The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  On the map it was part of Riverdale, but in most other ways it was a small slice of Burma . . . There was always an assortment of Burmese houseguests, who stayed anywhere from an evening to many months, and a domestic staff (all Burmese as well) of nannies and maids, cooks and gardeners, as one might expect in any Rangoon pukka home. Burmese dancers and musicians sometimes performed at parties on the lawn. A Buddhist shrine with fresh-cut flowers graced a special area on the first floor, and a constant smell of curries drifted out of the always-busy black-and-white tiled kitchen.

  “U Thant and his family would be warmly welcoming,” Ma Than É remembered—but even when the parties to which they were invited were intimate, the Secretary General declined to be drawn on the political issues of the day.16 Not for nothing had he succeeded in climbing to the top of diplomacy’s greasy pole.

  As the most powerful Burmese diplomat in the world, though with no official ties to Rangoon, U Thant was duty bound to keep in the good books of all the different Burmese factions on his doorstep, including the Ne Win appointees at the embassy. Doubtless they and the fiercely anti-regime émigrés among his guests—people such as Ma Than É and Aung San Suu Kyi—eyed each other venomously over the fish curry: Factionalism, as Aung San had noted many years before, was the besetting vice of the Burmese, and the polarizing policies of Ne Win made it very much worse.

  The permanent Burmese representative at the UN in those days, U Soe Tin, was in this respect unusual in that, although umbilically tied to the regime, he maintained friendly relations with those on the other side, and Suu and Ma Than É were often invited to his own, less imposing home in Riverdale for Burmese functions. “We liked him and his wife and children,” wrote Ma Than É. “He was a liberal type who did not divide us into sheep and goats . . . At his house it was possible to discuss, debate and argue, sometimes heatedly but in the main with much good nature.”17 But Soe Tin was on Ne Win’s payroll and orders were orders—hence one particular, very uncomfortable lunch party the pair of them had to sit through. It was Suu’s introduction to the ugly menaces which were the general’s political stock-in-trade.

  It seemed to Ma Than É like just another run-of-the-mill lunch invitation to Riverdale, arriving during a session of the UN General Assembly. “Some members of the [Burmese] delegation had said they would like to meet us,” she wrote.18 They arrived at Soe Tin’s home to find “a whole battery of Burmese ambassadors attending the current General Assembly,” all of them seated on chairs and sofas which had been ranged against the walls. Suu was put at one end of the room, seated between two of these worthies, her friend far away. “We made some slight inconsequential remarks,” she wrote. “U Soe Tin was smiling politely but looked uneasy. It became clear to me that the company was preparing to sit in judgment on Suu. But for what?”

  The chief of the Burmese delegation to the General Assembly took the floor.

  How was it that Suu was working for the UN? What passport was she using? Since her mother was no longer ambassador, Suu should have given up her diplomatic passport. Was it true that she had not done so? She must be aware that she was holding her diplomatic passport unlawfully. It was most irregular and should be put right as soon as possible. The whole company listened to this tirade with a sort of sycophantic deference, turning their eyes on Suu and murmuring agreement.

  Ma Than É recorded Suu’s reply—a very modest dry run, though no one could have guessed it at the time, for her speech before a million people at the Shwedagon more than fifteen years later. She wrote:

  Suu’s calm and composure were for me very reassuring. She replied with great dignity and in very quiet tones. She had long ago applied for a new passport to the embassy in London but had not received a reply up to now. She could not say what could be the reason for this extraordinary delay. She had come to New York to study and therefore had used her old passport . . .

  The ambassador from London then stood up to confirm that Suu had indeed applied months ago for a new passport . . . All of us in that room knew, of course, of the bureaucratic confusion and incompetence in Burma which had created similar delays . . .19

  The genteel court-martial ended with the chief delegate, comprehensively humiliated, promising to sort out the confusion when he returned to Rangoon. Suu had learned a useful lesson: Despite her youth and her sex, she was not obliged to kowtow to fools in office.

