Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  For a moment, her gaze lowered, and she pulled gently at the waist of her sarong. It fell instantly along with the lace petticoat beneath it, and he saw (because she’d worn no underwear!) the white curves of her backside and ample hips, and, reflected in the mirror, the generous thatch of her black hair. Swiftly, she raised her arms and removed her black embroidered top, and he saw the pucker of fat around her waist, the surprisingly heavy breasts, each focused on a petite dark areola. Now her eyes returned almost impassively to meet his—as though to communicate to him that she was in familiar territory, and expected that in this she had the upper hand. And did she? My God! This was not the nervously giggling girl he had encountered at the sessions judge’s house in Akyab! This was . . . a gift so unsurpassable, he was sure it would be abruptly retracted, that she would come to her senses and hide herself again in the sarong.

  A shy smile tremulously lit up her face as she continued to watch him, pity and feeling passing like shadows over her eyes. She seemed suddenly vulnerable, suddenly afraid, as though she would cry, or as though this were in fact all new to her and she had only been fumbling for how to start.

  In one sure step, he went and knelt before her and turned her around, and then he pressed against her damp warm scent, looking up past the pendulous breasts at her frightened, waiting eyes.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  She couldn’t answer, but she held him with her eyes. It is enough that we are here, she silently communicated.

  He was twenty, and she was eighteen. And they had discovered in each other a reprieve from loneliness beyond measure.

  And yet their new intimacy was not perfect. Khin, he learned, spoke nearly fluent Burmese—the language of the Burmans (utterly distinct from the Karen language, he was learning, though apparently of the same tonal family). Soon he discovered that if he put some effort into cultivating his memory of Burmese, which had wilted after his Rangoon boyhood ended, whole branches of its syntax sprouted up in his mind. But it had never been his native language any more than it was hers, and there was something pathetic about the way he used it to draw closer to Khin, something disturbing about even their most harmless verbal exchanges. “You like?” he thought she asked one evening, when they were at the table and he started to wipe his nose and eyes while enjoying the smoky, spicy soup that she called ta ga poh—a mélange of rice, meat, greens, and bamboo shoots. “Tasty!” he chimed. Tasty. Like a Burman child. How he hated his swallowing, grinning self at that moment. As if to compensate for the deficiency of his words and praise for her, she pushed forward a little bowl of fermented fish paste (which she called nya u htee, but which he clumsily kept referring to as the similar Burman condiment nga pi). Instead of helping himself to the savory paste, he took her hand, feeling alone and afraid he’d hurt her feelings. We will get through this, her steady, kind gaze seemed to communicate.

  But would they? “I have been . . . move up!” he stammered some days later, meaning to tell her of his promotion to the grade of senior officer in the customs service. “Very good! Very . . . happy!” he caught her reply. And “We . . . baby,” he understood her to say a few weeks after, when he had returned from the wharves exhausted and she came to him in joy and timidity. Her hair was loose, and she had powdered her face, penciled in her eyebrows, and put on the small sapphire earrings that had been his wedding gift to her. “We . . . baby.” In Burmese. It was almost as though she were telling him that the pregnancy, the child, was already inadequate. “Very good. Very happy,” he found himself parroting. He had wanted to say everything. Instead he kept repeating “Very good. Very happy,” as he held her just inside the doorway, and she laughed without making a noise.

  Their sputtering exchanges never failed to leave an aftertaste of disappointment in his mouth. Not that he was disappointed with her precisely. He was still surprised by her mysterious beauty, and his admiration for her as a manager of their new household increased with every passing week. With the salary that he turned over to her, she purchased a few handsome pieces to complete the flat, filled in their wardrobes, and even arranged for a neighbor’s servant to help her clean. She was an excellent cook and seamstress, and a truly gifted nurse (once, when he returned from the wharves wretched because of some bad fish he’d eaten, she spent the entire night by his side, washing his mouth, rinsing out the spattered porcelain, ignoring him when he waved her away in shame). In short, she was more capable and dignified than he could have anticipated. Yet gazing into her sweetly peering eyes, he often felt locked out of a place to which he’d never be permitted entry, because she was Karen, and he never could be.

