by Rory Maclean
In the neon-lit storeroom we almost overlooked Item 1950. As 3.2.5. Among many conspicuous treasures, it seemed to offer little of interest. The listing in the catalogue stated simply, ‘Basket with lid; as women use for market.’ It had been donated to the museum by the widow of a British civil servant. She had probably found it while cleaning out the attic. But instead of turning the page to the rattan cricket cages and hunter’s powder horn pouch inset with beetle wings, I hesitated over the entry. The name of the civil servant had caught my eye. It suggested that this basket might be something out of the ordinary.
James George Scott was a bearish man with eyes full of laughter. I have a photograph of him, unshaven, unkempt, smiling outside a canvas tent on the road to Kengtung. In a camera’s shutter-snap his whole life seems to be encapsulated, an enthusiastic adventurer ready to toss aside his pith helmet, roll up his sleeves and get down to the business of empire-building. He lived in Burma for more than thirty years in the late nineteenth century, serving as Frontier Officer, helping to map the Siamese border and receiving a knighthood for his contribution to the establishment of British rule in the Shan States. Yet his enduring legacy is not as a distinguished superintendent, aloof and busy with colonial administration, but rather in his books. Scott is probably the only Western writer to have captured the spirit of Burmese society. In his best-known book, The Burman: His Life and Notions, he wrote with insight, without condescension or romanticism, at a time when the country’s old ways were changing for ever. His work recorded the life and beliefs of a vanishing age: will a Sunday-born man marry well a woman born on a Wednesday? To bring luck, should a house be built on male, female or neuter foundation posts? He asked if a nation which has a voluminous history, almost all of which is pure romance, can be happy. It seemed unlikely that after spending three decades away from Britain this erudite observer would bother to bring home anything mundane.
Katrin waited with me while Scott’s basket was brought down from the shelves. We had been married for four years and, much to the despair of her parents, remained of no fixed abode. Her mother tried her best to tempt us into home ownership, clipping out property ads from the local paper and promising us enticing pieces of good furniture. Her father counselled me on rising property values. But instead of being sensible and investing in bricks-and-mortar we chose to look after the houses of absent friends, straining our over-laden Escort estate over the Alps, around the Brecon Beacons or into the Highlands every six months or so. We had no jobs to tie us to offices, no children needing to be dropped off at school. Our possessions were scattered from Tooting to Toronto. Our responsibility was only to ourselves, and our families and friends. The travelling life suited us, even if most of our wedding presents remained wrapped up and my papers were in a state of permanent disarray, for it gave us the luxury of time together. We both worked from home, or at least from the place where our suitcases fell open. My pad of paper balanced on my lap, while on hers Katrin wove dyed cane. I snapped pencil leads as she snipped the tips of her withies. She wielded seccateurs where I tried to cut adverbs. At the end of a good day I might have a single black-and-white typed sheet. Katrin would have produced two or three shapely objects of splendid texture and tone. She was happiest in a world of form and colour. She was a basket-maker.
When Scott’s treasure was set on the table Katrin was not disappointed. I was delighted. It was shaped like a woman’s torso, a full firm chest tapering down to an elegant waist, and my first instinct was to take it into my arms. The basket’s busty body was crafted in split bamboo, its dignified posture moulded with gentle curves. Its plaited skin was patterned with precision and the narrow, shaped elements woven into a collar by sensitive hands.
I removed its fitted lid and smelt jasmine and anise, remembered coffee served with lime and the shock of fiery spices. I imagined Scott seeing the basket a century before, swinging by its once-green carrying strap from a young woman’s shoulder, resting against her hip, being filled with tender-stew-leaves and fragrant sticky rice. It was feminine and graceful, small-boned and beautiful.
