Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  As soon as the song was over, however, everyone streamed out into the bright sunlight, and the requiem turned into a fiesta. The scene that greeted us outside the church looked like nothing so much as a rock festival. Vendors were hawking soft drinks and chewing gum. Other peddlers were doing a brisk business in T-shirts that said “I Ninoy,” “Ninoy forever,” “Ninoy lives in my ” and “Who Killed My Hero?” Yellow Ninoy balloons bumped together in the blue sky, and yellow Ninoy streamers fluttered in the breeze. Everyone was dressed in Ninoy yellow— no matter that some of the yellow T-shirts had “David Bowie” on them, and one of them said “I Feel Terrific.”

  As the march began, and everyone surged forward, laughing and singing with their friends, waving their yellow signs in the sunlight, it felt more than ever like a happy picnic. The girls in their bright yellow shirts giggled among themselves, the boys proudly threw their fists into the air. Toddlers looked on from the sidewalk under sun hats that said “My Hero.” Nuns, feminists, ragtag groups of students and other minority factions streamed smiling into the press of chanting yellow bodies. “I was a Breast-fed Baby,” read one of the revolutionaries’ T-shirts.

  And so, waving placards against the “U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship” and chanting slogans, the whole bright mob flocked through the streets of Quezon City, past “24-Hour Go-Go Girls” signs, past billboards advertising the latest California high school comedy. When the rain began to fall, thousands of umbrellas came out, and not one of them was black.

  In the early afternoon, the rain started to gather momentum, and as the yellow faction went off in one direction, I followed a more militant group, dressed all in red, in the other. For a few minutes, as we sang the “Internationale” and then started running, I felt a surge of adrenaline, the rising excitement of racing amidst a crowd of bright banners through the streets, hurled along by the mob, stumbling and tripping and speeding around corners as families sent confetti streaming down from their windows. And as we turned a corner and came into an open space where thousands of bodies had assembled from every direction, waving banners and laughing in the rain, I felt a dawning sense of wonder. But then the rally stopped for a few windy denunciations of the U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship, and a boy next to me went back to reading Nicaragua for Beginners, while a few college girls clustered around the latest issue of Newsweek.

  A few minutes later, we were off again, charging through the downpour without a care in the world, excited children in the rain, running our hearts out for thirty minutes or more until we careened around an intersection and up to the Mendiola Bridge, right in front of Malacañang Palace. Ahead of us stood a huge barricade. On the far side of the barbed-wire fence, rows of stony-faced riot policemen stood stock-still, fingering their guns; behind them, men in masks silently brandished shields.

  Just in case things didn’t go on schedule, the policemen had brought reinforcements and brown bags filled with food. But it had already been decided that the demonstrators should shout and wave banners for no more than an hour and then disperse. So the foreign correspondents at the front lines started making plans for dinner and asking around for rides. And the masked revolutionaries cried out their rage for an hour. And then, as dusk began to fall, all of them quietly filed home for dinner. A little later, the riot policemen also packed their picnic bags and followed their enemies home. Marcos, I thought, had nothing to worry about; his enemies were blowing kisses in the wind.

  AT THE RALLY, as so often in Manila, it was the happiness of the Filipinos that left me saddest.

  Carefree and irrepressible to the end, they reminded me finally of one of those beautiful tennis players—Yannick Noah, say, or Vijay Armitraj—who delight their audiences with the sweet fluency of their shots, and light up the court with their grace and daring, and dazzle even themselves with their élan, yet, in the end, are always undone by their own lovely insouciance. It was sad that the Filipinos had been left with nothing to steady themselves except four hundred years of colonialism and the leftover knickknacks of a rock-’n’-roll culture. But sadder by far was the fact that they still had the openness and hopefulness—the happy innocence—to believe that rock ’n’ roll was all they needed to change the world. “We Are the World” was especially popular, I suspected, because it was the ultimate anthem of pop idealism. It suggested that bright tunes could redeem politics; that high spirits and good intentions alone could bring food to the starving; that where there was music, there could not be misery.

  And as I sat in the departure lounge of Manila International Airport, waiting to fly away, I heard for the last time, issuing from the sound system, the strains of the country’s favorite anthem, affirming the limitless powers of faith. And I could not help thinking that even as the unguarded, sweet-tempered, friendly Filipinos kept on singing that they were the world, and they were the children, their own world was falling apart and they were too much the world, too much the children to resist.

