It was my mother’s wish, her dream, to go abroad, but she had no intention of leaving the country forever. This was a fact both of my parents took pride in: we never wanted to abandon our country. They had gone to Sittwe because they believed it was their patriotic duty. They believed the Rakhine were their countrymen and -women and worked to earn their respect. The Rakhine were fond of us, my parents always said proudly, even though they hated most Bamar. My parents believed they could make a difference. They believed in duty and courage and sacrifice, in the post-independence dream of a peaceful and prosperous multiethnic Burma.
Even back then, in the late eighties, my parents must have known, or at least feared, that this dream would never come to fruition. They must have known that the Burmese Way to Socialism was leading the country to ruin, that it was a catastrophic failure, and anyone with the means to leave the country was getting out. My father’s elder sister had married an American tourist she met while working at the US embassy and had left the country years ago. My father’s younger sister went to England on a government scholarship to get her bachelor’s and never returned. In March of 1987, while my parents were in Sittwe, my father’s mother and father also left to be with my aunt in America. I did the math, my mother said, and your grandmother would have been sixty-three when she came here. The same age I am now.
Though my mother never made it to the Mahamuni Buddha Temple in Kyauktaw, on her thirtieth birthday, in November of 1987, her neighbor, an older woman who took my mother under her wing, brought her to a large monastery in Sittwe. In my family, when I was growing up, birthdays were celebrated not with parties but with visits to the monastery where acts of good merit would be performed: donations of money and food for the monks, or, if one was lucky and there was a retreat taking place, for all the meditators as well. I was taught that a birthday was a time to give back, not to ask for presents or wishes.
My mother, however, went to the monastery in Sittwe to make a wish, which is what prayer translates to in Bamar, su taung, to ask for a prize or a reward. My mother’s wish, of course, was to have another opportunity to go abroad, another scholarship, or anything else, any chance to leave Sittwe. The monk my mother’s friend introduced her to did not understand why my mother wanted to leave. Why can’t you stay? he asked her, and she did not know how to answer without giving offense. I am just used to living in Rangoon, she finally said. I wonder if my mother felt any guilt or shame in that moment, knowing that a life that was livable for the monk and everyone else was not livable for her. I think it is more likely, however, that I am projecting my own guilt and my own shame onto my mother. She never had enough privilege to feel ashamed, only grateful.
In the one photograph there is of my family in Sittwe, they are at Point, on a rare sunny day. The sea is calm and blue behind them. My mother and father are each holding a child. My father is wearing a paso, and a white collarless shirt, with the top buttons unbuttoned. He gives a closed-lip smile and holds my infant middle sister tightly in his arms. My sister stares straight at the camera with a mixture of curiosity and distrust, her chubby little body turned away from my father so she can get a better look. The pink sock on her left foot seems to be coming loose. My mother is radiant in a matching htamein and blouse set in a rich shade of blue. The kind of blue that is deserving of a more beautiful name, azure, or lapis lazuli. She holds up the htamein, or skirt, with one hand, so as not to get it wet, and with the other hand, she holds my eldest sister, who is in her white birthday outfit. My mother smiles for the camera, but my sister seems to be caught in a moment of panic. She is gripping a plastic yellow lunchbox tight in one hand and is pressing her other elbow against my mother’s chest. My sister’s pretty little mouth is opened wide, and her brown legs are swinging in the air. She seems to be afraid of touching the wet sand, or any part of Sittwe. She looks like she is about to cry.
III
Hinthada
In the only photograph ever taken of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, they are seated in teak chairs, my great-grandfather with his elbows on the armrests, his hands lightly grazing his knees. His hands fine and plump, the left hand adorned with a large ring, the fingertips bearing its weight, and the right hand hanging heavy from the wrist.
My great-grandmother holds a flower in her right hand and her left rests on the seat of her chair, as if she is preparing to stand, or else has just steadied herself. Her necklace is askew, caught in the button of her blouse, and she looks at the camera with pained forbearance, as if the photograph were taken in the last moment before she exhaled a long-held breath.
This photograph hangs over the bookshelf in the room I used to share with my two sisters. For many years, I looked at it as if looking into a mirror, as if by my looking I could conjure the ghosts of my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother. I looked and looked at this photograph until I felt as if we were the ghosts, my middle sister and I, we, the remnants of these people.
I do not know if my great-grandfather was buried in Leymyethna, or cremated, or if his ashes were brought back to Hinthada and kept inside his trunk along with the family jewels. I do not know how much ash is produced when a body is burned. Ash is the remainder, the residue, the remnant or trace, the vestige of a body after it has burned. Ash is what could not burn, or what had to be created so something else could be destroyed. In this way, we are all each other’s ashes. I am my great-grandfather’s ash. I am the story that was told about his death, or the story that was created from his death, though many years later. I do not know the stories that were told at the time of his death. What my great-grandmother told her seven children, what she told herself.
