The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  She made an immediate splash. Large-scale immigration from the Indian subcontinent had yet to get under way: England was still predominantly a white, Anglo-Saxon country, and Suu, who may have been the first student in the history of the college to turn up for classes in longyi and aingyi, was petite, beautiful and exotic.

  She had changed from a stiff, over-protected adolescent into an elegant and fashionable young woman. Shankar Acharya, an Indian student who was also studying PPE, a friend of Malavika and her gang, got to know Suu well during her first year, though they were never more than friends. But he conceded, “Every male who met Suu had a little bit of a crush on her. So let’s not pretend that that dimension was totally absent.”2

  Yet although something in the Sixties’ air had brought on Suu’s transformation—her release from Daw Khin Kyi’s strict supervision was doubtless another factor—she found herself strongly out of sympathy with the moral relativism growing rampant all around her, of which Swinging London was the most famous manifestation. Malavika described the mores in which she and her friends in Delhi’s elite were raised as “post-colonial Victorian” and there is something of the prim and puritanical Victorian about the way Suu reacted to her new environment. But if it had only been that, if she had just been a provincial person with a lot of catching up to do, she might have shed those attitudes after a while, as others did. Instead, as her new English friends were to discover, her moral certainties were firmly rooted.

  “She had strong views about her country, and about right and wrong,” said Robin Christopher, another Oxford contemporary and friend. “She had a high sense of moral rigor, an almost visible sense of moral purpose. She would not do anything that she considered was wrong: She just wouldn’t! That shone through in an almost naïve way, but always touched with humor.” But where did her certainties come from? “She was very widely read in literature—it was she who introduced me to Jane Austen, and me an Englishman,” he said. And as Christopher saw it, Suu’s morality was “a mixture of her own traditional Burmese background and identification with bits of English literature. It was very curious . . .”3

  Over the years, a handful of Suu’s women friends have been strongly enough affected by Suu to record their memories of the friendship with a special eloquence and affection. Ma Thanegi in Rangoon many years later was one; and at St. Hugh’s she encountered another. She was Suu’s close contemporary, a few months older but starting the same course in the same term. Her name was Ann Pasternak Slater, the niece of the great Russian novelist.

  “We got to know each other in Oxford, as freshwomen at St. Hugh’s College, in 1964,” Ann wrote in a memoir of the friendship.

  I have to admit that I first approached her simply because she was so beautiful and exotic. She was everything I was not. I came from an Oxford home and Oxford schooling . . . I had spent the long summer between school and university in statutory fashion—hitching round Greece, picking grapes and maize in Israel, traveling deck-class across the Mediterranean with Anna Karenina for a pillow. Suu’s tight, trim, longyi and upright carriage, her firm moral convictions and inherited social grace contrasted sharply with the tatty dress and careless manners, vague liberalism and uncertain sexual morality of my English contemporaries.4

  How did Suu herself regard Oxford, and herself in it? For most British students, to gain a place at Oxford or Cambridge was and remains the great prize, the foundation of a good career, a priceless opportunity to build a network of useful contacts; it is an achievement in its own right, cause for jubilation. Yet there is nothing in the record to suggest that Suu saw it this way.

  She did not appear to be in awe either of Oxford or of England: She was doing what her mother wanted her to do, and what a girl of her age and class and intellect was capable of. And far from being a social climber, she seemed to pick her friends merely on the basis of liking them.

  “When I first got to know her as a student I can remember her talking very proudly about her father, and teaching me how to pronounce her name,” Pasternak Slater said in an interview at her home in Park Town, opposite Suu and Michael’s last family home in Oxford.5 She continued:

  All of that was a very important part of her total personality. But she was not a social climber in the least. She was extremely sort of democratic in her friendships. They were multiracial and included a Ghanaian girl who I didn’t find very interesting, outside the Indian social and intellectual elite who were the other people she knew.

