“Where are your shoes?” Khin demanded of Louisa one evening, when the girl and Johnny returned after a long day out, and Benny found the strength to limp to the kitchen to greet them.
Louisa stood barefoot within the doorway, gripping Johnny’s hand. “I gave them to a little girl who didn’t have any,” she replied—so boldly Khin slapped her across the cheek. But Louisa didn’t cry; she didn’t repent of her generosity. As Johnny held up one foot at a time to display the shoes he was still wearing, Louisa stood resolutely glaring at Khin with a kind of wounded pride that made Benny’s heart break all over again.
By June, though, they had all mostly recovered. Khin sold one of her rings, and she and Benny decided to buy a plot of land to till in a nearby valley. With Louisa and Johnny between them, they planted peas and avoided involvement in the war and each other’s eyes. Avoided each other’s touch, too. Only after Khin came to him one night and tried to straddle his weak thighs did he become aware of her metamorphosing body, of the hardening under her belly button and the slightest swelling that did not allow him to harden and swell toward her.
The child was born to them in January, after they had begun to harvest and dry the overabundant peas, a portion of which they sold to some of the gentler Japanese who began to infiltrate Tharrawaddy, one explaining to them with a chuckle that it was now assumed by the Japanese secret police that Benny was part Negro—part black, part kuro, the fellow chided him, pointing to his twists of hair. (Wasn’t kuro, Benny wondered, the word he’d been called by the soldiers who’d apprehended him in Khuli?) The child was a girl, and they named her Grace, because even the most painful life is still life, still inexplicable and blessed. And they never spoke of how she had come to be. He loved the little girl. She had Saw Lay’s placid eyes. Saw Lay, who had disappeared into the hills after giving a piece of himself to them, and for all they knew died soon thereafter.
The loyal are fully capable of deceit. That was something Benny told himself four months later, in May 1945, after the last of the Japanese had evacuated Rangoon and more than twelve thousand of their troops had been killed by Karen guerrillas supplied by British airdrop. Those Karens—a network of more than sixteen thousand by the end of the war—had not been the only irregular forces to resist the Japanese, Benny learned. Among the other intelligence and paramilitary groups working separately in Burma in support of the Allied cause were Kachin Rangers, Chin levies, Communist Party cadres, socialists, and even, in the final weeks of the campaign, Aung San’s renamed Burma National Army. (Benny heard that when a British military commander had quipped that Aung San changed sides only because the Allies were winning, Aung San had told him, “It wouldn’t be much use coming to you if you weren’t, would it?”) They had all fought the same enemy, yet what they had been fighting for apparently diverged widely. Thus, with the Japanese exodus, the alliances and promises that had been made or received (alliances and promises supporting individual causes, and leaving the future free in all the details) couldn’t be kept. Benny was distressed to learn that the same British and American intelligence and military officers who during the worst had guaranteed the “loyal” Karens their own state, or had convinced Kachin leaders of their support in a liberated Burma, appeared far less invested in the country and its peoples now that the Burma Road had been regained and the pipeline to China thus restored. And Benny could only shake his head when Aung San began preparing to fight the British as soon as they’d helped him oust the other imperialist enemy. Mutual effort gave way to mutual chaos, to widespread distrust, even before the war at large had formally been won.
Benny was so wasted by the breaches of faith near and far, he found himself turning his back on making any kind of sense of it all. Instead, suddenly liberated from the threat of the Japanese occupation, he found himself setting his sights on the future—a future in which he needn’t be a victim of others’ disloyalty or self-interest or viciousness, but could become a force to be reckoned with, a pugilist. Yes, a pugilist once more! A man prepared to fight for his share of the dream in Burma’s remaking, prepared to prove that he was still the kid who could counter life’s blows and make something of himself!
