Ma Hla May is turned out is over a switch of false hair that she and Ma Yi both say is theirs. Flory awards it to Ma Yi.
- The pot for his cutsAfter Flory falls off a pony in front of the whole town and comes home bleeding, the two of them are briefly at peace and arrive together with a pot of some mixture they insist is good for cuts. Flory quietly tells Ko S'la to throw it out of the window and bring the antiseptic ointment instead.
- On EnglishwomenWhen the male servants sit dreading the arrival of an English wife in the house, both women sigh along with them. Neither takes it as an insult to her own sex, because in that household an Englishwoman is held to be something else entirely.
In the last chapter Ko S'la inherits four hundred rupees under Flory's will and opens a tea-shop in the bazaar with the family. It fails, and Orwell gives the reason plainly: the two women fought in it at all hours. Ko S'la and his brother Ba Pe have to go back into service, and the family goes through a year of real poverty in which Ko S'la's small son Ba Shin dies of a cough.