  It is debatable, however, whether she fully appreciated that this was a special dispensation that applied to her and her alone, because of who she was, and not to any disaffected Burmese with the nerve to rock the boat. Ma Than É remembers a friend in the permanent delegation at the UN, one with whom they were in the custom of having knockabout political debates, saying to Suu teasingly one time when he felt she had gone over the top in her critical remarks, “You not only have the courage of your convictions—you have the courage of your connections!” It was the courage that was to carry her all the way from the Shwedagon to house arrest.

  *

  Buddhism is a curious religion. All the different schools acknowledge the same founding teacher, Gautama, the Seer of the Shakyas, the Enlightened One, and the same teaching, the same Fourfold Noble Truths, the same moral precepts. Most of them have sitting meditation as a central component of the religious practice. But they have been separated from each other for many centuries, since the destruction of the great monasteries and universities of Buddhism in northern India and the disappearance of Buddhism from the Indian mainland. And despite all they hold in common they have had very little to do with each other since. As is the way with all creeds, there is a tendency for adherents of each particular school to believe that they are the ones on the right track, but mutual indifference is the best way to characterise these non-relationships. There is no persecution, as Islam’s Sunnis persecute the Shiites and vice versa, no accusations of heresy or efforts to convert—but neither are there ecumenical efforts to build bridges or make compromises.

  The most celebrated of those few efforts that there have been is the exception that proves the rule: When the American Buddhist convert Colonel Henry Olcott, who was also the cofounder with Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, tried to make all the Buddhist branches into one church. He succeeded, in Sri Lanka, in writing a Buddhist Liturgy, accepted by the Buddhist authorities on the island, and he designed the beautiful Buddhist flag, composed of oblong strips, red, pink, white, indigo, saffron, comprising the colors of the Buddhist robes of the different Asian countries, which is vastly popular in Burma even today. But of his efforts to bring all these groups together, little remains. What, they would probably have asked him, is the need?

  So although Michael Aris, in faraway Bhutan, was becoming more and more familiar with the Bhutanese variant of Tibetan Buddhism, that didn’t in itself bring him materially closer to a young woman steeped in the related but distinct and very different traditions of Theravada Buddhism. Yet something convinced her—perhaps we can just say “love” and leave it at that—that Michael was the man for her.

  The two of them had kept in touch by letter since their early meetings in London. What those letters say remains a closely guarded secret. What we do know is that in the summer of 1970, when Aris came home to Britain from Bhutan on holiday, he also visited New York, where he and Suu became formally engaged. The following spring Suu kept a promise she had made and visited him in Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital, where he had now been working for three years and where they planned to live once they were married. The trip went well: Soon afterwards she was writing to thank her brother-in-law-to-be, Anthony Aris, for giving his formal approval to their union—a requirement in the Burmese tradition—while lamenting, though without too much apparent anxiety, the fact that her mother and brother had yet to give theirs.20 She also expressed her happiness and pride at the prospect of becoming part of a family she was already fond of. “At the end of her third year of service in the UN Secretariat,” wrote Ma Than É, “Suu made a choice. She decided that a husba
nd and children would be greatly preferable to a career in the UN, however brilliant it was promising to be.”21

  With six months’ more hard slog in a city she had learned to dislike thoroughly before she could start her new life, Suu began writing to Michael with remarkable intensity.22 During the eight months between her visit to Thimphu and the wedding, she wrote to him more than once every two days: a total of 187 letters.

  Some of them were tough letters to write, and tough to receive. If Michael had any doubt that he was marrying a person with very particular baggage, these letters would have removed it.