  Then there was the matron of St. Hugh’s who she was very kind to and who was very kind to her, and an elderly lady, a friend of our family, who was a terrible bore, a single Jewish spinster artist who Suu was extremely kind to, always hospitable and always polite—just as she was, with less effort I hope, to my mother, who was another foreign oddity.6 In this way she made friends with people who were of no possible use to her, and she was not looking over their shoulders at a party or something, on the contrary.

  Suu was an anomaly from the outset: an exotic belle who showed no interest in testing the value of her looks and breeding—who on the contrary was fiercely hostile to the prevailing morality of the university.

  Suu had arrived at the most sheltered and peripheral of Oxford’s five single-sex women colleges, founded by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet, in 1886. It lacked the classic medieval cloisters of the city’s more venerable colleges, and its buildings were unremarkable and generally undistinguished. In compensation it was endowed with spacious grounds and plenty of trees and greenery.

  Its north Oxford location “was popularly dismissed as ‘too far out,’” wrote Pasternak Slater in her memoir of Suu, “a full three minutes” bike ride from Balliol or St. John’s,” and the college had “a demeaningly high reputation for hockey. As freshers we were housed in the heavy main building. Dark brown doors; long, dim corridors; bleak sculleries where the homelier students simmered hankies and bedtime cocoa.”

  Talk of sexual liberation was all around—this was, after all, four years after the Lady Chatterley trial and two years after the Beatles’ first LP—but at St. Hugh’s at any rate it was rarely more than talk: For most of the freshers it was more a torment than a promise.7 “When we first arrived,” Pasternak Slater’s memoir continued,

  there was an active myth that news of the rare male visitor used to be tapped out on the central heating pipes running from room to room. Only a decade or two previously, another rumor ran, when men came visiting, the women’s beds had to be moved out into the corridor until their guests had left. We certainly had to be in by 10 pm, or sign a late pass releasing us until midnight at the latest. A warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates made for an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment.

  In this setting Suu was delightfully antithetical, an original who was at once laughably naïve, and genuinely innocent. All my memories of her at that time have certain recurring elements: cleanliness, determination, curiosity, a fierce purity. How do I see her? Eyebrows furrowed under a heavy fringe, shocked incredulity and disapproval: “But Ann! . . .” We are in the basement laundry room, starching piles of longyis and little sleeveless blouses. She is teaching me to iron. She is teaching me to eat rice neatly by hand . . . She is showing me how to carry off long dresses plausibly . . . She taught me to twist and tie a longyi round my inappropriately broad, unoriental waist; to sit on the floor, legs tucked away so that not even an ankle showed; to walk upstairs with only a slight furl of skirt twitched aside, not a great heaved armful in the English manner. Even with familiarity, much remained exotic—her proud parentage, above all. But no less evocative now is the tiny tuft of silky hair under her chin, the block of sandalwood she ground for face powder, the abundant scraps of sample silk she collected for dress trimmings, the fresh flower worn daily in her high pony-tail . . .

  There were tea parties of interminable oriental decorum, whose wit and finesse were imperceptible to my coarse western ear. And then the long
night gossip in other students’ rooms, where Suu’s assumptions seemed merely absurd.

  Everyone was on the hunt for boyfriends, many wanted affairs, sex being still a half-forbidden, half-won desideratum. Being laid-back about being laid was de rigueur—except that most of us were neither laid back nor laid. There was excitement and anxiety about the unknown, an atmosphere of tense inexperience dominated and dragooned by the few vocal and confident sexual sophisticates. It was extremely difficult to preserve any kind of innocence in such a setting. To most of our English contemporaries, Suu’s startled disapproval seemed a comic aberration. One bold girl asked her, “But don’t you want to sleep with someone?” Back came the indignant reply—“No! I’ll never go to bed with anyone except my husband. Now? I just go to bed hugging my pillow.” It raised a storm of mostly derisive laughter.8

  If Suu’s reaction to the new moral consensus ushered in by the pill struck her Oxford contemporaries as hilariously anachronistic, her shock at the ethical quagmire in which she had landed was unfeigned.

