Under the Dragon

by Rory Maclean

  An old monk found Ma Swe a week later. In exhaustion she had slumped over, switching on the radio which had remained lashed to her thigh. Its batteries had retained a last spark of charge. Distant voices and cheerful jingles had blared through the ancient corridors. The monk had followed the scream of static down the maze of darkened passageways, through the child-size openings into her tiny alcove. When the man had spoken she had called out in her delirium, then wept in the blackness.

  The monastery took her in, giving her a quiet haven, allowing her to live by herself but not alone, sheltering her within the bamboo walls with a dozen other women who had been widowed or orphaned by the elimination of the village. In return for sanctuary the women cared for the last, chaste monks, sweeping, cleaning and preparing their meals. Ma Swe spent her hours in the company of the elder who had found her. His eyes were bad but he liked to keep up with events, as much as precepts and censorship allowed, so every day she read aloud for him articles from the Working People’s Daily and stories from the copies of Asiaweek left by passing tourists. She once found a back-issue of the Economist and so learned of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house-arrest, of her party contesting and winning the election, of the SLORC’s annulment of the results. Sometimes, when the monk’s concentration drifted away, Ma Swe was tempted to recite from memory a passage or poem from her magazine. But she never did. There was no one with whom the eleven imaginary issues would ever be shared. The past was past and she tried to look forward, giving what she could as deeds of merit. She learned to be content with her lot, and rarely left the environs of the Ananda, except when she tuned her radio.

  On the wavelengths she travelled the world. At night alone in the dark she listened to the news from Moscow and heard poetry readings from Bangladesh. Over the airwaves came the music of Zakir Hussain’s table and Cape Breton Island fiddles. She turned the dial around and around, reaching out beyond the borders, drawing the precious strands of dialogue towards her. The Soviet Union collapsed, Nelson Mandela was released and Winnie Mandela appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Seasons and events slipped away without touching timeless Pagan. Nothing changed until one evening when, as she dozed, she heard his voice.

  Over the intervening years Ma Swe had imagined Ko Lin in the muffled half-sleep of dreams. He had often drifted into her thoughts, laughing at his own jokes, repeating his disdain for the complicity of silence, asking her again to marry him. But now his words were fresh and new and their clarity shook her awake. It was not a fantasy, rather it was as if his ghost had come back to life, as if he had laid his head down on the pillow beside her. He was talking to her from another world. He was reading her the news. Ma Swe sat up holding the radio, gripping her husband in her hands. The movement knocked it out of tune. A growl of interference, hiss and whistle, quickly, 11850 kHz 25-metre band. She retuned her receiver. Again she heard him, finishing the bulletin, then conducting a short discussion on recent political arrests and finally, when the news was done, starting to tell a story. ‘Long ago there lived a prince named Bhanlatiya who was fond of hunting,’ he said over the airwaves. ‘One day while wandering far from home he came upon two kinnayas, weeping by a shallow stream.’ Ma Swe heard her words, carried in her husband’s heart to safety beyond Burma, read back to her from another world. ‘A great storm blew up out of nowhere and the river swelled into rapids and the kinnayas were cast onto opposite banks, unable to reach each other across the angry water, hardly able even to see through the rain.’ The temple bells of Ananda chimed above the monastery walls and Ma Swe no longer felt afraid. She wanted to speak out, to tell Ko Lin about herself, to recite to him every issue and article and story in their wished-for magazine. But he could not hear her. He was with her, yet he would for ever be too far away, out of hearing. ‘We spent one night apart,’ said the wanderer across the ether, ‘and we have been crying every day remembering our loss for over seven hundred years.’ He finished her story and wished his wife – and the rest of their poor, golden country – goodnight from London.

  FIVE

  Heart Strings

  MA SWE SERVED US EACH a bottle of Pepsi, though she would drink only weak Chinese tea herself, and sat talking in a beam of dusty sunlight which filtered through the open shutters of the cool teak monastery. The shortwave radio lay on the smooth floor at her side. There was no one else to overhear her recollections, apart from the old monk who leaned against a wooden pillar eating rice and beans. The stray cat circling his low table probably had better hearing.

