A Sawbwa Dies

Orignally published in The Antioch Review, Fall 1962

THE SAWBWA lay on the high hospital bed under the very thick red Chinese blanket. The screen which shut him off from immediate view told us that the news of his critical condition, bringing us rushing here, was indeed correct. Ranged around the large emergency ward, silent, seated on chairs, were close relatives.

The uniting shadow of death was already over us. Sao Tun Aye and his wife we saw often; yet only now, seeing them already in attendance, I realized our kinship through that figure on the bed. Shan families are so interwoven by marriages and polygamy, we forget ramifications without surnames to remind us; we treat people as friends, to remember suddenly they are close relatives after all.

But one's thoughts should not wander irreverently. The Sawbwa is in dire straits. His habitual grunting snores beat the silence; beside him three nurses wipe away the injections from that burst vessel in his brain; his tongue is clipped with a clothes-peg to keep it free of his teeth; he has not been conscious since he reached the foot of this high hill on the road from his capital town, Lawksawk, whence they brought him yesterday. His squat figure, his completely vulnerable and helpless position, is visible from the side of the room where I have found a chair at an angle to the screen. Horror strikes. ...

My averted eyes rest then on Sao Tun Aye's wife, Sao Kin Lay. A Shan beauty. Lily skin, soft eyes, plump cheeks, with a slender body, sweet expression, fresh from a bath, powdered perfumed. As so often before, this man now dying, who enjoyed no physical beauty in his own person, has loveliness hovering in his vicinity, gently brushing by. His growth was stunted, according to popular belief, by a fall from an elephant at the age of ten. That was a bitter blow to the towering old Chief, his father. Regardless, the old man's will arranged for him a marriage with the best any Shan prince could hope for: a Kengtung daughter, Sao Van Kyiao, "Gem-Mirror," beautiful as well as highest born. From that shrinking bride of fifteen had come the love of a mature woman, and from his thwarted growth six whole handsome children.

But fourteen years ago he had lost this Gem-Mirror Mahadevi who had truly been the light of his life. Eleven of the years he had spent in uncomplaining grief and loneliness; and then he had remarried, for companionship he thought, for he was 64; but such is the wonder of Nature, such the potency of seed and germ, that a second florescence had brought him twin boys.

But I was forgetting Sao Leng, also called Jean, our niece, and the only one among the Sawbwa's four daughters to be present, quietly sobbing. While I comfort her with embraces, Sao Sai comes, with the confidence of her husband's authority: "Get up and go away, quickly."

I don't want to be flattered with ministrations, but this tone is never to be denied and I notice also a starting of other relatives from chairs. Sai hustles me toward the stairs.

"The doctors give him only a few more minutes. If he wants to die at house he must be carried there straight away. That won't be a pleasant sight, so hurry. Come, there is no use in looking at such things."

The heir, younger than the Sawbwa's four daughters, follows and asks urgently: "Could not my father last the journey to Lawksawk so that he may die among his own people?"

"No, no, the ambulance is waiting, and he will go to the Haw."

This is the modest house he has built in Taunggyi, in place of the old cavernous mansion. His son looks unconvinced. Though the Shan Sawbwas relinquished powers and revenues two years ago, by the desire of a Socialist-inspired government, they remain the Sawbwas to their people and their families.

We pause to head off cars which bring more inquiring relations, and then follow the half-mile to the Haw.

The ambulance is drawn up at the door, and immediately inside it is confusion. A staircase abuts right on the porch, and up and down it rush people who fetch things, throw things, catch things urgently demanded from within the closed ambulance. Jean has been living here in modern young-family style. Her husband an engineer, her son a toddler, her twin girls arriving so soon and her job as a school librarian given up.

Now with a dying Sawbwa on the doorstep, there is this continuous flurry up and down the stairs to find the right kind of things. Cotton ... wool ... rags ... yes, surely. Sheets ... yes, plenty. But they need a silk carpet first ... it must be a silk carpet ... And blankets ... no, not a woolen one ... a velvet blanket. ... And, Jean, they want a gold chain! Not, not like this, Sao, not with a locket, long plain ones.

Men pull furniture out of the sitting-room into the narrow hallway and put a bed in. More shouts and remonstrations: "Not a mug like this, I'm telling you! We need a silver bowl! A large one!"

"Surely not, he is there in the ambulance still. No one has said a thing."

But the taps are running full in the downstairs bathroom. It is a corpse that we bathe, not a dying man, and Jean sobs out suddenly with realization, making obeisances vainly into the air, "My father has gone without my last respects!"