My mother said my great-grandmother and great-grandfather had loved each other. They had had a happy marriage. She said when two people loved each other as much as my great-grandparents did, they usually died within days or weeks of each other and were reborn in the same womb, as twins. My great-grandfather, however, died too young, and too unexpectedly. He was only a little over forty. My great-grandmother could not follow him into death, not yet; she still had seven children to raise. My great-grandmother was a few years older than my great-grandfather, my mother said, two or three years, the same as the age gap between my middle sister and me. My great-grandfather would have had to call his wife ma, meaning big sister, and she would have had to call him maung, little brother. In Bamar, all polite pronouns are familial; to speak the language is to become a part of a family. I call my eldest sister ma, but not my middle sister. Though she is three years older than me, she was so small, and I grew so quickly, that for most of our childhood and adolescence, we were always mistaken for twins.
When my great-grandmother and her children returned home to Hinthada, they discovered that the house they had left behind was exactly the same. Untouched by the British bombs and the Japanese bombs, untouched by looters, soldiers, and wild animals. It was as if the war had never happened, as if the family had never left. The house was pristine, immaculate, pyu cin, like my eldest sister’s name, meaning white and clean. A new beginning.
It was a miracle, my mother said, a testament to my great-grandmother’s faith, the power of her faith, her prayers of protection. I think it would have been a greater miracle if my great-grandfather had not died. If my great-grandmother’s prayers could have protected him instead of the house. But I know prayers do not work in that way. I know that all beings are owners of their actions. My great-grandfather died because he had to, because all of us have to die someday. Many of their neighbors’ homes were destroyed, my mother said my great-grandmother said. Some of their neighbors never returned.
As a widow, my great-grandmother was protective of her children. Every night, she walked through the house casting prayers so the family jewels would not be robbed, and her daughters would not be violated. The jewels were kept locked in the attic, and the daughters were kept hidden inside the house. For seven years they were not allowed to leave the house. They were not allowed to go to school.
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br /> For years Ohnmardani was kept hidden inside her parents’ house, because of her beauty. Patacara too was locked away for the same reason. Subha, because she was not locked away, was harassed by a libertine, a philanderer, a rake. There are many euphemisms in English for men who perpetrate sexual violence, and only one word for rapist. I do not even know that word in Bamar. The only words I know are everyday ones, common ones. He insulted her. He wronged her. To escape from her harasser, her potential rapist, Subha plucked out her eye and gave it to him. Because she was enlightened, she felt no pain, and later the eye was restored. All three stories end in the same way: the women achieve enlightenment. They become fearless.
My great-grandmother was fearful. She sent her sons to school and kept her daughters at home because that was what was done, that was what the British did. Gentlemen’s daughters were educated at home. My grandmother and her sisters, though, were a gentleman’s orphans, and there was no money for a governess or a tutor. There was no money, but there was the large house they lived in, and the family jewels, the royal jewels that my great-grandfather had inherited from his mother. My great-grandmother sold the jewels, one by one. She loaned out the money she made from these sales and collected interest. She took in boarders at the house. My grandmother, the eldest daughter, was in charge of all the bookkeeping. She was good with numbers. My grandmother was a very capable, very efficient and organized person. That was what my mother always said, and what I observed the two times I met her as a child. Her clothes were always crisp and clean, her hair perfectly in place, and the jasmines pinned in it always fresh.
When my great-grandmother finally died, she was reborn as my middle sister. My sister was my wife in our past life. My mother says I followed her into this life. My mother believes my sister was once my great-grandmother because of the dream she had before my sister’s birth and also because after my sister was born, she displayed the same traits and mannerisms that my great-grandmother once possessed. A peculiar way of wiping one’s mouth, with the thumb and forefinger rather than the back of the hand. Miserliness. Irritability. Stubbornness. As a toddler my sister carried on fights with my grandmother that had started in a past life when my grandmother was her daughter. My sister furrowed her brows, hunched her back, and frowned. My mother always called my sister a little old lady. My sister even looked like my great-grandmother. She had the same small and slender frame, the same fair skin, the same unmistakable beauty.
My middle sister traveled to Hinthada to see her old house and returned with artifacts from our previous life: a striped skinny tie that once belonged to our great-grandfather, our great-grandmother’s music box. The house had been damaged by the cyclone, but our great-aunt who still lived in Hinthada was making repairs. The house that had withstood Japanese and British bombs had not withstood Nargis. The roof had flown off, and the contents of the attic were lost, including my eldest sister’s beloved stuffed bear.
My middle sister also brought back the photograph that now hangs above the bookshelf in our old room, the room I used to share with my sisters. I do not know how old they were when the picture was taken, how many children they had already had, how close they were to war, to death. After all these years, I still cannot make out what is in the background of the photograph: a threshold to another room, frames leaned against the wall, or a dark mirror that shows no reflection.