And so, as the Allies trooped through the country from May to August, installing units of both British forces and Aung San’s Burma National Army to “mop up operations” and restore the peace, Benny chose to look past the madness (was anyone less qualified to broker peace than the Burma National Army, whose leaders had ushered in the Japanese, and whose throngs of dacoits had raped, pillaged, and slaughtered those most loyal to the British effort?). He chose to look past what any of these deserters owed the Karens in particular (the Karens, who, when all was said and done, did more damage to the Japanese than any other irregular military force during the war). Instead, he seized the moment to extract something concrete from the British army: a food contract. With the earnings from the sale of dried peas to the Japanese, he’d doubled the size of his tillable land and hired several Karens to help him sow a new crop. It was really quite simple, in the postwar pandemonium, to convince a British quartermaster that his forthcoming pea yields would be excellent.
The problem was how to transport to the Brits the almost obscene amount of peas he soon harvested—a problem that worked to Benny’s benefit when those Brits decided to scrap many of their old lorries, and he took advantage of the old bookkeeping skills he’d acquired while pushing his pen back at B. Meyer. He bought a fleet of three hundred junkers, mostly three- and five-ton trucks capable of years of service once they’d been overhauled by a flotilla of mechanically inclined Karens from Tharrawaddy. Then, over the following few months, he sold half the trucks—to civilians wanting to get on with their own lives, for the most part. With the stunning profit, he hired his mechanics to transport not just piddling peas, but all the supplies and foodstuffs the army posts needed—even posts in China and India once the war was done with. Sure, a few Chinese soon got into the same racket, but with the partial profit-sharing plan Benny put into action, his well-paid, loyal employees soon made his the biggest postwar transportation company in Southeast Asia.
Within ten months of the Japanese retreat, he wasn’t just supplying the British army; he was hauling teak and rice back to long-dormant export companies (such as good old B. Meyer) in the Rangoon port of his youth. That sector of his business became so explosive he almost couldn’t keep up: he bought another fleet of lorries and a parcel of land eight miles from the port, where on a hill overlooking the Karen village of Thamaing he built a sprawling house, several cottages to house his personal assistants, a gas station to fill his trucks, and a machine shop and garage to service and station them. The problem was that many of his new trucks, though stuffed with supplies for export on their way to the Rangoon wharves, were wastefully empty going north. Then one day he remembered that E. Solomon, where his father had worked as a cashier, used to provide ice to the British navy. He was at the port, keeping an eye on a couple of workers unloading one of his trucks, when it occurred to him that a stone’s throw away on the Strand his father had pointed to a British navy ship and first illumined for him the essential concept of supply and demand. (“And how do you imagine their sailors relieve themselves from the press of this heat? Our ice! Our fizzy drinks!”) Hadn’t Benny’s drivers moaned that if there was one thing civilians and soldiers needed in the outposts, it was ice to prevent their food from rotting?
Turned out there were no ice factories anywhere near the outposts from which he was hauling supplies; turned out that if you covered ice with palm leaves and stored it in a metal compartment, it lasted for up to two days; turned out E. Solomon’s abandoned ice factory was still standing—albeit in utter disrepair and need of upgrading; turned out, what with economies of scale and the onetime cost of shipping refrigeration machinery from Britain, it made more sense to open two ice factories simultaneously—one to serve Rangoon and its outlying communities, the other stationed farther north in Tharrawad
dy, where he could rely on his Karen contacts. This new venture, launched well before the first anniversary of the war’s end, he named Aung Mingala Refrigeration Company. He just couldn’t help referencing the claim to success made by the Burman military ruler and self-proclaimed lord—aung being the Burman word for “succeed,” mingala being a Burman bastardization of the Pali word for “auspicious.” He couldn’t help referencing it because, truth be told, he’d done nothing openly to express his dismay at an evolving slew of negotiations between Aung San and the Brits, the latter of whom had put forward white paper plans to ease Burma toward self-governance (even as they supposedly wanted to ensure the “Frontier” peoples’ involvement in the country’s political future), while the former was sticking to a hard-nosed Burman agenda and encouraging the imperialists to make a prompt exit from the scene. Theft, dacoity, mass strikes . . . If Aung San didn’t precisely incite them all, neither did he seem to be seeking a way to forestall the collapse of peace; and the spent British—helmed by Attlee’s Labour Party, which had trumped Churchill’s Conservative Party by a landslide earlier that year—were backing away.