There is a rush of feet from the back rooms of the house. Lawksawk has long been a sad and dying court, first losing prosperity from the internecine wars of the pre-British period; then suffering an eclipse of splendor with the death of the old Chieftain during Japanese occupation, and the fires which burnt his palace; and finally losing all heart with the loss of the beautiful Mahadevi. So, it is mostly old women who rush out now. This is their saddest hour. They could see through shabbiness, beyond poverty, across empty walls, to the innate kingliness that resided in that squat body. But now their lord, their rice-giver has gone, and they sob in greatest distress.

"Have you gone, Your Worship? Have you left us? Where are we now? Whom do we turn to?"

The shaky old women follow each other through the door wrinkles, tears, dismay on their faces; but in the arms of two of them are the twin boys, one apiece astraddle on ancient hips, but lovely, lovable, clear-skinned, succulent, plump, wide-eyed and unperturbed. Again, live beauty blooms in the shadows of this man's dark wooden pillars...

We went home for a bath and quick supper. When we returned, the Sawbwa lay, not yet in state, but still on silken rugs and under velvet covers; his two thumbs bound together with a gold chain, his two big toes likewise; a gold coin on his mouth; his drinking water by his head, pictures to the wall, and the floor carpeted end to end for watchers to sit by. The doctors had come and injected him to keep him preserved while relatives gathered.

There was quiet and calm in the Haw now. The two sets of twins, plump uncles and winsome nieces, were sound asleep; the sobs of the old women were stilled, and in their place could be heard the kitchen choppers preparing next dawn's meals for the helpers who were already collecting.

And so Agnes, the eldest daughter and herself a Mahadevi of another state, arriving after seven hours hard driving from Mandalay, did not break the quiet with sobs but carried her mother's beauty silently in her weary, utterly resigned face, beauty enhanced as never before by her grief.

With her here, the family could begin to discuss whether to cable the children overseas, how long to wait, when and how to transport the corpse to Lawksawk. Agnes, who gives to each of her eight daughters an English name, like Fern, Ellaline, Charlotte, and Gladys, alongside their Shan names, lived for these other matters in the climate of the past. Communities object to an alien corpse crossing their areas and trailing ominous shadows. To her, communities were still only Shans with state fealties, and she worried intensely that her father, having died out of his state, would have to cross Yaunghwe State's villages to get home.

But next day the Lawksawk elders arrived and decided all. The Buddhist New Year was due, it was not good to keep a corpse over it; so interment should be on the Tuesday, a suitable day by all calculations.

"0nly one week's mourning? And for a Sawbwa!" This was unheard of.

"But why such a rush? Our father lay for twenty months, and he saw more than one year out."

"But there was a reason."

"Yes, by Kengtung tradition the old Sawbwa is not buried till his successor is proclaimed. The British were in full control then, and for their own reasons withheld recognition from my brother, for two years, they said. So father lay on."

"If I may respectfully submit an opinion, sir, this brought no good to Kengtung State."

"Yes, it is true. My brother was assassinated before recognition came, and both had to be buried together."

So it was decided.

"And then, please, sir, the Haw in Lawksawk is too small to receive the funeral crowds."

That was sad indeed. He died without ever rebuilding his power home. Poor modest man, so slow to act, so lost without his Mahadevi; modest till death, never assuming, never uttering an unkind or tactless word. He would be taken to his state only on the funeral day. Pavilions would be built beside the tomb for the last offices, and he would be buried without re-entering his home.

But the shortness of the wake was made up for by its intensiveness. This thriving and congested cosmopolitan town, owing no allegiance to him, spilled out its citizens to visit the Sawbwa, after office, after school, in the lunch-hour, after dinner, and before breakfast.

But none of its shops could supply the traditional grandeur. A short while, the Sawbwa's Kengtung mother-in-law had died. Her coffin had been encased in white velvet, on which delicately cut metal flowers covered with gold leaf were set in by skilled craftsmen of Kengtung taking twenty-one days to make, so how could our dead brother have anything fit in seven days?

But grand or not, none of the symbols or steps must be omitted. Faithful old courtiers took over Jean's menage. One side of the driveway was cleared for parking cars; the other built over with a long bamboo pavilion. Here all the town could come for tea, cheroots, pickles, or sweets. Here also, an orchestra played. As we stopped our car the strains of the royal sidaw greeted us, sad in the peculiar Burmese way; for to us pomp and ceremonial are sad, perhaps in the dormant memories they stir of those deprived of pomp by a swordsman's stroke in the days of kings long ago; perhaps by the realization of their transitoriness, which sense is the real spring of poignancy.

