OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  None of the original killers were still alive, but one old woman revealed to John that she was the widow of the recently deceased Chief Sokriti, who had been among the hunting party. She was able to give more details: that the hunters had removed Richard’s revolver – for signalling in case he got lost – but, not knowing what it was, had tried to smash it. They also clubbed something ‘shiny and mirror-like’ – his cigarette lighter, which the others later found near his body.

  JOHN ASKED ABOUT the machetes he had left there and found that, as he had hoped, they had been accepted as peace tokens. To his surprise, given that Amazon Indians are not given to niceties of gratitude or sympathy, one man – a ‘gentle giant called Teseya’ – told him: ‘We killed your friend in the old days when we did not know white men. We did not know that there are good white men and bad white men.’ He named the good white men who had helped the tribe to return to part of its lands. ‘You are a good white man. You may come back.’ John took this as a form of apology, even remorse, for the ambush forty years before.

  On leaving the Panará, John again flew over the Iriri River country that he had seen all those years before, much of it now looking like a lunar landscape from the damage left by cattle-ranchers and soya farmers. By ironic coincidence the Panará have ended up living in precisely that area where Richard Mason was killed – then a part of their distant hunting ground, but now one of the last bits of forest left to them. However, as John has pointed out in his recent book, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, there are some optimistic gleams of light through the undergrowth. Since the 1960s the population of Amazon Indians has quadrupled, and there is now more respect for them in Brazil as the natural custodians of the planet’s most important lung. Many Indians that have had contact with outside society, after seeing how the West lives, have chosen to go back to their own way of life. And even today, there are still at least thirty Indian tribes in Brazil who are known only because they have been seen from the air, and have never been contacted.

  John still bears no bitterness to the Panará over the death of his friend: ‘We were trespassers in their forests after all. The Brazilian Government’s Indian Service have a saying for expeditions like ours: “Die if you must, but never kill”. I do wish, though, that they had given Richard the time to convince them, even by sign language, of his good intentions, as I’m sure he would have.’

  John Hemming’s latest book is Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon. It describes the struggles that have taken place in order to use, protect and understand the Amazon, and recalls the adventures and misadventures of the explorers, missionaries, indigenous Indians, naturalists, rubber barons, scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists, political extremists, prospectors and others who have been in its thrall.

  Love in a Hot Climate

  RORY MACLEAN (born Vancouver, Canada, 1954) is a writer, broadcaster and blogger. He is the author of eight books, including Stalin’s Nose (Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant), Under the Dragon (on Burma), Magic Bus (reliving the hippy trail to India) and, most recently, Gift of Time, in which he comes home to travel with his mother on her final journey. He has visited Burma often over the past twenty years, moved by his encounters with the people: ‘not least with the young woman named Ni Ni whose story seemed to encapsulate the tragedy of that beautiful, betrayed land’. www.rorymaclean.com

  Love in a Hot Climate

  RORY MACLEAN

  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 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 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; what did it mean 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 Rangoon’s 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 neighbourhood’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 customer’s 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 bear 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 pound coin or a five euro note, tokens that her father had been given during the night. Over breakfast mohinga he told her about the far away 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 pover
ty’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 possessed only the two rooms and two thin-bya 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 pick-pocket 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 1,000 yen note 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 forty years had confused running children with pariah dogs, ear lobes 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 the ease and economy the bicycle possesses a greater quality. 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 but not even aromatic hkauk-hswe, served in coconut milk, could lift his spirits.

  SOME TEN DAYS LATER, Ni Ni’s father spotted his bicycle, stacked with half a dozen other machines against the wall of a local barracks. The officer at the camp gate offered to arrange its return, but for this kindness he asked for more money than Ni Ni’s father earned in a month. The soldier’s greed kindled Ni Ni’s father’s discontent and, at the end of that summer when he lost his job, he found the courage to join one of the city’s rare public demonstrations. In central Rangoon students made speeches calling for democracy, for an end to one-party rule and for freedom for political prisoners. Monks carried their alms bowls upside down, to show their support for the protesters. Then Ni Ni learnt that armoured cars had driven into the heart of the crowd. Soldiers had stepped down from the vehicles, taken up position and opened fire. Machine guns had cut savage swathes through the mass of unarmed civilians. Hundreds had fallen as they ran. The monks who stood their ground were bayoneted. A scattering of lost sandals littered the gory pavement, and Ni Ni’s father vanished forever.

  WITHOUT HER FATHER’S INCOME Ni Ni could not pay the rent. She was cast out of their rooms, saving only her dowry of foreign coins in a cotton purse. Without her beauty stall she could not practise her craft. Without money she had to take the first job she found. She worked at a large building site, teaching herself to bear the splinters and sprains, to endure the chafe of masonry, and soon the rough labour began to scour the sensitivity off her fingertips. It was there that she caught the eye of the building’s English architect. He asked her out to dinner. Ni Ni had never before been to a restaurant, apart from Law San’s noodle stall, and she ate with caution. After the meal sitting in the dark in his car he asked her where she lived. When she would not answer him, he took her home like a take-away meal.