But how successful Benny felt with his own expanding business empire—and at just twenty-six! How reassured he felt by the vast metal buckets tipping blocks of ice over the conveyor belts in one of his factories. There was something so undeniable about the ice and the relief it brought others; it quenched a parched place within him and restored his vitality. “Careful not to get your hair stuck in the belt!” he’d call to the children (his children—and how handsome all three of them were, how bright and articulate and charming). Their delight in the machinery, and in their new proprietorship of something, was his delight; their pleasure in the long tubes of flavored sugar-water, frozen especially for them by the workers, was his pleasure. Even Khin looked on with vague relief at the chugging machinery, pleased, he tried to convince himself, by the reliable creak of the rollers, by the clunk of ice dumped again and again and again onto the belt. Something else—someone else—had taken over her burden. Yes, for the first time in his life, he truly felt like a man.
And that man got a kick out of renting space in the same building as B. Meyer and putting his name on the office door. That man enjoyed the things money could buy—the Steinway concert grand and the Packard and the private schools for the kids; the chauffeur and servants and membership at the old British Rowing Club, where he took up billiards and also bridge again. That man became reacquainted with the Western music they’d mostly missed out on during the war. How he loved belting out love songs (so many about dreams, now that he thought about it) while little Louisa plinked out the melodies at the piano—“Sweet Genevieve,” “Charmaine,” “I’ll Buy That Dream.”
And, bloody hell, did he buy that dream! A large part of his time was now spent cultivating and keeping business contacts, and if at the many parties he attended and hosted he took certain privileges with women, if he did more than allow his eyes to luxuriate in their coconut-oiled hair or kohl-lidded eyes—if he sometimes left Khin’s side to slip some sweet dame a business card, what of it? Hadn’t he earned a certain right to flaunt his freedom? None of it meant anything. None of it had the slightest thing to do with what he refused to entertain—thoughts of the war years (and what he’d suffered, what they’d suffered). And if he doubted his decency now and then, if he questioned the authenticity of his renewed bullishness, if he was ashamed about his lack of involvement on the political scene, if he noticed the return in Khin’s eyes of a disappointment that she’d only just begun to shed—he threw it off with the thought that his wife was back in his bed, back in his corner, and he was back in the ring, fighting as never before.
But several things happened to rouse him from the dream he’d bought. The first was that, in May 1946, when he was twenty-seven, he had the hubris to think he could saunter unscathed down to the old Jewish quarter to drum up some new business. He’d been reflecting on his father and the man’s modest station as head cashier at E. Solomon. His memories had taken him back to the fizzy drinks Daddy had often rewarded him with, and he’d thought, I’m damned if I can’t still feel the cool shape of those bottles in my hand, still taste that bit of sparkling orange sunshine—why not bottle the stuff for everyone to enjoy again? No one else in the country had gotten it together to start up a domestic bottling plant after the war (idiocy, given that drinking water had to be boiled for three minutes minimum). He seemed to remember a pair of ginger-haired brothers, Jews from the neighborhood, whose father guarded secret recipes for several aerated sodas. E. Solomon hadn’t reopened after the war, but wouldn’t Daddy be proud if one of the Jewish grocers stocked drinks from his son’s very own bottling outfit? Mingala Waters—that’s what he’d call it, because the idea had bubbled up from the same well of auspiciousness that hadn’t yet slaked his thirst.