  VII

  Thus I left the Philippines. But the Philippines did not so easily leave me. For months, I could not get the country out of my head: it haunted me like some pretty, plaintive melody.

  In part, no doubt, this was explained by the world’s sudden interest in the collapsing country. Just as I was beginning to write this chapter, President Marcos, in deference to U.S. pressure, held an election. As I continued writing, I heard snatches of news about the campaign: as usual, the voting was preceded by crazy rumors and as usual, the politicking was almost comic in its crudity (Imelda boasted that she had control of the bar-girl and “billyboy” vote because she used makeup better than Cory, while her husband’s bullhorns boomed: “In these times of crisis, what this country needs is a man! A bull! A stud!”). As usual too, the balloting, though closely watched by a team of U.S. observers and more than seven hundred foreign journalists, was a free-for-all farce. Soldiers smilingly posed for pictures while tearing up ballots; voters happily admitted to accepting bribes; as many as three-million voter names were simply struck off the lists. But then, just as I was finishing this chapter, something happened: a friend raced in to announce that Marcos was gone. All my fears, it seemed, had been proven wrong. In the “smiling revolution,” the very optimism, gentleness and tolerance that had long come to seem the country’s greatest liabilities had proved to be its greatest blessing. With nothing more substantial than hope, faith and courage, the people had heroically brought off a nonviolent revolution and recovered, as if by a miracle, their sense of possibility and pride.

  Yet as the euphoria began to subside, I could not help wondering how much anything in the Philippines would really change. Cory Aquino was the purest and sincerest politician I had ever seen, yet even her fairy-tale ascent seemed only the flip side of the Marcoses’ fabulous wickedness, a radiant and inspiring turn to be sure, but a turn that seemed still to belong to the world of a children’s fantasy. I wondered too if Philippine politics would ever develop a real sense of gravitas or order, for even under Cory, it returned soon enough to show-business-as-usual, a made-for-TV drama filled with coffeehouse rumors, bungled coups and flashy gestures. Most of all, I wondered how soon the rainy streets of Ermita would change, and what would become of a people whose very buoyancy and hospitality lay at the heart of their vulnerability.

  Once home, I made great efforts to keep in touch with the friends I had made in the Philippines. I never heard from Mark, though, and Minnie never replied to my letters—by now, I assumed, she must have gone off to Stockholm, or found herself another husband, or else just disappeared into some dark corner of the bar world. But Sarah, whom I had never met outside her restaurant, wrote to me as often as she had promised. Her letters were full of the sweet earnestness and solicitude I remembered. Most of her news, however, was sad.

  Pico,

  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. How’s your parents. I know your so happy it’s because your close to your papa and mama. For me it’s so sad because I’m too far from my beloved parents. I’m lonely. Sorry, ha, if I
’m telling you my problem. It is sad. I don’t have job any more. That’s why my Christmas and New Year’s Eve is saddest.

  Pico, my friend, how can I finish my studies if my situation is like this? Who’s the one to support my studies? Nobody, except me. You know me. I belong in a poor and uneducated family. It’s better as you are. You are rich if you want to be, because of having permanent job.

  Well, Pico, do you remember the tickets? Well, here we are. We have more tickets to come. And that’s when there begins a problem. Last Dec. 12, 1985, I go home to my boarding house. I’m crying because of no job. That date my 3 tickets were not sold. My salary in that month they will not give to me. Then I got mad. I hate them, all the employers in Calle Cinquo. I resigned. So here I am, no job, always crying, as if the world is to end. I pray to God that somebody offers to help my studies. As of now, I’m looking for a job. Pico, I love my studies. I don’t want to stop.

  Please answer me wherever you are. May the Lord Jesus Christ Remember You Always.

  Friendlove,

  Sarah

  On the day after Christmas, she was admitted to the hospital with a lung disease, Sarah wrote in her next letter, and two months later, she was still in bed. She had no job and no money for her medicine. But still she sent me a card and a prayer on my birthday. And at the end of her letters, Sarah always closed by sending my parents all her best. “How about more photos of your beloved papa and mama?” she usually signed off. “Please send me. Okey?”