  ‘My house was very old,’ Ma Swe remembered, her features serious, her inflection light. A Citizen ‘Electronic Big Ben’ quartz clock chimed the quarter hour. The year in prison had marked her, yet her voice remained polished and thoughtful. ‘It was Grandmother’s Grandfather’s house.’

  ‘Your family had lived there so long?’ asked Katrin. We were still dismayed that a whole village and its people could vanish.

  Ma Swe dipped her head in a nod. ‘When I returned to Pagan the house – and my mother – were gone.’

  Immediately after the 1988 uprising the government had begun to promote tourism, in part to resurrect its tarnished image abroad, but primarily to earn itself hard currency. The generals and their allies had confiscated hotels, requisitioned bus franchises and built airlines with the profits from opium sales. Rangoon, Mandalay and Pagan were chosen as the three destinations to be opened to tourists. To make way for the visitors the 5,200 residents of Pagan were evicted from their homes around the ancient temples. The number was small when compared to expulsions elsewhere in the country: a million civilians were relocated within the capital, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. But the method employed was similar. The army simply announced through loudspeakers that the village was to be resettled. The residents, many of whom had lived in the same house for generations, were told to pack their belongings. Compensation of only 250 kyat – about $2 – was to be paid per property. No money was given for the buildings themselves. The owners of the Mother Hotel received nothing. Two weeks later the lorries and bulldozers arrived. The people were taken away and two hundred homes destroyed. The old village was replaced by a tourist enclave of modern hotels catering for dollar-bearing foreigners. The dispossessed residents were given plots of barren land three miles away in ‘New Pagan’.

  ‘There were no trees in New Pagan,’ said Ma Swe. ‘It was very hot and, when rains came, very wet. Some people, their land wash away. Three four five old people die every day. My mother given land but she sick and with no family cannot work. She die the first monsoon.’ There was dignity, even grace in her controlled, direct speech. ‘The old monk save me and I meditate every night – to Buddha, to the monk – and if I forget I cannot sleep. I am happy here but now I must leave.’

  ‘To live on your mother’s land?’ I asked.

  Ma Swe nodded. ‘I have no choice. It is forbidden for women to stay on in the monastery.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because tourists come, and we are not photogenic for them.’

  In the seven years since the resettlement, New Pagan had found an identity of sorts, expanding to supply old Pagan with waiters and souvenirs, tour guides and pony-carts. The palm-frond huts were replaced by breeze-block guest houses. Migrants moved in from Meiktila and Thazi to profit from the growing tourist business. The receptionist at our hotel came from Taunggyi. She had trained as an archaeologist but earned more money working on the front desk than she would restoring temples. The old community had been destroyed.

  ‘I will build my house,’ Ma Swe said, tucking a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. Her mother’s small lot lay behind the modern Paradise Guest House. ‘My friends will help and we build in five days. But first I have to save enough money to buy the bamboo. The matting and walls cost twelve thousand kyat.’ Our four nights in the cheapest room at the Thante Hotel had cost us $100, the equivalent of twelve thousand kyat at the black-market rate. Foreigners were allowed only to
stay at ‘dollar’ hotels. ‘So I must try to sell my radio.’

  ‘You cannot sell your radio,’ said Katrin, appalled by the thought. To give up the radio was to lose her hearing, as well as her sanity.

  ‘You like it?’ Ma Swe asked, hesitant.

  ‘It is very nice,’ replied Katrin.

  ‘It is good one, but you are right, I cannot sell it. In Rangoon I could get two thousand kyat but here no one will buy it. Everyone is too busy with tourist-working to worry about the outside world.’ She picked up the little radio. ‘So maybe you would like to have it?’

  ‘I can’t accept it, Ma Swe,’ said Katrin, startled by the offer.

  ‘But I would like you to have it.’

  ‘It is more important that you keep the radio.’

  ‘We met a boy who believes that your husband fills the sky with lies,’ I told her. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Even in a small place you have to – I do not want to use the word – you have to be brave. You have to stand up. The boys say wrong things. I tell them right, but they do not listen.’ She pushed the radio into Katrin’s hands. ‘Please, it is for you.’