But suddenly this music changed. A full jubilance of all the instruments tinkled, clapped, shouted, sang, and resounded as we went in.

In the chamber an ornate bed had been put. A canopy of white nylon in frills and flounces covered it, hung all around with gold and silver banyan leaves, not real gold nor red silver, but tinsel, light; yet effectively pretty, sufficiently evocative of pagoda bells and splendor associated with divine sanction. Umbrellas, white, gold and red --- how surprising that mixtures of more frothy nylon, lacquer, and old oiled silk went so pleasingly ---- these festive umbrellas flanked the bed head and foot. The silk covers were bright red and green, not chaste white. A big red lacquered rod rammed the bed through from end to end, and under this the coffin rested, enormous, gilt, giving to the Sawbwa in his last sleep the full height he must have desired all his life, for he stretched out now as long, even, as his renowned father who had been a fierce enough warrior to stick the heads of rebellious tribesmen on the pediments of his palace walls as warning to all.

Every day, especially at evening time, the house overflowed; all rooms, passages and staircases too, filled with people sitting or standing. The Sawbwa's brothers-in-law, easy with their aristocratic origins, rarely came in to take seats of honors, stoop, laughing, joking, sometimes with antics, drinking whisky and comparing the merits of their parked cars.

We invariably sat in the carpeted room, a great contrast. On the first day silent or whispering. A day later mild jokes to lighten the wait, but still a painful effort holding jaws back from laughing widely in appreciation. Then the gambling at night started, to make it possible for some to stay awake all night. A day later talk and laughter came naturally.

It continued as the servant brought in a tray with the Sawbwa's meal and set it beside his dead master. He uncovered the dishes, poured drinking water, and as new plaintive music started from outside he fanned gently with a fan of peacock's feathers. After fifteen minutes of this, he backed out with the tray, returned with tea which he poured out, and cheroots and matches.

The tray was enameled tin, the china, plain utility. Yet symbols suffice for our people. No one in that crowd questioned that this man was as much a Sawbwa as my father-in-law who, lying under several tiers of magnificent canopies, during each day for twenty long months, had his meals served by his fair daughters in turn --- no servant being good enough --- on a table of carved silver, set with cups and dishes of solid gold, and lit by a giant taper before which the sad princess bent as she waved the fan gently to and fro.

But this short wake was soon over. The seventh day was fine and clear. We decided to drive ahead of the cortège. It would be a pleasant trip for us, for the forty-six miles to Lawksawk was now good road, tarred by the Army who had set up a military town beside it; and we invited Pete, our American friend, to join us.

"Will I not be intruding?"

"Heavens no! There is no such idea with us. The more people go, the better the bereaved ones like it."

Foolish Westerner's sensitivities persisted... "It seems not decent to go out of curiosity or just for a trip."

"Will you believe us, Pete. No one expects you to feel sad, so for what other seasons could you be going, except to please Jean by your attendance?"

The drive took us across a flat stretch of plain, its extensiveness rare in these Shan hill regions. I could understand why the young heir had sometimes shown what appeared to us undue confidence about his future. Had it not been for a Union government which put an end to feudal rule, he would now have become lord of all these acres.

Lawksawk was an old and powerful principality in Burmese history, and approaching it from this end, one could understand that also. After forty odd miles of straight road, we swooped around a bend and faced abruptly a miniature canyon, not grim enough to dispel the smiling nature of this drive, but with its humped farther bank good enough for defense. The bends continued rapidly four or five times, and then we entered straight into the beautiful Lawksawk valley, suddenly open right before our eyes. Across the wide plain the eye leapt to blue hills whose peaks were topped, exactly as one expects peaks to be crowned, with great white massed spires with very thick, clumped foliage. The rest was lost in mystery and in distant loveliness.

Everything necessary to a capital was there as we crossed the valley. Fertile rice fields, a great banyan tree, sentinel to the town; further guard was provided by the Zawgyi river, a narrow stream that coiled around and again in a curve which enclosed the series of mounds forming Lawksawk town, like a heaven-filled moat. All this spelled a kingdom in the past, but today Lawksawk town consisted of one main street a couple of hundred yards long and a few lanes of villagers' houses.

We turned into the old royal town, and that did not disappoint us. No buildings except for a few small ones for school, for state officials, and for Sawbwa's relatives. But the remains of the old brick walls, the red roads ploughing deep through the dust, the old pagodas dating back eight or nine centuries, the vast enclosure in which had stood the old Chief's palace and where jungle was fast growing now, these were enough for us.