  The architect knew that Ni Ni was young, very young, and wondered at himself for a moment. He was hard-working, loved by his parents, from Berkshire. At home he bought flowers for his grandmother and made donations to good causes. His designs favoured open-plan architecture, not the hierarchical structures which set in stone the tentacles of power. He was not at home, but he reasoned that he could still do good. I can help this one, he told himself. I can give her a home, a bed and a start in life. It’s almost an act of charity, he lied. He took her with gentleness, handling her as a caged bird, whispering soft vows, until the heat and frustration swelled up inside him and he tore deeply into her flesh, making her bite her tongue so as not to cry.

  When Ni Ni moved into the architect’s villa, all she brought with her was the purse of coins and her few worn clothes, which Louis stripped off her that evening. They tumbled on the shreds, ripping the seams of the threadbare cloth, then while the flush of their copulation was still on her, he dressed her in a new silk blouse and a Chinese silk longyi. Its rich salmon-pink complimented her high colour.

  ‘It costs nothing,’ he said as she gazed at the unfamiliar reflection in the full-length mirror.

  In Burma physical contact is an intimate matter. Men and women do not touch in public. For the next few months Ni Ni’s life hung between innocence and barbarism, caring and abuse, East and West. Her actions further dispossessed her from her society. To compensate for the loss she convinced herself that she was tied to the Englishman, that his convenient liaison was love. He did nothing to dissuade her. But when the building was finished and his transfer to the firm’s Singapore office arranged, he did not ask her, a fourteen-year-old orphan, to come with him.

  ‘Ni Ni, you are young,’ he told her on their last morning together in bed. ‘Your whole life is in front of you,’ he added, turning his unease into platitudes.

  Ni Ni slipped out from under the sheet, her lightness leaving no impression on the mattress to show that she had ever lain beside him, and crossed the room to the wardrobe. She opened a lower drawer, burrowed under her fine new clothes and found the bag of coins. Ni Ni knelt beside the bed and emptied out the money onto the pillow. There were silver quarters, a few Swiss francs and a single Canadian ten dollar bill. She arranged her funds with care, sorting them according to colour and size, not by value or nationality. She explained that her father had saved them for her, every day for five years. The architect sat up in bed, pulled the orderly display towards him, and roared with laughter.

  ‘About sixty dollars,’ he calculated. ‘Five years, you say? My poor Ni Ni.’ He shook his head. ‘And where is your father now?’

  PROSTITUTION DOES NOT exist in Burma, at least it cannot be mentioned in the press. The Burmese kings had a history of taking numerous wives, and religious sites always offered the service of ‘pagoda servants’ to pilgrims. Neither custom still exists today, officially. The girls on the steps of pagodas sell flowers and candles, religious requisites, not physical comforts. The royal zenana has been replaced by the executive escort agency. But both traditions remain part of the culture and, as the result of the smallest misfortune, a woman can become trapped.

  A FRIEND FROM the building site promised to find Ni Ni work in Thailand as a dishwasher. The wage offered was double that which she could earn in Rangoon. He paid for her bus ticket to the border, where she was met by a Thai driver. There were five other women in his car: two Burmese, two Shan girls
with milky-white complexions and a single, silent Chinese. On the road to Bangkok the driver paid a uniformed man at a checkpoint. In the brothel Ni Ni was given a number and told to sit in a windowed showroom. She toyed with the hem of her blouse when bypassers stopped to stare at her. The first man who took her in the hong bud boree sut, ‘the room to unveil virgins’, paid the owner 120 baht – less then five dollars – and tipped her the same amount. During that month she was sold as a virgin to four more clients. She was allowed to keep her tips. They were the largest that she received over the next four years.

  The friend had been an agent. The debt which enslaved Ni Ni was his fee, plus her transport, clothes and protection money, compounded by 100 per cent interest. She was required to wear high heels and a mini-skirt instead of her silk longyi. In lieu of money she received red plastic chips; one for every client. Each morning she counted them twice to calculate the amount to be subtracted from her debt. She kept the chips under the cement bunk where she was forced to prostitute herself.

  The cubicle measuring six feet square was her home. Here Ni Ni slept and worked, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Only two days a month were allowed off, during her period. The clients were mostly Asian, although Westerners paid for her too, flying in from Frankfurt and Brussels on ‘Sexbomber’ package holidays. She served five or six men each weekday. On weekends she often had as many as thirty customers.

  The demand for new faces dictated that every few months she be moved to a different hotel. Once in a cubicle she thought that she heard the sea, though it could have been a passing tuk-tuk. The frequent displacement left her no time to get to know the other girls or even to consider escape, especially as none of them ever knew where they were incarcerated. In these grimy grey neon-lit rooms the years crept upon her, ageing Ni Ni’s firm young body. Men began to choose her less often, and those who did were less particular. One client put a gun to her head when she asked him to wear a condom. It wasn’t because she was afraid of pregnancy – she had often paid the owner’s wife to give her Depo-Provera injections – or even because he was filthy. It was simply that he frightened her. In life there is a path of fear and a path of love, and Ni Ni had been unable to follow the latter one alone. The owner threatened her with a beating if she ever came out of the room before her client again.