Ghosts live inside of mirrors, my mother always said, and when we were young, she warned that looking into a mirror was even worse for your eyes than watching television. There was once a young, beautiful woman, my mother said, but she was very vain, and she spent all her time looking into a mirror and admiring her beauty, until she ruined her eyes and finally went blind. I do not remember if the woman then perished, or if she repented and shaved her head.
_________________
Our family monk asked me if I wanted him to read my fortune and I knew it was a trick question because monks did not tell fortunes. Holy men believed in karma, not superstition. My mother always said so before she gave a reading of any kind, and my father always said so when he wanted to wash his hair on a Wednesday. I did not know how to answer the monk. I could feel my whole family watching me, waiting for me to speak. Finally, the monk said, here is your fortune. You will grow old. You will get sick and you will die. I knew, even then, that the monk was wrong. Many people do not grow old or get sick. They just die.
A few years ago, I made a list of everyone I knew who had died, in chronological order. My uncle who died of liver failure. My grandmother who died of diabetes. My grandfather who died of pneumonia. My friend in high school who died in a car accident when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Another uncle who also died of liver failure. A boy in my freshman-year dorm who fell off the roof of a building and died. A girl in my anthropology class who was reported dead, though I never found out how she died. My aunt who had a heart attack. A friend of a friend who walked into the bay and drowned himself. My grandfather and grandmother who died of old age. An old acquaintance whose death I only learned of years after we lost touch. Our family monk who died of lung cancer. A boy I knew from college who once told me he sometimes looks around a crowded room and wonders, Who will love me? He was found dead on the subway tracks at four in the morning.
And before all these deaths, my brother died. His death the first death in my life, though it occurred before my life began.
The first time my eldest sister pushed a finger down her throat, she said she thought of our brother, and how he had died because he vomited up all of his milk, because he could not drink, take nourishment, and grow. All the days he was in the hospital, my mother prayed that he would live. She was not allowed to see him at the hospital. My father and my grandparents would not allow it. They believed that women who had recently given birth were in a delicate state, a precarious state, of soft blood and soft skin, and in this state, they were close to madness. My father and my grandparents believed my mother had to be shielded from any shock or disturbance.
And my brother’s body had been shocking, my mother said, when she finally saw him at the children’s hospital, in an incubator at the intensive care unit. She hardly recognized him. He had been a fair, chubby baby, a handsome boy, and now he looked like a shriveled animal, so many tubes and wires sticking out of his little body. He would have fit in the palm of her hand, my mother said, her small, slender hand. But she was not allowed to hold him.
Vomiting was the activity of ghosts, my mother always said. Ghosts could not speak or touch or bleed, but they could vomit. Vomit and ghosts, the ultimate others, the abject, that which is rejected from the body, in death or in times of distress when reality is rejected: the image in the mirror, the weight of one’s flesh on one’s body of bones.
I never found the jars of vomit hidden in the closet I shared with my two sisters, but I always knew the closet was haunted. I always made sure the closet door was closed before I went to bed. My eldest sister vomited in jars because there was only one bathroom between the five of us and it wasn’t easy for her to hide her illness. Though sometimes she didn’t bother to hide it at all, and sometimes she used it as a weapon against my mother. She would lock herself in the bathroom in the middle of a fight, and neglect to turn on the fan, so that we could all hear what she was doing in there, so my mother could hear her son dying a second death, so she would be sorry for whatever she had said.
I remember watching my sister on her knees in the kitchen one evening. The cabinet below the sink swung open, the trash pulled out, and my sister’s head bent over it. My mother said ghosts eat out of dumpsters and I believed my sister was possessed. I don’t remember what excuse she gave me, but I remember I didn’t believe it. I was old enough to recognize a lie. I said, I’ve puked only once in my life. Keep watching me, my sister said, and you’ll be able to vomit too.
The first time my eldest sister pushed a finger down her throat, she thought of my brother and how he had died, how she had died, because that was the worst th
ing that had happened to her, that had happened to all of us daughters, long before we were born, and when she made herself vomit, it was as if she were bringing him back to life, by reliving his death, as if she were aborting him over and over again, so that in the moment before she bent her head over the toilet, or the trash in the kitchen, or the glass jar in her hands, in the dark of the closet, he was alive again, at the back of her throat, a ghost waiting to be born.
That night at the hospital, my mother changed her prayers. She no longer prayed for my brother’s life, she said, but for an end to his suffering.
Until very recently, I had vomited only once in my life. I remember little of the incident, only having gone to bed nauseated, then waking up in the middle of the night, and suddenly my parents there in the bathroom with me, my father holding me up by the sink, and the feeling of disgust and relief when I dribbled out a yellowish paste. It felt like crying, but even better and worse, and still half-asleep it was all a dream or a nightmare: my father’s hands gripping my armpits, the fluorescent light above the mirror, and the shadows everywhere else.
Gayan
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