Standing on one of the prominences and looking back towards the entrance into the valley, we were silenced by the beauty that we saw, and the consciousness of its history too. With our ravaging weather, our destructive exploits of the past, our building for permanence, only these buildings seemed to continue the torch of Buddhism long after each poor mortal has left his pitiful accumulations of wealth. We can rarely become conscious of our past by man-made structures standing to remind us. It is Nature, only, which must remind us; the geographical formation of this or that place which made its history and which remains after all is destroyed; the face of which, being now bared, makes its events plain to read. Again and again has this consciousness come to me. It came when I stood at Mandalay and saw its site as the crossroads of all the land and water routes to the four corners of Burma, and understood, without the fabled palaces, why it had been the "Center of the Universe." In Lawksawk now it visited me again.

The cortège still not being in sight, we went to look at the military town. What a contrast to Lawksawk's softened decay. A mile away from the red village, the metal roads cut clean and uncompromising, signs posted everywhere, new bungalows, barracks; trim, orderly; green lawns, water towers, and motorized units. The Army with its corps of educated. hard-working and patriotic officers, would be the vanguard of our entry into the modern world.

The cortège was due. We returned and changed into all-white clothes. The men told us to wait at the monastery while they escorted the coffin on foot.

The monastery was a massive wooden pile, still holding together its beautiful old components, though for how much longer one could not say, before it tottered into decayed timber. Its grounds were full of milling people, from every Lawksawk house, from the Army lines, from all the villages in the 2,196 square miles of Lawksawk territory. They were eating the free food served without stop under the big banyans which shaded the cleared circumference of the monastery grounds.

We went to the bamboo dining hall nearby. Here everyone who was of any consequence or affluence from Taunggyi and the neighboring big towns had driven and were seated at tables and chairs. An impressive Chinese meal was being served from the steaming iron pans under the trees; little boys in Boy Scout uniforms ran in and out between waiters and put down opened bottles of fizzy drinks, a bevy of girls threaded their way through the little boys with trays of green Shan tea, and some youths in Shan homespun carried drinking water in enamel urns topped by a communal lacquer cup from table to table.

The meal turned out to be delicious. I wished I had sat at the next table where some relatives were eating heartily. Now with admirably controlled ladies from Taunggyi I had to hold appetite back like a decorous funeral guest.

After this we were shown into the monastery. I was struck by the attitude of the Lawksawk elders who arranged all this. They seemed anxious to spare Agnes and all of us modern creatures the physical discomforts of the ceremonies. Kengtung, which was a generation behind in relaxing its customs, would have assumed that it was our privilege to undergo every part of the ritual, rigors and all. After a long wake, we would by now have been walking from the entrance of the valley with the coffin, all holding on to a long white cotton cloth which would keep us in line and set the same tortuous pace for all. We still expected to do part of this, but here we were in the cool dimness of the monastery, eating pickles, drinking Shan tea, and chatting. When they called us at one o'clock, we found to our surprise that we were being hustled to the very last rites.

Even then an elder ran and implored us to go by car, the sun being hot, but this time we held firm. From all sides now the crowds were converging on the bamboo structure at the top of the mound. Though most of them were in working clothes, their number and combined pedestrian movements seen from the treeless slop still suggested a great occasion.

Is it because we are under-populated, is it because we lack material wealth, that in the context of our country-side traditions it is the human crowd which makes the festival, more so than lights, colors, structures or what have you, which may or may not be there? The grandeur of a man is measured by the size of a crowd he assembles; judged like this, the Lawksawk Sawbwa was having a truly grand end. Seven days' spread of news had been enough to gather a mighty crowd pushing towards the top of the mound. People in ordinary Shan and Burmese clothes like ours, hill tribes in various outfits of black and bright splashes, soldiers in uniform, Indian cattle-communities, and little buffalo-urchins in semi-nakedness, all toiled up the hill.

Now we entered the most beautiful part of the funeral. It had been baking hot on the slope, and then this structure greeted us, cool bamboo poles and thatch, not cheap matting. On the earthen floor thick piles of clean straw; over that thick mats, fine at the front and coarsening away backwards. The thatch roof was low, but the tent was enormously spacious and airy. In front of us, raised on a bamboo dais six inches higher, sat a hundred or more monks in saffron robes. Behind them was the only closed end of the structure, a screen made all of thatch, with light entering between the tufts. Everything smelled of this thatch, of fresh-cut bamboo, and of clean earth. Before the monks, the offerings were piled, not arranged artistically as one could expect in a more organized function than this one; but piled in profusion they looked all the more: towels, umbrellas, slippers, spittoons, for each of sixty-seven monks. The completeness of this type of expenditure --- to give to as many monks as one has lived years, all their needs, which are basic and regulated --- makes further grandeur pointless.

