Legends clung to Niranjan like barnacles to a ship's hull. Some, I suspected, were the products of his ingenuity. So I asked him about the commentary and wasn't surprised when he replied, "How could I tell one Chinese from another? I know even less about them than I do about football!"
Niranjan wasn't the only Indian to be confused. It's a national failing. Kunwar Natwar Singh recounts an amusing incident that took place in December 1954 when he was attached to a Chinese cultural delegation that performed in Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. After the show in Madras, Chen Chen Tho, China's vice-minister for culture who led the delegation, garlanded K Kamaraj, then chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Singh says that "imagining that all Chinese look alike, Kamaraj garlanded the interpreter, whose vigorous protests made the chief minister even more determined!"
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Of course, the Kunwar may have got the wrong end of the stick. Flaunting an obscure handle to his name and the author of books with telltale titles like The Magnificent Maharaja and Maharaja Suraj Mal, Singh might have missed the populist impulse of a politician indulging in the Indian equivalent of kissing babies on the stomp. Syed Shahabuddin once recalled admiringly that when he called on Muammar Gaddafi as India's ambassador, the Libyan leader hugged his local driver because they had fought together in the resistance. Shahabuddin saw Gaddafi as a man of the people.
A descendant of Tamil Nadu's toddy-tapping community would insist on similar egalitarian glory. With a genial "Parkalam" at the visiting minister, Kamaraj might deliberately have turned to the lowly interpreter as a more rewarding political target. He might not have known that in the China of the 1950s, the interpreter might well have been the vice-minister's boss.
The border war with China erupted not long after my conversation with Niranjan. And we had further evidence that Indians are all at sea when it comes to other races. I don't know if patriotic Calcutta mobs fell upon any Japanese in the city as they did on some lone Chinese, but I do remember "JAPAN" labels on car windscreens. There weren't too many Japanese in the city but the few businessmen and consular officials were not gambling on the Indian's -Bengali's, in this instance - ability to distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese.
It can cut many ways. I used to tease my old friend from Sikkim, Karma Topden, when he was appointed Indian ambassador to Mongolia that Ulan Bator would regard him as one of their own. There's also blatant deception, as in a smart Thai restaurant in Bombay where a pretty young Mongolian-looking girl in brocaded silk pha nung received us. I asked if she was from Bangkok and she smiled. Chiang Mai? She smiled again. Phuket? A third smile. Running out of Thai place names, I demanded to know her home. Aizawl, she replied. As noted in this column two years ago, Jyoti Basu was upset when a British writer wrote he was "surrounded by Chinesey-looking types". "That was our Darjeeling district committee," he protested.
But, as Indians know, foreigners are ignorant. To our shame, we often can't recognise our own. Hokishe Sema, who was elected chief minister of Nagaland no fewer than four times before becoming governor of Himachal Pradesh, told me that Bombay's premier hotel had once demanded his passport. I witnessed the same blunder in Bengaluru's Vidhana Soudha when a Naga student was mistaken for an inmate of one of Karnataka's Tibetan colonies. This inability to identify fellow Indians was partly responsible for the disturbances in many parts of north, west and south India that forced hundreds of Northeasterners to go back in 2012.
It happens because we haven't yet come to terms with our own diversity. That is something we must do if we are ever to appreciate that First, Second and Third Chinese, and millions more, are distinctive individuals who comprise a great nation. India must muster courage, confidence and more courtesy than is now shown to diversity to meet the challenge and opportunity it presents.