  It was wrong that Ma Swe should have to sell the radio; even worse that she should try to give it to us. We managed to persuade her to keep it, then offered to help her finance her house. At first she refused, but we insisted. She would build herself a house for the same cost as a good lunch in London.

  Ma Swe then began showering us with gifts of local yun lacquerware: two trays, a miniature chest, a matching pair of vases and an octagonal-topped folding table. ‘To remember me by,’ she explained. We tried to decline her gifts, explaining that we had only one small rucksack, but she could not be dissuaded. The giving seemed necessary; to refuse would be to deny her her deed of good merit.

  ‘You do not like lacquerware?’ she asked, her tired eyes protruding in her thin, bony face. ‘Pagan lacquerware good quality.’ To demonstrate she squeezed together the rims of a bowl. It suffered no damage. ‘All tourists like.’

  I explained that although the lacquerware was beautiful, we were searching for a specific basket. A maker in Rangoon had directed us to Pagan, where we hoped to find it. We had been told that she might be able to help us.

  Katrin showed her the photograph. Ma Swe shook her head. ‘Sorry, not Pagan style,’ she apologised. ‘But you go to Mandalay. Maybe you find in Zegyo market. Then afterwards you come back,’ she insisted, pressing two small lacquer betel boxes into our hands, ‘and stay in my house, not hotel.’

  ‘Has the post gone yet?’ demanded the tanned, middle-aged German couple at the hotel reception desk. A thin boy, his head bowed, loaded their monogrammed suitcases into the Air Mandalay minibus. ‘It is not good if our cards arrive home late.’

  ‘The postman will pick them up this afternoon,’ promised the receptionist. She chose not to point out that the censor’s inspection would delay their cards in any event. ‘Have a good trip. Goodbye.’

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ replied the wife. ‘Try to say it in German, not just English. Next time we come you will say it in German.’

  The Ministry of Hotels and Tourism – under the direction of Lieutenant General Kyaw Ba – ensures that all independent and package travellers are catalogued, controlled and contained. Each evening every hotel and guest house in the country is required to produce thirteen copies of their guest register, to be distributed to”

  External Passenger Control Unit (one copy)

  Immigration Office (one copy)

  Township Law and Order Restoration Council (four copies)

  Ward Law and Order Restoration Council (one copy)

  Police Station (five copies)

  Navy Intelligence Unit (one copy)

  The thirteen copies have to be submitted by seven o’clock every evening. If a guest arrives at a hotel after that time, thirteen amended lists have to be prepared and delivered to the authorities before midnight. In addition, once a week a full roster of visiting foreigners needs to be lodged with both the Military Office and the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism. In this regard alone tourists are treated in a similar manner to residents. Every Burmese household also has to register with the Ward Law and Order Restoration Council, and no guest – family or friend – is allowed to spend the night in another place without obtaining permission from the local chairman. Ma Swe’s invitation to us had been sincere, but foreigners are forbidden from staying in private homes. The intrusive system ensures that every journey is made under surveillance. Tourists alone retain the luxury of itinerancy. The Burmese travel only out of necessity.

  We could have flown to Mandalay, of course. We could have dropped our knapsack into the thin boy’s arms and joined the German couple on the back seat of the minibus to trade stories of plum-size cockroaches and egg-on-sugared-toast hotel breakfasts. We could have confused landscape and historical remains with the living country. Our credit card could have been debited and a round of drinks ordered. Peanuts and crispies would have been served in the departure lounge. We could have checked in, taken off, touched down and still had time to take in Mandalay Hill before lunch at the Novotel. But instead we decided not to luxuriate on the ATR 72-210 Hintha Golden Flight. It wasn’t a question of saving the cost of the airfare, or even our response to the rumours that the airline had been financed by the profits of arms trading. It was for a greater reason than that. We had the freedom to choose.

