by Rory Maclean
‘Oh dear,’ the gardener sighed. ‘It is the army.’
Our passports were fingered, and each page inspected, before being taken off to the nearest hut. After a moment the gardener was ordered to follow them. It was hot in the bug-eyed little car, and we started to sweat. Ten, twenty, then thirty minutes ticked away. I worried about him, but we had been told to wait. Chinese lorries lumbered by the checkpoint, swaying around the bamboo barrier like wind-lashed sailing ships. Their vast cargoes were watched over by boys clinging to the top of the khaki tarpaulins. Ox-carts squeaked and squealed along the rutted verge, unmolested by the sleepy guards. An overloaded line-bus thundered down the centre of the road, its exhaust long ago dislodged by a collision. A lizard stole across our bonnet to stalk a fly on the ‘Flying A’ hood ornament. The soldiers only jumped up once, to salute a passing black Mercedes. I wondered if it was the car I had been offered in exchange for Katrin.
‘There is a compulsory transit tax,’ the gardener told us when he returned, ‘of five hundred kyat.’ I passed the notes through the window to him. He moved to hand over the money but the soldier grimaced, stealing a quick look back towards the post. The gardener discreetly placed the bills between the pages of a document which he then surrendered.
The soldier seemed displeased. He fingered his automatic and unleashed a series of short, sharp rapid-fire questions at the gardener. Like the officer in the train, he refused to meet our eyes. Our host backed up against the Austin and whispered over his shoulder, ‘I think he wishes more money.’
‘Please tell the soldier,’ I said in as light a tone as I could muster, ‘that everyone in Lashio has been very kind to us.’
‘Such kind, generous people,’ echoed Katrin, smiling at him.
‘And that we have enjoyed our stay in his town.’
‘Very much.’
The gardener translated, and the soldier looked startled. It seemed that compliments were as uncommon as foreigners at his checkpoint. The exercise of authority was at odds with his natural manner. He stepped back, straightened himself, glanced again at his peers dozing in the shade and nodded.
‘You are very kind,’ Katrin told him as he returned our papers.
‘Bye bye,’ he said under his breath.
The open road beckoned, assuming that we could negotiate a fair price for a few gallons of black-market petrol. We coasted downhill from the checkpoint to the first vendor. Burma has vast oil reserves but the military rations fuel, not only in an attempt to limit car imports. Every petrol shop knows a bureaucrat or soldier willing to sell on his ample official supply for profit.
A glass bottle of fuel was balanced on top of a brick at the side of the road. Scavenged oil filters and distributors filled a display case. Machetes were on sale for carving bypasses when trees blocked the road. Two thousand kyat – about a month’s salary for an office clerk – bought us six gallons of petrol of unknown quality. The gardener watched the attendant measure and pour it through a tea strainer into the Austin. He twice asked him to shake the bottle so as not to waste a drop.
‘Officials only pay twenty-five kyat for a gallon,’ he explained as he slipped back behind the wheel. ‘When they0 resell it we say that their cars are “milking cows”.’ He shook his head in quiet despair. ‘Everyone has to make a living somehow.’
We pulled away from the pump and hit the first pothole. The Austin jumped out of gear. ‘It needs a stronger synchro spring,’ sighed the gardener.
The ragged strip of asphalt, its metalled edges like cliff-edge precipices, wove through banana groves and jungle. The Burma Road, along with the disused Ledo Road which once ran north and west to India, had been built by thirty-five thousand Burmese, Indian, British and Chinese troops under the direction of American engineers during the Second World War. The Bhamo arm had spanned ten major rivers and 155 smaller streams and had cost so many lives that it had been nick-named ‘the man-a-mile road’. Yet despite the horrific human cost of construction, little had been done to improve or maintain it since the Allies withdrew in 1946. The Austin skirted the ruts and hesitated across ‘temporary’ US Army bridges. Along the roadside crippled lorries expired in the dust, bleeding black oil into plastic containers, their drivers lying beneath them in pools of brake fluid. The line-bus which had raced past us at the checkpoint lay wounded by a waterhole. Its patient passengers idled on the bank while one woman, familiar with travel delays, took the opportunity to wash her hair.