  Given the indifference of one brother and the death of the other in childhood, Suu was the only one of her generation left to carry the family flame. What did that mean? She had no idea. She was not a soothsayer. But she felt the weight of her father’s legacy on her shoulders; and she had already discovered what sort of weight it carried in Burmese affairs, even today, more than twenty years after his death. Ne Win would ask her to tea, and whether she accepted or refused, her response mattered. She obtained a humble job in the United Nations, and the passport she carried became a diplomatic incident. This was a weight you could shrug off only by deciding that it didn’t matter what your father had said or done or believed: by doing like her brother, becoming a foreign citizen, settling elsewhere and turning your back on the whole thing. But even in the midst of her early adult doldrums, that was not a position Suu showed any sign of adopting.

  Marrying an Englishman was not the obvious way to stay true to the legacy, it would not make it any easier to stay true to it—but she was in love and that was that. So the only thing to do was, by the force of her will, to ensure that she did stay true, regardless, and that her fiancé was well aware of that and fully accepted what it might mean, well in advance. Because otherwise this marriage was not going to happen. It was the mother of all pre-nups.

  “Recently I read again the 187 letters she sent to me in Bhutan from New York,” Aris wrote twenty years later.23 Then he quoted from the letters: lines that, among Suu’s worldwide supporters and admirers, have become famous:

  I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.

  Would you mind very much should such a situation ever arise? How probable it is I do not know, but the possibility is there.

  Michael Aris accepted these terms without demur. There could be no finer proof of his love. They married in London on January 1, 1972.

  5

  SUPERWOMAN

  Suu and Michael on their wedding day in London, January 1, 1972.

  THEY were married in a Buddhist ceremony in the Gore-Booths’ home in Chelsea, guests wrapping sacred thread around the couple as they sat cross-legged on the floor while a Tibetan lama, Chime Youngdroung Rimpoche, blew on a conch shell. “It was a lovely ceremony,” recalled Sir Robin Christopher, one of Suu’s closest friends from Oxford. “I was one of those who walked around them with the holy thread. What a wonderful bond that was to prove to be!”1 It was charmingly romantic: two anglophone Buddhists, conjoined a few hundred yards from the World’s End and Gandalf’s Garden—before flying off together to make their home in Shangri-La.2

  But few romantic stories are quite as enchanted as they appear, and there is none without its shadow. The ceremony was a gracious nod to Suu’s roots and Michael’s fascination with Buddhism, but there were absences that were ominous given Suu’s stature as the Bogyoke’s only daughter. The Burmese ambassador did not show up: The froideur between Suu and the Ne Win regime was now official. More upsettingly, nor did Suu’s brother or mother. Despite the evocative ceremony and the reception at the Hyde Park Hotel afterwards laid on by her generous guardians, it was more like the wedding of an orphan than Burma’s most honored child.

  There is no doubting the strength of the love that Suu and Michael Aris felt for each other: There is a gleam in Suu’s eyes in the photographs taken in the early years of their marriage that we have not seen before. Gone is the blank correctness of her expression when she was an Oxford student visiting her mother in Delhi, the air of gloomy abstraction she wore in New York, “serious, sad, uncertain” in the words of Ann Pasternak Slater.3 In a photograph taken in 1973 during their first visit to Burma together, Suu glows in a way that is quite new. She and Michael are pressed together on the floor in a room washed with sunshine, both dressed in white, gazing at the camera. Michael appears dazed with happiness, Suu looks practically beatific. In a photograph taken the same year in Nepal, she cradles her baby boy Alexander and beams open-mouthed at the camera from under her fringe, showing her sparkling teeth, and looking more like a Burmese Audrey Hepburn than one would think possible.

  Suu and baby Alexander.

  They look like the perfect modern couple: Buddhist to a degree—both steeped in its ideas and ceremonies and art works—but never in thrall to superstition, unmistakably secular, late-twentieth century young people, their differences of race and upbringing dissolved in the hot sun of their love for one another; the conventional expectations of an older generation—settling down, finding a career—rendered irrelevant by the wonderful prospect of setting off together on a great adventure. And the adventures really happened: A year in Thimphu, where hardly any foreigners had spent even a fortnight; the best part of another year in Nepal, tiny baby in tow, with side-trips to Burma; later long trips to Japan, to the Indian Himalayas.