  BURMA

  The Raj Is Dead! Long Live the Raj!

  SETTING FOOT at last in Burma, I looked around. A weathered little building, with monsoon stains smeared across its whiteness: “Rangoon Airport.” A broken door: “VIP Lounge.” A few girls under peacocky parasols, a few men in wraparound skirts, desultory in the steady drizzle. Across the length and breadth of the rainswept tarmac, not a single other plane was to be seen. This, I suppose, was hardly surprising: Mingaladon, Burma’s only international airport, was not equipped to accommodate 747s, or even DC-10s. On a typical Friday, it received exactly one incoming flight.

  Following me out of the creaking Fokker F-28 came fifty other shaken passengers, every one of them carrying an identical red-and-white bag bought at the airport duty-free shop in Bangkok. Within every bag—whether purchased by teetotaler, non-smoker or pleasure lover—was one carton of 555 brand cigarettes and one bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. Every visitor to Burma must bring such a bag, we had all been instructed by guidebooks, returned friends, the lore of the road; even the Burma Airways boarding card had pointedly reminded all embarking passengers: “PROCEED TO THE AIRPORT DEPARTURE LOUNGE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, TAX-FREE PURCHASES CAN BE MADE INSIDE.” Identical red-and-white bags in hand, we trooped into the washed-out terminal.

  Inside, several cheerful officials, trying hard to look grave, were lined up behind a long wooden counter like schoolteachers at a prizegiving. In the absence of formalities, passengers were invited to punch and pummel their way toward this central desk. A crush of bodies swept me forward, and I flung my health form toward an official. The scrum swayed and wobbled; I extended my Tourist Arrival Report in the direction of another official. Thrown off balance in the melee, and finding myself suddenly close to the front, I thrust my Customs Form at random into the air. A third official, unflustered and fastidious in his spectacles, plucked the paper from my grasp, asked a few questions, then handed it to a colleague. This fellow, in turn, copied down all the contents of my four-page form onto a separate form. The crowd shoved and shouted, and a soldier challenged an unfortunate who had brought no whiskey, only cigarettes, in his duty-free bag. A fifth man checked my carry-on case. What valuables did I have? None. How could that be? Curses rose up around me. Did I carry no watch? No glasses? No cuff links? By now, my third form, I was told, conflicted with a fourth, and a fifth would have to be completed. Did I have no wedding ring? Contact lenses perhaps? No spectacles? Elbows, passports collided. No American Express card? Not even a travel alarm clock? All, it seemed, were valuables; all had to be declared. An official began to add some of these items to my revised Customs Form and then, amidst a crash of voices, bodies, imprecations, to ask me, most cordially, to estimate the value of each piece. $5? $20? $7? Another official started rummaging through my bags, and then handed them to another for official inspection. Someone else gave me a copy of a Customs Declaration Form and a Currency Declaration Form and a Declaration Form, and told me that one had to be kept on my person and one had to be presented before every single transaction in Burma and one had to be shown upon departure. All of them, I noticed, already conflicted.

  Then, as suddenly as they had converged, the officials released me, red-and-white bag in hand, through an old door bandaged with cellotape. Instantly, I was assaulted by a gang of waiting unofficials. 100 kyats for a carton of 555 cigarettes! 200 kyats for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red! 270 kyats for cigarettes and whiskey! 250 kyats and a ride into town! 10 U.S. dollars for a taxi and a carton of 555s! 8 U.S. dollars and 100 kyats for …

  I wasted not a moment; were it not for these black-market negotiations, I knew, I could easily find myself stranded at the airport indefinitely. Tourist Burma, ever eager to see the backs of foreigners, offered buses from Rangoon out to the airport; less pleased to welcome visitors, it ran no buses from the airport into town. Besides, it was illegal to bring kyats into the country and the only booth in the airport where local currency could be procured was closed.

  A smiling man with pleading eyes and a greasy sarong led me outside. There, idling in the warm rain, were dozens upon dozens of cars, the youngest of them older than I. Battered Ford Fairlanes from the mid-fifties. Peeling Morris Minors from the Mountbatten years. Veteran Willys Jeeps left over from the war. Nearly all of them were gray, or green, or a khaki gray-green. Some had steering wheels on the right, some had steering wheels on the left and some, I’m sure, had no steering wheels at all. All looked like the final relics of some superannuated mobster.