‘We Burmese don’t call it the Burma Road any more,’ the gardener said, plunging aside to avoid a Chinese truck, its back groaning under the weight of imported diesel engines, tin teapots and coconut shampoo. ‘It has nothing to do with us, apart from running through our country.’ He reeled off a list of statistics – GNP, import tonnage, the number of local factory closures – then eased the Austin back onto a perforated length of metalled surface. ‘It’s called the Dragon Road now, because the Chinese use it for smuggling.’
‘You’ve got quite a head for figures,’ I said.
‘I was once an economist in the Ministry of Finance,’ he said, trying to find second gear. The revelation took us by surprise. He had given us the impression of being an uneducated man. ‘But no more. No more.’ He concentrated on the road ahead, slowing down to avoid a flock of scrawny chickens. ‘The Chinese sell us their arms and pumps and ploughs. It is bad for Burmese industry, but even worse is the import of technical advisers. These people come with each delivery and they instruct us to follow their way, instead of using our own tools and methods.’ We reduced our speed to such a cautious pace that a cyclist overtook us. ‘Burma is becoming China’s Baltic States. Government employees are leaving the civil service, creating vacancies for even more Chinese advisers.’ A line-bus raced head-on towards us, its horn blaring. The gardener wrenched us off the tarmac to give way and the bus swerved at the last possible moment, just avoiding a collision. Our journey to Hsipaw would take hours. ‘We cover our ears and eyes and, as I said in the church, retreat into smaller worlds.’
‘But isn’t it better to try to resist from within?’ I asked.
‘You must be an American.’
‘Canadian.’
‘It is very refreshing to hear your optimism,’ he smiled, indulging me. ‘But no, it is not possible. My associates have left the civil service and gone into tourism and hotel management. I too am looking after myself, and hiding from the loss of my country.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘When I become disheartened I compare our lot with the people of Cambodia or Stalin’s Russia,’ replied the gardener. ‘Then I do not feel so bad. Would you care for an egg sandwich yet?’
Along the roadside women and children broke stones by hand to make gravel. We circumnavigated cavernous potholes, paused for bullock-carts and stopped when a puff of smoke from a burning field obscured our view. Twice we waited in the shade to let the engine cool. Cicadas buzzed in the trees above our heads. I ground grit between my teeth. The black Mercedes swept past us on its return journey to Lashio.
‘Five years ago that man arrived from nearby with nothing,’ said the gardener, nodding after the swirl of dust.
‘“Nearby” is China?’ asked Katrin.
He nodded. ‘In the first year he opened a small shop, a year later a large store and now, just this past month, a hotel. Only the Chinese are rich.’
‘In five years? How is that possible?’
‘Because he was willing to trade anything, except his nationality. Please understand, the Shan and Burmans and local Chinese all got on well enough before all this…this invasion. Now it is too much. We are no longer at home in our own country.’ We asked him about Burma’s prospects. ‘Do you mean the future? Oh, no hope,’ he smiled.
It was nightfall by the time we crawled into Hsipaw, which means ‘four corners’ in Shan. In 1888 a plague had swept through the state and the Shan Prince, Sao Kya Kaine, had chosen the site for a new settlement, burying a pot of oil at e
ach of its four corners to ward off evil spirits. It was said that the town would prosper as long as the pots remained full of oil. If they dried out the residents were fated to suffer. But it was no longer possible to inspect the pots. In 1988 the government had cemented over them.
The events of our evening suggested that, if not bone dry, the pots were all but empty. The road was not safe to use after dark – there were stories of rebels operating to the north and east – so we invited the gardener to stay with us overnight. He made enquiries on our behalf and discovered, first, that there would not be another market for two weeks and, second, that the basket wasn’t from Hsipaw after all. We had not yet reached our destination.
‘But I am told that these baskets are very common in Pan Chan Pan Cha,’ reported the gardener, returning the photograph. ‘There every Palaung woman wears one on her back.’
‘Is it far away?’
‘About eight miles.’
‘Then we will go there.’