Basketry was probably man’s earliest invention. Pottery came later, when woven vessels were lined with clay as protection from cooking coals and hot food. The craft links us to our beginnings and confirms our longing for organisation. In gathering and carrying, trapping or storing, our practical nature has always sought to contain, to try to order life’s chaotic tumble of events. A basket weaves together disordered strands to create a new form, becoming a vessel that guards against disarray and uncertainty. A lover’s embrace fulfils the same longing for completeness. Limbs entwine like a basket-maker’s fronds. Man is stitched to woman, neighbour to neighbourhood, citizen to country, our lives becoming the interlocking strands that together contain and are contained. The individual elements are plaited over and under, twisted and lashed to form a border, making receptacles to enclose a measure of rice, a young family or a whole nation. But the ties that bind also separate. A lover’s caress and the bonding of peoples both enfold and exclude. A basket is separated from all but itself. And any weave, if uneven, will exert a pressure that in time frays the edges, unravels the lacing and loosens the bands until the basket comes undone and chaos is restored.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Katrin, admiring the craftsmanship with a professional eye. ‘And so elaborate. But how would it ever carry a day’s shopping?’
The basket did seem too small for a trip to the market, but my need for it wasn’t domestic. ‘I want one,’ I told her.
‘It’s probably a hundred years old,’ she said, her realism trying to keep in check my more excessive fancies. ‘And the design will have changed. No one will have the time to do detailed work like this any more. We don’t even know where Scott found it.’
I looked at the museum’s label. It revealed no details of the place of origin. There was no clue either as to the identity of its makers. Although Scott had spent most of his days in the north of Burma, he had travelled so widely that it could have been discovered in any corner of the country.
‘The design may not have changed,’ I said, my optimism getting the better of me. I hoped that Burma’s isolation might have protected its traditions from the worst effects of consumerism’s advance.
Burma had been a kingdom – or at least a succession of alternately glorious and anarchic monarchies – for a thousand years, until the British annexed the country in 1885 and placed it under the Raj. After the Second World War it had enjoyed a brief period of independence and democracy before falling under a repressive military government in 1962. For more than twenty-five years its borders were sealed and its people isolated in a kind of world apart, as the new regime tried to eliminate its opponents and waged a barbaric civil war against ethnic minorities. Then in 1988, the year after my accidental visit, the dictators had put down a popular uprising by killing more than five thousand people. The leaders of the democratic movement who had survived were arrested. But with the temporary release of Aung San Suu Kyi in 1995, the generals had seemed to turn over a new leaf. At least, they were anxious to promote the impression of wanting their country to be united by a force other than fear.
‘It’s certainly a working basket,’ said Katrin, considering its elaborate corners. ‘Decoration would have depended on the availability of materials and the plentifulness of food. This would have been made in a good year.’
‘So these could still be in use today,’ I persisted. ‘Look, this has to be a functional feature,’ I added, pointing out the inner shell of broad plaited bamboo that protected the outer body’s delicate weave.
We considered the statuesque form, the labour of a gifted, anonymous maker. Katrin had a refined sense of adventure, the courage of curiosity tempered by the desire for a long, fruitful life. She knew that a family couldn’t be raised in the back of a Ford Escort but, until that time came, she was eager to travel. She also sensed that the basket provided the strand that I needed to follow.
‘It’s a big c
ountry,’ Katrin said. Burma is larger than France. ‘Where would we start?’
I took another long sniff of the basket. Again its pungent aromas carried me half a world away. I smelt durian and jack-fruit, tasted sweet milky tea, saw boy soldiers in sneaker boots toy with their rifles. Pagoda bells tinkled in my memory and I remembered the warmth of a friend’s hand. In all my travels no country had touched me so unexpectedly. It seemed to me that the search for a basket like Scott’s would really be an attempt to understand the forces that weave people together. I wanted to try to fathom the needs and fancies, mysteries and curiosities that move the heart. I also needed to see if the Burmese had remained good-natured and quiescent through the last decade of brutal political suppression.
For me only a subjective view enables us to begin to understand – and empathise with – an unfamiliar people and place. So to record the true events I had to go to Burma, in spite of pressure discouraging visitors to the country. The evil unleashed by the country’s unelected rulers had to be assessed and articulated. I knew that the journey could be dangerous, and not just for us. The political reality would oblige me to conceal the identities of people about whom I would write. To protect their lives, and to tell the truth, I would have to weave a necessary fiction.