  England might have been the colonial oppressor, but both in Rangoon and Delhi she had learned that it was also the fount of learning and wisdom, the land of Jane Austen and George Eliot, of John Locke and Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi, asked for his opinion about Western civilization, said he thought it would be a good idea, but that was just a quip: He carried around one of the works of John Ruskin, and his social philosophy was based as much on primitive English socialism as on anything suggested by the Vedas.9 But on her first direct encounter with England, not in some benighted slum but at the high altar of scholarship, Suu learned that the moral values with which she identified England were crumbling.

  For the first time she found herself in a country where Aung San and the Burmese independence struggle meant very little; and where Buddhism meant less than nothing to the vast majority, while those few who thought they understood it were mostly quite wrong. It was a moment of lonely self-definition. If we can locate the moment when Suu discovered the need to dig in her heels and declare her own moral convictions, however mocking or baffled the reaction, this was it.

  At least one of her teachers found her unforgettable for that reason. Yet even Mary Warnock, the distinguished philosopher, could only make a failed, groping attempt to work out what she was all about.

  Reviewing a book about Suu many years later, she wrote:

  Aung San Suu Kyi was, briefly, a pupil of mine when she was reading for the honors school of PPE.

  She was unlike any undergraduate I had taught before or have taught since. She was highly intelligent and articulate, though quiet and enormously polite . . . She was totally untouched by the sexual aspirations of her friends, naive in a way, but sure-footed and direct in all her dealings. She was also extraordinarily easily amused, and found many things hilarious, not least her philosophy tutorials.

  She had been brought up severely by her mother in a Buddhist tradition. I never knew how religious, in the ordinary sense, she was. Once in the course of a very standard tutorial on personal identity, starting from the text of John Locke, we . . . were considering the proposition, put forward by Locke, that one is the same person only as that person whose past acts one can remember. Suu said, “But I am my grandmother.” Her [tutorial] partner and I fell upon her with questions about how she knew this. She smiled, with a look of incredible mischief, and refused to be drawn.10

  Suu was discovering that, despite close encounters with Asia going back some three hundred years, Britain, as represented by the brains she found around her at St. Hugh’s, had largely failed to get to grips with Asian religious and philosophical ideas. If a philosopher as distinguished as Warnock could write hazily about “a Buddhist tradition” yet be amazed that a practicing Buddhist should subscribe to a belief in reincarnation, what could she hope for from her peers?

  “Morality,” ventured Warnock, seeking to put Suu’s beliefs in a nutshell, “consists in aspiring to the traditional Buddhist virtues, especially loving-kindness and honesty. She is a living illustration of the truth that to be moral entails essentially wanting to be good, rather than bad.” It would be hard to imagine a lamer attempt to sum up the truths of Buddhism. Listening to such stuff, the “enormously polite” Suu must have heaved a quiet sigh and bitten her lip. What would be the point, with this Oxford philosopher, of, say, proposing a discussion of the basic principles of Theravada Buddhism—of the three characteristics of conditioned beings, for example, namely suffering, impermanence and non-self? Better to save your breath.

  *

  Yet if Suu found Oxford intellectually frustrating and in steep moral decline, she did not react by retreating into her Burmese shell. On the contrary, she was quite as determined to master the exotic customs of the country as she had been to climb up to the glass roof of 25 Tower Lane with her brother fifteen years before. Ann Pasternak Slater wrote:

  She was curious to experience the European and the alien, pursuing knowledge with endearing, single-minded practicality. Climbing in, for instance. Social kudos came with climbing into college after a late date. One actress friend was a precociously blasé habitué of late-night scramblings: By her second year she spent full nights and days away from college; by the third she was breaking college rules by renting a pad shared by a variety of boyfriends. After two demure years in Oxford, Suu wanted to climb in too, and requested a respectable friend to take her out to dinner, and then—as any gentleman should—hand her over the crumbling college garden wall. No infringement of university regulations could have been perpetrated with greater propriety.11

  Pasternak Slater also identified the precise moment of Suu’s white jeans metamorphosis—and the very practical reason for it. It was the summer of 1965: Suu had just emerged from her first northern winter, which must have struck her South Asian soul as unspeakably long and dark; the country was pulsating to the beat of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, “California Girls” by the Beach Boys and the new Beatles album, Help! And a cool new Suu emerged. “Most students have bikes,” Pasternak Slater wrote, “it is a practical way of getting about, but tricky in a longyi. In the first summer term Suu bought a pair of white jeans and the latest smart white Moulton bike with minute wheels. One sunny evening spent on the sandy cycle-track running alongside the University Parks and that was mastered.”