  He began to wonder about the secrets she might be keeping, such as what exactly had happened to her father at the hands of the Burman dacoits, what toll that had taken on her, and why her mother and sister had looked at her with such blame. And also: How sexually experienced had she been before their first encounter as man and wife? Her nightly abandon with him, so in contrast to her demure (enforced?) tranquillity by day, both fed and poisoned his peace of mind. While away from her at the wharves, he had vivid fantasies of her undressed and entertaining some old Karen flame. And at the same time, he became increasingly sensitive to the differences between his Burman and Karen underlings—how the former tended to fly into a rage when slighted, while the latter tended to smolder, even when treated to a generous dose of the former’s sense of supremacy.

  He had hardly considered the matter of race when spontaneously determining to marry Khin, his only consideration being his embarrassing lack of awareness of how the Karen were distinct from any other people among the Burmese. Perhaps this had been his privilege as a “white”—though olive-complexioned—citizen of British India. If he was very honest with himself, he understood that he had distrusted the notion of race to begin with. His aunties’ clannishness reeked of false comfort, even of superiority, no less than Ducksworth’s claiming of his Anglo blood reeked of latent self-hatred. But now he felt cornered by questions pertaining to race. Was it a Karen trait, Khin’s preference for the quietness he sometimes found stifling? Had she been taught never to impose, to avoid eye contact, to fold her arms across her chest in conversation, to duck when passing others congregated on the street? He wasn’t at all sure that her habit of refusing his offers to purchase her some tidbit (a coffee, a trinket from a stand) wasn’t in fact a Karen form of modestly accepting. Nor was he certain that the concerned glances she cast him when he asked something of her directly (say, that she use a tad less chili in his lunchtime curry) weren’t in fact meant to be reproving. She very visibly forced herself not to comment when he offended her sense of propriety (as when he walked with a heavy step or shut the doors with a bang). And the few times he lost his patience with her (generally because he was fed up with having to read her mind), she seemed to be on the verge of packing up to leave.

  “Leave them, please,” she beseeched Benny one afternoon when they were walking along the Strand and a pack of runts began shouting crass words about her clothing (because of the unseasonable heat, she was wearing a native tunic rather than one of the fitted and buttoned Burman blouses that she’d come to favor since moving to the city). Benny ignored her pleas, charging over to the runts, taking one of them by the sleeve, and asking him in an English that was meant to put the kid in his place, “Do you know what you are doing?” But, of course, only Benny was stunned by what had just been done to his wife.

  And as 1940 progressed and Khin became resplendently pregnant with his child, Benny’s sense of what he didn’t know about Khin and her people seemed to take on the dimension of Burma’s ­problem—what with a warrant issued for Aung San’s arrest for conspiring to overthrow the government, and the Burman elites and masses, helmed by this de facto leader, attempting to turn the pressure of the wars at large into a domestic opportunity by demonstrating, rioting, and striking. For that matter, Benny and Khin’s troubles seemed to be magnified by the scale of the world’s rec
ent problems—Japan’s capturing of Nanning in China, the Soviet attack on Finland, the sinking of a British destroyer by a German submarine. True, Khin continued to appear mostly secure in their marital arrangement and her life as a member of a minority, just as the British continued confidently to frequent their Rangoon clubs in their ascots and evening gowns, insisting that their hold on Singapore—“the most important strategic point in the British Empire”—was safe, that the Japs were armed with no more than a fleet of sampans and rice-paper planes. But in more ways than Benny could count, he felt threatened. And, without ever admitting as much to himself, he started to ready himself for a fight.

  There have been so many unfortunate, and disagreeable, and regretable things in connection with our annexation of Upper Burmah, that whatever pleasant features there are should have full prominence. And one of the most pleasant features has been the remarkable loyalty to the British Crown of the little nation of Karens. It is a nation almost unknown at home here, and is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, even in India; but it is one with such marked idiosyncrasies and of such peculiar suggestiveness, that we have thought it would be of interest to our readers to set before them a few facts . . .