  That’s the bright side of the picture. What of the shady side?

  It is the story of many a modern woman who finds herself in what turns out to be, almost by default, a rather traditional marriage—often despite the best and most enlightened intentions of both partners.

  Since they had first met in Chelsea, Michael had got his lucky break and run with it: He had spent nearly five years immersed in the language, culture and history of Bhutan and Tibet. Those years were to be as fundamental to his future career as the voyage on the Beagle was for Charles Darwin. From now on, no one in Tibet studies would get away with calling him a dabbler.

  And Suu? She had taken a mediocre degree, done a little part-time tutoring and a little temporary research work, obtained a postgraduate position in New York which she abandoned weeks later; and then had used her name and connections to get a semi-menial job in the United Nations, from which she resigned after three years to get married. She was the proud daughter of a great man but had achieved next to nothing on her own account—and, more disturbingly, did not seem to have a compass of her own. Unable to forget who she was, she had attached ferocious conditions to her marriage “. . . should my people need me . . .”—but in the meantime she was that unfortunate creature: a trailing spouse.

  *

  They flew off to Bhutan, where Michael, now thoroughly at home, continued as tutor to the royal family while deepening his knowledge of all things Bhutanese. During his free time they trekked through the kingdom’s vertiginous valleys, sometimes on foot, sometimes on ponyback; at least once they were obliged to ride on the roof of a lorry, and snacked on the fruit of the Asian gooseberry trees they passed under.

  For Michael it was the coda to his years of primary research: By the end of it he had enough material, he believed, to write the doctoral thesis that would be the next vital step in his career. For Suu, by contrast, it was an exotic interlude but not much more. The scenery was magnificent, though repetitive; the local cuisine, in which pork fat and chilies played a dominant role, was largely inedible, she confided to a friend in Rangoon—“we were hungry all the time,” she said.4 In response to her appeals, her mother sent that eye-watering staple of Burmese cuisine, fried balachaung—pounded dried shrimp and fish paste deep-fried with sugar, chili and tamarind paste—packed in empty Horlicks bottles. On one occasion the package arrived but the bottle was cracked at the bottom; they debated whether they should throw it out because of glass shards but ended up eating it at a single sitting.

  Keeping Suu company during Michael’s frequent absences was a Himalayan terrier pupp
y called Puppy, a gift of the king’s chief minister. Suu became extremely attached to her new pet. It accompanied them back to England, and was with them throughout the family’s years together—a talisman of their togetherness, as cherished pets often are. When she learned that Puppy had finally died at an advanced age in her absence—word arrived while she was traveling around Burma in 1989, campaigning for her party—the news broke her heart.

  Suu with Michael’s siblings and brother-in-law, plus dog. They all struck up a warm relationship with the family’s new member.

  Suu and Michael in Bhutan with their new puppy, forever to be known as Puppy, to which Suu became very attached.

  Bhutan joined the United Nations while Suu and Michael were in residence, and Suu advised the kingdom’s minuscule Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the mysterious ways of that body. She also taught English to a class of royal bodyguards, but her fierce efforts to keep order reduced them, by her own admission, to cowering shadows of their normal hulking selves. Michael learned to drive on Thimphu’s almost empty roads, but his attempts to pass on his new skills to Suu were not a success. Then in August, eight months after their arrival, Suu discovered she was pregnant, and they decided to go home.

  By Christmas they were back in London. Michael wanted to write a doctoral thesis at SOAS on the early history of Bhutan, based on what he had learned during his years of residence there; his supervisor was to be the man who was already his mentor in Tibetan studies, Hugh Richardson. With Michael’s family’s help they bought a tiny flat in Brompton, not far from the Gore-Booths, and on April 12, 1973, Suu’s first son Alexander was born.