The place filled rapidly. The surging hordes took seats behind us with no doubt as to who sat where. Late-comers among the mobs jostled in and laughed at their stumbling, sure that none of the family, though feeling grief imminent again, expected from them a solemnity they did not feel. There was noise all over; little cow-herds outside the thatch lifted tufts to see the better and were roared at by the Sawbwa's cousin, an ex-Army officer: "Get away, you young rascals! This is not your show!" Jean smiled quietly and said, "We need someone like him to handle naughty people."

The noise increased and so did the surging, pushing us till we were tightly packed. The drums could now be heard, louder and louder, the thumping deepened and resounded, the tempo increased, the low roof bore down on our eats, urgent shouts came closer, calling, "This way! Heave! More, more! Hey!" Panic, expectancy, death, finally, doomed in the air, all came nearer for those who listened, amidst the jostling which still went on; and then with a great clash of cymbals he was carried in, lancers, umbrella-bearers, pennant carriers, all furling their standards and coming in, directed this way and that by the ex-major, without detracting one whit from the solemnity for those who felt solemn, and adding to the curiosity of those who gaped at the show.

Flowers had been handed to us to hold during the prayers; also yellow and saffron rice to hold, but nobody know for how long or why; we looked at each other and giggled a little at our ignorance.

The prayers were the shortest on record. As soon as they were over, the heir, guided by an elderly hand, knelt and presented each different offering to the senior monk in the regular way. He proffered it respectfully and got it acknowledged by a touch of the monk's hand, an act which can be performed only by males even when the real donor is a woman. But before he had quite finished, well-meaning people were already ready directing the carrying out of the huge coffin, umbrella-bearers, lancers, pennants also, directed again by the ex-major. My brothers-in-law rushed to be among the pall-bearers, my husband clicked his cameras. And by the time the son and heir had finished the ritual, the coffin was already at the grave twenty yards away. Those who ran in its wake must have got there with it. We were shut off by crowds pressing forward, Sai saying, "It's no use, some of the people are very dirty. Don't try to go, wait patiently here."

The heir wandered out looking lost, no one paying heed to him. He pressed slowly but determinedly through, without asking for a special way. With a sister-in-law I did the same.

Old voices behind us said, "Please, those who have stood long enough, give other eyes a chance also."

But there was nothing to see.

An open trench, in it the masons bricking up the coffin, across the trench perched precariously on the pile of loose dug earth, Agnes with her eight daughters and sister and brother. Soldiers, cowherds, and cultivators pressed round them. Little whispers from my sister-in-law came to me: "How odd. . . they should have marked out an area round the grave."

I called across then to the son, "Sao Sai Long, won't you ask someone to clear the crowd to make the last paying of respects easier?"

He woke; for an instant the mantle of all the Lawksawk Sawbwa's descended on the playboy that he was, and squaring his shoulders he called with authority, without shouting: "Stand back there, we want a clear space." At once people took up his words, so eager in their obedience, and in a second the space was clear; the front people teetered on the invisible line with pressure from behind.

We knelt to pay respects; the last brick was in; with no guns, no more ceremony, the Sawbwa was laid to rest; and the crowd dispersed quickly down the hill.

The chauffeurs of all the cars had driven up to the mound to save their employer's legs. We waved ours away and walked. The air was cool, the people disappearing; the winding of the River Zawgyi across the plain made blue-green clumps on the pale ground again and again between us and the far hills.

"Isn't it beautiful, Sai?"

The little wild flowers and sprouting buds had not been crushed by those thousands of feet, and I could still gather a fresh and delicate bunch.

We had our Kengtung brother with us and found a side track which brought us back to the dining shed. The tables were already packed away, the cooks had washed up, the crates of pop bottles were being loaded onto a lorry, the bamboo posts being dismantled. I could not help saying, "People have remarked about how this whole funeral has been rushed through. The procession was scheduled to start at two but he is buried now and it is just two."

The Kengtung brother had been closest to the Mahadevi and Sawbwa, and I felt at once I should not have spoken; he might be hurt; why must I always speak, why not be completely silent like others? But there was the purest laughter in our brother's voice and his smile was sincere as he replied, "Yes, he who was always so slow and so diffident we have made him brisk today. Let us hope we have given him confidence and that he will be quicker in his next existence."