  That was Charles Dickens Jr., in December 1888, in an essay Benny had very nearly neglected to read. He’d first heard mention of the piece several months before meeting Khin, when the inspector above him at the Rangoon wharf, a Briton and recent transplant to the country, had mentioned casually over tea that it was the son of the great author who had first introduced him to the Karens (or the “little people,” as he’d called them). “Wrote a marvelous little musing on the Karens,” he’d told Benny. “Can’t say I remember the title . . . In the All the Year Round series, it seems to me.”

  Now Benny ransacked more than fifty mildewing volumes in the series, the bulk of which sat neglected on the shelves of the officers’ club library, before opening volume XLIII to the contents and, under the chilling listing “JEWS, SLAUGHTER OF, IN YORK,” finding what he was searching for: “KARENS, SOMETHING ABOUT THE.”

  There are times when time is revealed as a mockery. It was as though Dickens were in the musty room alongside him, pulling him by the sleeve, leading him to the worn leather armchair in which the ghosts of Benny’s predecessors had pondered their papers; it was as though Dickens were pushing him down and prodding him to leaf through the volume, thrusting his finger at Benny, and crying with all the reproach of the unheeded: “See what my son saw! Over half a century later, and you people are still living in ignorance! My God, man, do something!”

  The article was more comprehensive than its unobtrusive title suggested, covering everything from the term “Karen” (a broad one, if Dickens Jr. was right, and referring to several tribes sharing linguistic and ethnic traits) to the geographic (the Karens of Dickens’s time were spread out from the hills abutting Siam down to Tenasserim and as far to the west as the Irrawaddy Delta) to the topic of origins (drawing on the publications of several of his contemporaries, Dickens Jr. advanced the theory that the Karens had originally lived on the borders of Tibet, then crossed the Gobi Desert into China and journeyed south, although “why they migrated,” he stipulated, “and when they first came to Burmah, remains a mystery”). What was most immediately fascinating to Benny, however, was the article’s meditation on the Karens’ faith, whose traditions the author’s son described as having “a singularly Jewish tinge”(!) with “accounts of the Creation, the Fall, the Curse, and the dispersion of men . . . startling in their resemblance to the Mosaic records”:

  But now we come to the most remarkable tradition of all, held absolutely identical by each tribe of the Karens, and enabling us to understand the success which the American missionaries have had among them, and their devotion to the British alliance. After the Fall, they say, God gave His “Word” (the Bible) to the Karens first, as the elder branch of the human race; but they neglected it, and God, in anger, took it away and gave it to their younger brother, the white man, who was placed under a promise to restore it to the Karens, and teach them the true religion after their sins had been sufficiently expiated by long oppression of other races.

  “Oppression.” The word was one pole of an axis around which Dickens Jr. seemed to pivot, the other pole being “loyalty,” as in: “their loyalty to the British Crown is beyond question,” and “their loyalty and courage have been in refreshing contrast to the dacoity and unfaithfulness of the Burmese.” Were not oppression and loyalty, Benny wondered, the twin forces that still kept the Karens in a kind of limbo—caught between outright destruction and advancement of any meaningful kind? Even in Dickens’s time, the Karens had “rendered signal service” to the British government, which had received their loyalty with “only scurvy acknowledgement”—so much so that they were “not even known at all” in England. The Karens: the chronically oppressed loyalists spinning continually in the void of an apathetic realm.

  On a March morning several weeks later, Benny was introduced by the inspector at the wharf to a new colleague and fellow officer named Saw Lay—“Saw,” Benny knew by now, being the Karen for “Mister.”

  “This chap was a national football hero until recently,” the inspector raved. It was fitting, Benny thought, that the inspector had hired a Karen to fill in for the recently transferred Indian, but also curious that a Karen could rise to national stature as an athlete. Perhaps the British domination of the Burmans had allowed for such a shift in the order of things.

