The Incident at Badamya

by Dorothy Gilman

  And so in the month of Pyatho, in the year 2494 of the Burmese Era, and in the year of Our Lord 1950, Gen—in the company of U Hatnlin—left behind Burma and sixteen years of a not uneventful life. She carried with her a battered felt hat, a pearl necklace, certain memories to cherish, the puppet Zawgwi and an awareness of many new genevieves to be learned and explored.

  In the several years that followed, a new Cynthia Gore novel was published and welcomed by its readers; it concerned a small group of people captured by dacoits and closeted in a jungle temple, its heroine a young woman with hair the color of ripe apricots.

  Miss Thorald and Baharían were married in San Francisco and eventually, as children arrived, she became president of the PTA, and a den mother, and no one ever heard again of a murderess named Lina Lerina.

  Lady Waring wrote many letters to Gen from her cottage in Cornwall, where she distributed kindness among her neighbors, her daughters and her grandchildren. She did not return to Burma.

  From Mrs. Caswell came postcards from Syria, and then from Egypt, where she continued to observe and to collect the pains and exultations of living.

  And during those years Hamlin learned why he had been compelled to return to Badamyâ and to find Gen again.

  From U Ba Sein nothing is heard but Gen often finds herself at the window on a clear moonlit night sending thoughts into the sky to a star too distant to be seen by the naked eye. U Hamlin, having seen what he saw at the pagoda, does not think her a fool.