  The next morning, at the hour when – as the Burmese say – ‘one first sees the veins on one’s hands’, we sat in an Isuzu bus beside the Irrawaddy, yawning. In the cool dawn a drowsy mother lit her breakfast fire. The match hissed, kindling crackled and her child called out in its sleep. Waking sparrows chattered. The ebony sky turned to ash grey, tinged itself with rose then burst into morning bloom. Voices warmed in the sun, growing excited with the heat. Our driver detached himself from a circle of conversation and slipped behind the wheel. He was a cut above the usual line-bus driver, wearing a dusty tailored blazer with his longyi. His ticket collector sported a flutter of banknotes around his fingers and a T-shirt which read ‘Top of the Heap’. The engine shook itself awake and, with an alarming shriek of gears, the bus eased forward along the low, muddy riverbank.

  The Irrawaddy rises in the southern Himalayas, winds its way through the Kachin Hills, curls around the rice paddies of the Shan Plateau and crosses the arid central plains before uncoiling, like the frayed end of a rope, into the Andaman Sea. In an earlier age our dashing driver might have captained one of the forty steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. At the height of British rule its ships carried nine million passengers a year along the river. But instead of sounding a polished brass whistle, he tooted his horn to encourage a bullock-cart out of our path, and startled a heron fishing in the shallows.

  The bus gathered speed, racing along the single-lane carriageway and swaying onto the cinder shoulder to pass oncoming lorries or local pick-ups with live pigs lashed to their roofs. The wild motion shook us with such violence that our vision soon became blurred. Our bodies bounced out of contact with the hard bench seat. Within thirty minutes our brains felt as bruised within the bone of our heads as were we inside the metal box of the bus. The appalling road was a long, weaving Morse-code line of contact and non-contact, and after an hour our comfortable Pagan hotel seemed a lifetime away. A stone punctured the muffler, releasing a deafening blast of exhaust. The wearying movement created an impression of great distances travelled, but after four hours we had covered only forty miles. ‘I think I need a new bra,’ Katrin groaned as we shivered and jolted into Myingyan, our lunch stop.

  The Burmese passengers scrambled out of the bus and into the café to wolf down plates of curry. We took longer to collect ourselves and were besieged by a clamour of street vendors, balancing on their heads trays of plastic-wrapped quail eggs, bunches of grapes and fierce ruby-red sausages. Katrin ate a tiny boiled egg and I managed to stomach a samosa, its fried pastry stuffed with pigeon peas. We drank three bottles
of purified water (‘UV Treated for your Good Health and Extra Comfort’) while our driver finished his second ‘brain sweet’ bread pudding. Across the road a gang of villagers thatched a house with toddy fronds, and we remembered Ma Swe.

  The journey after lunch was no more comfortable, but because the morning had numbed our senses, it became easier to think. I noticed again that, as on the Meiktila line-bus, children slept on their parents’ laps undisturbed by the vicious motion. Their calm reminded me of the words of Major Grant Allen, as quoted by Scott in The Burman. ‘Unlike the generality of Asiatics,’ Allen had declared with a Victorian’s certainty, ‘the Burmese are not a fawning race. They are cheerful, and singularly alive to the ridiculous; buoyant, elastic, soon recovering from personal or domestic disaster.’

  Allen’s assertion that the Burmese were ‘not individually cruel’, yet were ‘indifferent to the shedding of blood on the part of their rulers’ intrigued me. Watching the children, dozing innocents in a harsh environment, I began to wonder if the tolerance of tyranny could be a legacy of the past. Was the present military dictatorship simply a modern version of the old despotic monarchy? If this was the case, then could the 1988 uprising, with all its hopes for democracy, have been more the result of Western influences than a response to an intrinsic Burmese need for freedom? Neither Allen’s nor Scott’s words could explain the central dichotomy of Burma: that the gentle generosity of the people – the constant offers to share food, to give us presents and pay our bus fare – was at odds with the grasping brutality of authority.

  Beyond the bus’s dust-caked windows the scorched plains gradually yielded to tilled land. Against a backdrop of sunflower fields a goatherd leaned on a bush and lowered juicy new shoots to within his herd’s reach. Chalk-white egrets fed in emerald-green rice paddies. Beneath a stern but imperfect red and white sign – ‘anyone who Gets Riotustive and Unruly is our Enemy’ – we entered Mandalay on sore, bruised bottoms.