  Gently divesting me of my case, my guide flung it into the back of a 1953 Czech-made Skoda, ushered me happily into the back seat, and off we roared—or sputtered, rather, as the aging wreck gasped and creaked its way toward Rangoon. Every few minutes, it coughed up some phlegm and gave out completely. At that, the driver whirled around, flashed me a bright smile of helpless apology, jumped out, threw open the trunk, grabbed a container of water, flung open the hood, hopefully poured some water onto the engine, returned the container to the trunk, leapt into the car again and started her up. There were two dials on the dashboard, but neither of them worked.

  Groaning and gagging, the Skoda bumped through wide avenues built for a queen. Above us, on an overblown billboard painted in faded comic-strip colors, a white-skinned woman with a fifties hairdo offered “English for Everyone.” By the side of the road, broad driveways swept up to somber, white-pillared mansions that now stood discolored and empty, their walls mildewed, their gardens overgrown, moisture dripping from their Kent or Sussex eaves. In the midst of all these tombs of Empire, the Burmese went calmly about their daily rounds. On Thirlmere Avenue, monks in burgundy robes stood in line for buses. Thick-spectacled old Indian gentlemen, with folded brollies and ancient briefcases under their arms, waited to cross Windsor Road. In the Landsdowne area, schoolchildren in spotless white shirts and bright blue skirts sauntered, satchels swinging, homeward down muddy lanes.

  Trying in vain to direct the dance of juddering jalopies that careened like Dodg’ems through the collapsing city, policemen presided over every roundabout, stern in their odd white shirts with shiny blue buttons. A frayed notice board advertised “Public Latrines” and behind it the steeples of red-brick Victorian churches poked into the sky. Shabby, dark little booths offered “Cake and Snacks.” Other solemn institutions, puffed up with an air of earnest self-importance, stood unvisited along the streets: the Military and Civil Tailors, the Foodstuffs and General Merchandise Trading Corporation, the Burmese League of Moslem Women. Above
us, on a Day-Glo cartoon of a billboard, a dashing young couple—she a proto-Grace Kelly in white dress, he a dinner-jacketed sophisticate—danced beside a goblet of Super Star ice cream several times bigger than themselves.

  At last, with an apologetic cough, the Skoda lurched up to the Strand Hotel. Inside, behind a semicircular wooden counter, a stern-looking woman pulled out a ledger thick with the dust of ages. I filled in my name, my address and, most important of all, the date on which I planned to leave Burma. A dirty-turbaned man led me past grand and desolate assembly halls where groups of schoolchildren might have gathered each morning for prayers. A skeletal 1940s elevator creaked up its chute, the bellboy led me down a naked, well-scrubbed corridor, a dungeon key turned in a door and we entered my room: a hard bed with hospital covers, a black film noir phone, a spartan tub in the bathroom, a Yale lock. The turbaned man flicked a switch, and, lazily, a fan began to whir.

  “This is Burma,” Kipling had written, “and it will be quite unlike any land you know about.”

  ———

  BURMA is THE dotty eccentric of Asia, the queer maiden aunt who lives alone and whom the maid has forgotten to visit. A quarter of a century ago. General Ne Win introduced his people to his own homemade political system—a slaphappy mixture of Buddhism and socialism. Almost overnight, he eliminated all private enterprise, expelled all foreigners and sealed up his nation’s borders. Nothing should enter the country, he decreed, nobody should leave, and nothing should change. Burma is hardly a negligible little banana republic: it has as many citizens as Canada and Australia combined and its area is more than sixteen times greater than that of Switzerland. When Win took over, his country was the world’s foremost exporter of rice, and even today it is rich with 80 percent of the globe’s teak, vast quantities of rubies, even oil. Yet with one wave of his wand, its new leader managed to put the entire country to sleep. Ever since, the country had continued to slide further into poverty, deeper and ever deeper into the past. In 1974, it had emerged from its solitary confinement just long enough to announce its willingness to enter into joint-venture projects. But fully a decade passed before the first such deal was agreed upon, and it involved nothing more than the manufacture of obsolete German rifles for the Burmese Army. In Burma, Time itself had been sentenced to life imprisonment and History was held under house arrest.