‘We’ll start at the beginning,’ I answered Katrin. ‘In Rangoon.’
TWO
Love in a Hot Climate
IN FRONT, BEHIND. In front, behind. She recalled his hands, so large that they had held her as a nest holds a bird. In front, behind. She felt his touch, his lips on her neck and thigh against hip, and let her head roll back in surrender. The gesture had excited him, making her laugh like the bulbuls that hid in the green groves of peepul trees. She felt foolish, always laughing at the wrong time. In front, behind. He had cupped her, clutched her, then found her again. Twist into upright. His urgency had scared her yet still she traced an ear and knotted a finger into a thick curl of fair hair. She felt the white heat blaze out of him. His broad limbs wrapped her to him, pulled her body hard onto his own. In front, behind. Leave the end. Lay in a new strand. He rose inside her, so deep that she thought she might burst, weaving himself into her flesh, coming with a sudden violence that made her want to cry out loud. In front, and behind the next stake. He fell silent, was unable to move, yet held her with no less intensity, his pale skin folding around her own burnished brown. Through the fevered February afternoons it had been that single moment of stillness which had touched her, knitting their fingers together as she now wove her baskets, her small copper hand contained within his palm. In front, behind. She had believed herself to be safe in his arms, as secure as she had felt with her father. The two men of her life – her lover and her father – had protected her. Now both were gone. Ni Ni finished the weave, working the bamboo in pairs, picking up the right-hand stake as she moved around the border, and tried to remember; was that what it meant to love the right way?
It had begun with theft, and ended in ruin.
Ni Ni had grown up alone with her father in two small rooms that opened onto leafy Prome Road. She was an only child because her mother, who had never loved her husband properly, had run off with the refrigeration manager of the Diamond Ice Factory. The manager’s cold demeanour had made Ni Ni and the other children shiver. It was his icy feet, they had whispered, which cooled the bottles of Lemon Sparkling and Vimto which no one could afford. But he had been a bolder man than Ni Ni’s father, with better prospects. He had also come home at night to sleep, an important consideration for any young wife. The desertion had condemned her father to an existence on the periphery of life, for it had left him not tied to any woman’s heart. Yet he continued to try to provide for his daughter. She may have worn longyis of plain cotton, not Mandalay silk, and sometimes found no ngapi fish paste on the table, but they seldom went hungry. Ni Ni wanted for nothing, except perhaps for less sensitive hands.
Ni Ni ran a small beauty stall from their second room selling lotions, balms and tayaw shampoo. Her hands had earned her a reputation for preparing the township’s finest thanakha, the mildly astringent paste used by Burmese women as combination cosmetic, conditioner and sunscreen. She would have preferred to go to school – pupils at Dagon State High School No. 1 wore a smart uniform with a badge on the pocket – but her father didn’t make enough money to pay for the books, let alone the desk and teaching levy. So instead she helped to earn their living by laying her fingertips on her customers’ cheeks. She leaned forward, willing from them confessions and complaints, then prescribed the ideal consistency of thanakha. Her sensitive touch could also advise them on a change of diet, even tell if they had eaten meat or made love last night. In a tea shop she could pick up a coffee cup and know if it had last been held by a man or a woman. Sometimes though the sensations became too painful and she could not bare even the lightest touch. The breath of air from a falling feather might send shivers to the ends of her fingers. A cooking fire’s warmth would scald her. She dropped things. Then she would withdraw, her young laughter disguising adult tears, and wish away her paper-thin skin. She longed to have hard hands like her father.
Every evening Ni Ni’s father rode his battered Triumph bicycle into the fiery Rangoon dusk. He worked nights in a central hotel for foreigners near the Sule Pagoda, massaging tired tourist bodies. The hotel collected his fee, paying him only a small retainer, but he was allowed to keep his tips. So sometimes at dawn Ni Ni awoke to the vision of a ten-franc coin, an American Quarter or a pound note, tokens that her father had been given during the night. Over breakfast mohinga he told her about the faraway places from where the money had come, not with resentment for those who could afford to travel or with a craving to see other countries himself, but out of simple curiosity.