It was near dusk when his car pulled up on Dalhousie Street, where E. Solomon had stood, and where he remembered the ginger-haired brothers living in an overstuffed flat—something between a fleapit and a magician’s lab. He knew this was Dalhousie—his driver and the sign at the corner reminded him as much—but his soul refused to believe it. Where the rows of rickety buildings had been, there was . . . nothing, a stray dog hunting for food on refuse-riddled mud, a few abandoned pieces of decaying furniture keeping company with the weeds swaying in a gentle wind. (“One of these days, it’ll all be burned up. You wait and see, Benny.”) From behind a distant heap of rubble, an isolated bark rang out. He had the frightening impression that the dogs had finally achieved their dominion. Then he noticed, down the empty street, a pair of indolent armed soldiers, Aung San’s henchmen—the star of the Imperial Japanese Army on their caps gave them away. They loitered on a corner, smoking, sporadically eyeing his car, as though positioned there to keep out the place’s past occupants. Hadn’t Benny known that nearly all the members of this once flourishing community had fled after the invasion because they were targets, many perishing en route to India and hardly more than a handful returning to set up shop again? He’d known it, and yet he hadn’t been able to fathom it.
“Take me home,” he told the driver.
When they passed Tseekai Maung Tauley Street, where he’d spent his first seven years, he kept his eyes averted. He had the chilling sensation that his mother was watching him now from their timbered balcony—watching him in all his greed and cowardice. (“You must not just think of yourself, Benny. Only animals just think of themselves. The worst sin is to forget your responsibility to the less fortunate. Thank God you are a good, noble boy.”)
But though he left the Jewish quarter, along with the fleeting dream of Mingala Waters, he could not evade the memory of the woman who had once showered him with dignity. And over the following few weeks, as the worst of the hot weather blew in with the southwest monsoon, he felt drowned by an awareness of having abandoned Mama’s God when he’d felt most abandoned during the war. If he was angry with God, if he had lost his faith, he didn’t know it, because somewhere along the line even the thought of faith, of God, had become too much. And what about his faith in man?
That June, Benny was obliged to make an appearance at a British embassy party. The banquet hall was one of those airy, suddenly eerie residuals of colonialism, all gleaming teak and mirrors and candlelit chandeliers. Looking past the rim of a tumbler of pink gin at the blur of chattering, gulping, ogling, richly dressed partygoers, he seemed to see their every anxious bead of sweat. The room and its brightness all at once struck him as a glaring denial of the dark fright brewing within each of them.
Like every one of the guests, he had clawed his way to the top and to what he had imagined was his freedom by insinuating himself into the good graces of the powers that be—principally those in the upper ranks of Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, the nationalist party formed during the war and presently involved in exclusive bilateral negotiations with the Brits. Benny had done so with a kind of willful d
isregard for these men’s machinations—a cold, albeit largely unconscious calculation that if they were getting their lot, he would get his. And now, swallowing down his gin, and watching a pair of flirtatious wives pretending not to try to attract him, he wanted to cover his face in shame.
He was just about to make his escape when Aung San’s right-hand man suddenly approached the bar in his Japanese-inspired military uniform. He leaned into the counter a few feet from where Benny stood and barked out his drink order, his mouth hanging open as if to better display the full prominence of his mismatched buck teeth and disturbingly sensual lips. Benny had never met the man before (and everything about his posture suggested it would take more than the usual pleasantries to get him to pay attention to anyone whom he didn’t care to meet), but he knew that this general had been an underperforming university dropout before joining up with Aung San in the We Burmans Association and then becoming one of the “Thirty Comrades” to receive military training in Japan. Like his comrades, the general called himself Thakin, Burman for “lord” (the thinking being that the ethnic Burmans, and not the British, were the natural lords of their country), and he’d chosen a nom de guerre: in his case, Ne Win, or “Radiant Sun.” The only thing about him that was remotely radiant, however, was his perspiring brow.
Without a glint of graciousness, he accepted a drink from the nervous bartender and turned to survey the crowd. He could have been a schoolyard bully who didn’t want to be caught showing kindness to flatterers or the powerless. “One blood, one voice, one leader”—that was the slogan that he and his bully friends had recently been chanting from their parapets of power (how many times had Benny heard the slogan broadcast over the wireless since the conclusion of the war?)—and there could be no doubt that what they had in mind was a country overrun by their values, their culture, their language, their military. That military had “liberated” the country from its captors, according to their spokesmen, from “aggressors,” whom they sought to repel by rousing Burmans to continue to strike, to create bedlam.
Miss Burma Page 9