‘It will not be good for you,’ he advised, lowering his voice. We had stopped for supper at a sidestreet restaurant. Its yawning owner sliced slivers of boiled pork by candlelight. Two stocky Chinese skinheads drank and joked with off-duty soldiers. ‘The area is under the control of the SSA – the Shan State Army – and they are cutting down teak to ship to China. They will not let you see.’
‘But we have come so far,’ I said.
The gardener hesitated. ‘Maybe Namhsan is better. I understand that the baskets are common there too, and it is under government control. But it is far away.’
‘How far?’ I asked, opening up my Nelles map.
‘Nine miles as the crow flies, but forty-five miles by road. At least a day’s journey.’
I found Namhsan. It lay high in the hills, in a range of mountains dominated by the Loi Tawngkyaw peak. Few other places appeared to be as isolated. ‘We can drive forty-five miles.’
‘I’m afraid that the road is too poor for the Austin.’
‘Then we’ll go by bus.’
‘A bus will be bad for you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because maybe the buses do not run, and even if they do, it is holiday and you cannot return. That would be bad.’
‘We could rent another car.’
‘The road is too poor for any car.’
My map classified the route as a cart track or path. I took a long, deep breath. The same map had categorised the appalling Burma Road as a National Highway. ‘A four-wheel-drive, then?’
‘Phahte has a jeep.’
‘Paddy?’ I said, encouraged by a familiar name. The skinheads glanced towards our table. ‘There’s a man called Paddy living here?’ In my imagination I pictured a cheeky Irish rogue, fond of a glass, who had stayed on after the departure of the British. The heat must have affected my brain. ‘Let’s meet him,’ I said, wishing I’d brought a couple of cans of duty-free Guinness.
‘I am sorry, but I do not know him. I know only that he is an important man.’
‘He must be if he owns a jeep,’ pointed out Katrin.
‘I understand that he owns eleven vehicles,’ said the gardener. ‘If you wish I can make more enquiries.’
We woke to the dawn chorus of monks calling for alms, but by the time we reached his compound Paddy had gone out. He was due back at noon. We idled away the morning on the banks of the Dokhtawaddy River. Bone-thin fishermen, stripped to the waist and wearing only baggy black Shan trousers, punted canoes as light as leaves across to the far shore. Naked children busied themselves around long poles stuck in the river mud. Cicadas were caught by the hundreds on their gummed, black lengths and little hands plucked them off one by one to be drowned in tin buckets. A mother washed clothes in the brown water, her youngest child dabbling in the shallows behind her.
At two o’clock Paddy was still not home, and in the white heat of the day we retreated to the cool shade under a river house to eat sweet sausages of glutinous rice. The rice had been steamed in lengths of bamboo, which were then shaved away until only a flower-petal skin remained to contain the meal. Paddy’s driver was spotted at six o’clock, but he vanished before the gardener could speak to him. We returned to the sidestreet restaurant, where the skinheads still joked with the soldiers, and waited. Around sunset a message reached us, passed between envoys, that Paddy would meet us at midnight at the pagoda festival. ‘Nice of him to turn up,’ said Katrin. I thought her impatience was misplaced, especially as her grandmother had been Irish.
‘I am told that he is a busy man,’ translated the gardener.
The restaurant owner, who like everyone else in town watched our waiting, said in Shan, ‘He is a generous man.’ The words were spoken with a respect approaching awe. ‘He is paying for the festival even though he is a Christian.’
‘A Christian?’ I repeated. My Paddy fantasy expanded to embrace damp sermons and timid confessions in a rain-soaked church in Donegal. His upbringing must have instilled a sense of charity in him.
‘This man says that the festival has been organised to raise money for the monastery,’ the gardener explained, then hesitated. ‘These events usually occasion much drinking and gambling. I am told, please excuse me, that they are not suitable for ladies.’
Katrin did not object. She was in no hurry to be once again the only woman at an all-male gathering. ‘I’ll just curl up with a mug of hot cocoa and ring a friend for a chat,’ she said, pining for home. As we walked her back to the darkened guest house she added, ‘You know, they make beautiful graticio baskets in Tuscany. Next time, let’s just go to Italy.’