  Saw Lay was a serious sort, the same height as Benny, though leaner, lankier, less apt to meet others in the eye. He spoke English impeccably, and was terribly unimpressed with his renown—“It’s only football,” he liked to say. If it weren’t for the nimble way he leaped up onto the launches, Benny would have doubted his football prowess, so unassumingly did Saw Lay stride up and down the wharf each day. And yet, there was nothing passive about him. His every infrequent look, his every measured word, burned with intelligence and intensity—and rage. A steadying rage, Benny thought, just the opposite of his own explosiveness.

  The new officer had taken a flat across from Queen’s Park, which abutted the Sule Pagoda and the colonnaded municipal office in Fytche Square, and often after work they would stroll through the gardens, seeking shelter from the heat under a variety of blooming trees, Benny asking questions and then retreating into silence while Saw Lay began to speak.

  “You must understand,” Saw Lay explained as he and Benny walked one evening in April. “The loyalist bond we share with the Brits . . . what made it stick was our mutual security. Their takeover of the country wasn’t easy. It happened over time, with several wars. We welcomed them because we’d been persecuted by the Burmans for centuries, we’d been their slaves—our villages perpetually attacked, our people perpetually preyed upon, stripped of everything from our clothing to our lives. There is a reason that we are characteristically afraid. Our tendency to be shy, to be modest, to avoid confrontation, to be cautious—all of this comes from our long history of being intimidated. And the Brits, well, they made use of that history. It didn’t hurt that we populated strategic territory. It behooved them to make nice with us, as they say. And, well, it behooved us, too. We’re not shy about referring to the missionaries who brought many of us our faith as ‘Mother,’ just as we’re not shy about referring to His Majesty’s government as ‘Father.’ Why shouldn’t we? Like a good father, the British government rescued us, taking us out of our long state of slavery and subjugation.”

  They stopped to sit on a bench under a shade tree, and for a few moments Saw Lay fell quiet, as though sinking into the recesses of his vast mind. He sighed, looking up at the intricate white facade of the municipal building.

  “Is that why there are so many Karens in the army and the police?” Benny ventured. He’d learned in recent weeks, with some surprise, that of the four battalions of the Burma Rifles—the regional regiment of the British army—two were mad
e up exclusively of Karens.

  A melancholy shadow passed over Saw Lay’s eyes, and he looked up again, above the municipal building to the white clouds poised above the city. “Without us fighting by their side,” he said, “the British couldn’t have won the wars against the Burmans, couldn’t have annexed one piece of the country after another.” He glanced at Benny, in one of his rare moments of meeting another’s eyes. “The Burmans rose up, rebelled—sometimes in the smallest, the ugliest of ways, with dacoities, armed robberies. And the Brits didn’t hesitate to use us as police, as troops, to suppress these rebellions. If you were a Burman, wouldn’t you therefore hate the Karens as viciously as you hated the British?”

  Benny didn’t immediately answer, and the silence into which Saw Lay fell again silenced him further—he had the sense that even a single word might disturb the calibrations of thought vitally taking place in his new friend’s mind.

  “The problem—” Saw Lay went on, with the caution of someone vigilantly staking his claim, “the problem is that the Brits are more favorably inclined toward the Burmans when it comes to issues of administration—no doubt because of the Burmans’ centuries-long rule over this country. You would think that, knowing the Burmans’ tendency to subjugate, our Father would limit their power, politically speaking. But our Father has always behaved very strangely in this regard. Even as we’ve continued to serve loyally, militarily, we have had to suffer being governed by Burman subordinates. We have a Burman prime minister, a Burman cabinet, a legislature dominated by Burman nationalist parties . . . And now with their strikes, their riots, our Father has been giving them greater and greater self-government. You can understand why we Karens are apprehensive, fearful. Has our Father forgotten our needs, our acts of loyalty? Surely he must ensure the fulfillment of our right to a measure of self-determination, to a separate administrative territory or state that we can call our own, and to some sort of guarantee of representation at the national level.”