  Rather more challenging was the art of punting, in which her Indian friend Shankar Acharya instructed her, and took an embarrassing photograph of her trying to do it.

  Like cycling, Pasternak Slater pointed out, punting was “another essential qualification for an Oxford summer,” and Suu would not be found wanting. But she quickly discovered that it is more difficult than it looks. “A punt is a flat-bottomed, low-sided tray of a boat,” wrote Pasternak Slater. “Its weight, inertia and ungainliness defy description. It is like sailing a sideboard. It really is difficult learning to punt, especially on your own. The boat swings in dull circles that modulate to a maddening headstrong zigzag from bank to bank, until you learn to steer, like a gondolier, by hugging the pole tight against the punt as you push, and letting it swing like a rudder.

  “Suu set out, a determined solitary figure in the early morning haze, to return at dusk, dripping and triumphant.”12 But Acharya’s snap of Suu afloat seems to have been taken before her mastery was complete. It may be the most unflattering photo of her ever published. The ugly duckling plaits have made a comeback, crowned by a white cap. Her dark jeans are wrinkled, and the profile they give her bears out Pasternak Slater’s remark to me that “she was not completely blemishless—she had quite fat thighs and was still quite chubby when I knew her.” Rather than the grave, poised, vertical posture recommended by the experts, with the pole held as close to the breast as a walking staff, Suu is bent at the knees and holds the pole in her outstretched hand and looks as if she is planning to vault out of the boat and onto the bank.

  Then there was alcohol. Buddh
ism’s Fifth Precept requires the Buddhist to abstain from alcohol. Although it is not exactly a commandment as it is for most Muslims, and plenty of Buddhist laypeople drink in moderation, for Suu it has always been non-negotiable. But at Oxford everyone did it, often to excess, and Suu decided she must try it once. “She was curious to know what it was like,” wrote Pasternak Slater.

  At the very end of her final year, in great secrecy, she bought a miniature bottle—of what? Sherry? Wine?—and, with two rather more worldly Indians as accoucheuses and handmaids at this rite of passage, retired to the ladies’ lavatory in the Bodleian Library. There, among the sinks and the cubicles, in a setting deliberately chosen to mirror the distastefulness of the experience, she tried and rejected alcohol for ever.13

  Despite her shyness and her strict rules, Suu’s circle of friends gradually expanded. Her punting teacher, Shankar Acharya, offered the comfort of familiarity: He was from the same top civil service drawer as her Indian friends in Delhi, but as he had spent the previous four years at school in London, where his father was a diplomat, he was more familiar with British ways.

  “She was more comfortable with Indians than with Brits to begin with,” he remembered, “because they were similar to her own cultural background, vaguely Victorian.”14 Both he and Suu were studying PPE, and soon after Suu arrived at Oxford they became friends. “Our backgrounds were quite similar and we hit if off easily and well,” he said. “These things happen. Basically she had led a sheltered life in terms of dealing with the opposite sex: She had been to an all-girls’ college in India, and presumably her life at Oxford was fairly cloistered, too, in terms of going around with boys. I think she was quite a shy person. I was less shy as I had already been in England.”

  Although Acharya did not deny having “a little bit of a crush” on Suu, “like every male she met,” their friendship remained on the calm, platonic plane; soon he was courting the Indian student who later became his wife. When Suu had overcome any awkwardness she experienced in dealing with English people, that sort of relationship, founded on common interests but going no further than simple affection, proved to be one she had a gift for.