The gardener and I carried on along pitch-black lanes, guided by the firefly flashes of torches carried by boys on bicycles. Shadows of people filled the sandy streets, spilling out of the cramped houses to catch a breath of evening breeze. The town’s ration of electricity had been used up and young drunks wheeled through the dark towards the festival, singing American pop songs to the crickets and tree frogs. The night was filled with an outward air of celebration, but behinds its mask I sensed a strained volatility, a ferment to be held in check only by the amnesia of alcohol.
The flickering oil lanterns cast a tarnished halo of light around the temple’s perimeter. Tinny piped music crackled from a dozen loudspeakers. A diesel generator grumbled behind a Buddha. Beneath the canopies of a hundred bamboo stands, wild-eyed gamblers stepped forward crying out ‘Dragon!’ or ‘Tiger!’ They threw crumpled notes onto tilted tables marked with the symbols of animals, watched the dice roll, then slipped back into the crowd as long feather-dusters swept their money into a pot. The rare yelp of triumph brought an eager rush of new punters, a flurry of bets at the lucky table, then disappointment, always disappointment. The Shans’ enthusiasm for drink was surpassed only by their love of gambling. The players, all of whom were men, roamed from game to game, their movements stealthy, their tired eyes charged with futile hope. When their money was lost they stole away, their tempers frayed, carrying with them the expectation of argument and despair. It was a place of extremes: of hope and delinquency, of sobriety and drunkenness, of grand future designs and denial of the present. The winking fairy lamps and pallid lanterns did nothing to alleviate the shadows cast by the darkness of spirit. A man could be murdered in the gloom. At least, I reasoned, Paddy would bring a measure of Catholic tolerance to the community.
We searched up and down the ugly aisles looking for him, looking too for some variation in the game but finding none. The gardener paused to speak to a noodle vendor and was directed towards a knot of gamblers. We pushed through the bodies, drawn towards the whiplash yelp of laughter, and found ourselves standing above a wiry spring of a man in green army fatigues. He squatted on a painted mat, across from a weary boy, snapping hundred–kyat notes onto the dragon symbol. He clicked his tongue and the dice were rolled. His eyes followed them with the quickness of a lizard. They landed on the elephant. He laughed again, a sound at once manic and cruel, then mussed the boy’s hair.
‘Phaht
e is like an angel to the children,’ rumbled the stranger standing beside me, a whale of a man with minnow-like eyes. ‘You should bet with him.’
The gardener took the hint. ‘Yes, bet,’ he whispered to me, pressing a five-kyat note into my hand, ‘so he will like you.’
‘This is Paddy?’ I asked, too surprised to act.
‘Lucky shrimp!’ called the gardener, beginning to match Phahte’s bets, losing alongside him, indicating that he was acting on my behalf. ‘For my English friend.’
‘“Phahte” means Honoured Uncle,’ translated the stranger as they gambled. ‘He is our guardian angel.’
‘This man?’ I laughed, but the stranger did not laugh with me. My Paddy was neither an Irish rogue nor a Burmese angel. He was very drunk. I looked again at the wiry gambler. My first thought was that it would be inadvisable to be disliked by him.
‘Fish of fortune,’ cried the gardener, casting another bet, emptying his wallet, ‘bring our honoured uncle and welcome guest together.’ He and Phahte lost their stakes again.
Hsipaw’s ‘guardian’ roared, springing to his feet to face me. Phahte was in his early fifties, though his taut, hairless skin made him appear younger. His hooded eyes were yellow and lustreless. His limbs were elastic and supple. He swayed, reached out a sinewy arm to catch his balance, and I saw the rubbery flange of his baby finger sticking out at right angles from his hand. ‘Jesus loves little children,’ he said to me in English, then resettled the pistol in the back of his trousers and swayed away.
An entourage of tall, unsmiling men shadowed his erratic steps from gaming stall to table, swinging left then right, ready to catch their protector if he fell to earth. Phahte slumped onto a stool and demanded beer. While it was being poured the gardener whispered to the minnow-eyed whale who, in turn, rumbled into Phahte’s ear. I was led forward and pushed into the seat beside him. He did not look at me. The gardener indicated that I should talk. I began to explain about our search for the basket and our wish to reach Namhsan.