‘They are all yours,’ he told her with pride, ‘so when you marry you can be free to love your husband in the right way.’
‘I will always stay here with you,’ she assured him in childish devotion, then cheered away poverty’s imprisonment. ‘The right way is just to care for each other.’
The notes and coins were tucked into the matted walls and Ni Ni’s father curled up beneath them, their sleeping room not being long enough for him to lie out straight. She and her father owned the two rooms and two thin-byu sleeping mats, a rice pot and betel box, her beauty stall and the bicycle. In a world so large they were content with their peaceful corner of it. Desire did not blind them, like the pickpocket who sees only the monk’s pockets.
Ni Ni was thirteen years old when the bicycle vanished. Her father had left it leaning against the gate for no more than a minute. He had woken her with a crisp hundred-yen bill and returned to find his cycle gone. None of the neighbours had caught sight of the thief, not their friend Law San who owned the Chinese noodle stall or even the hawk-eyed gossip May May Gyi. Only Ko Aye, who ran a makeshift barber shop under the banyan tree, claimed to have seen an unfamiliar khaki lorry pass by, although nobody paid much attention to his observations. He had lost an eye back in 1962, and for more than twenty-five years had confused running children with pariah dogs, earlobes with tufts of knotted hair.
All that morning and half the hot afternoon Ni Ni watched her father standing beside the Prome Road looking left and right then left again. He glared at every cyclist who clattered past him. His suspicions were aroused by any newly painted machine. He chased after a man who had turned to ride off in the opposite direction. Ni Ni had been taught that the human abode meant trial and trouble. She understood that the theft, though unfortunate, was not a tragedy. Yet the disappearance of the bicycle made her fingertips tingle, as if she could feel her father’s Triumph being ridden far away.
The bicycle is man’s purest invention, an ingenious arrangement of metal and rubber that liberates the body from the dusty plod to ride on a cushion of air, at speed or with leisure, stopping on a whim, travelling for free. Its design is simple and its maintenance inexpensive. Yet for all its ease and economy, the bicycle possesses a greater qua
lity. It offers the possibility of escape.
Without his Triumph, Ni Ni’s father had to walk to work. He could not afford the bus fare, and needed to leave home two hours earlier to reach the hotel. At the end of his shift he returned long after Ni Ni had risen, ground the day’s supply of thanakha and opened the shop. Foreign coins no longer jingled in his purse. Tourists grew dissatisfied with his tired hands. Instead of sharing the world with his daughter he slumped, weary and grey, onto his sleeping mat. Ni Ni stroked his brow but the noises of the day – the droning of doves, the throaty hawk of Law San, the call of boiled-bean vendors – began to disturb his sleep. He tossed and turned through the long afternoons. She traded her favourite silver dollar for a small chicken from May May Gyi, but not even aromatic hkauk-hswe served in coconut milk could lift his spirits.
Some ten days after the theft Law San scuttled across the street from his stall. His abrupt, sideways walk reminded Ni Ni of a yellow-toned crab. When she was smaller she had believed that Law San cut up his vermicelli with his pincer-like hands.
‘Akogyi,’ he jittered, addressing the older man with respect, ‘are you awake?’ No voice replied from the dark room, so he added, ‘I have found your bicycle.’
‘Where?’ cried Ni Ni’s father, sitting up in the shadows. Ni Ni hurried in from the shop and, in her excitement, dropped a jar of shampoo.
‘You remember my cousin who owns the bicycle repair shop in Mingaladon, off Highway No. 1?’ said Law San, jerking down onto his haunches. ‘I asked him to keep an eye open for your bike. It is a particularly uncommon model, after all.’
‘Mingaladon is miles away,’ said Ni Ni, scooping the coconut liquid back into the jar. ‘No one would ride it that far.’
‘That’s right,’ moaned her father, slumping back against the wall and cracking his knuckles. ‘It would never turn up there.’ He then added, ‘Ni Ni, please make a cup of coffee for our guest.’