tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12688140561309607722024-03-18T22:09:12.348-07:00Mi Mi KhaingKhaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1268814056130960772.post-28218762704841647002010-03-03T12:14:00.000-08:002010-03-03T12:38:51.700-08:00IV EXHILARATIONS OF RELEASE<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPgZVGJ2Fq1x4nOX0MZCZ46jnBYnpwcZDVOqOMcV945gx4hTLWy7MVpUYALoDKHjFEhD5I5wvy_nI_wlvyd684LudpiR0gvU-cUuKozyQ9EcwVfJxK32WUJqzj367r4QV_DeR4RSeqv1d/s1600-h/64(3).jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 223px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPgZVGJ2Fq1x4nOX0MZCZ46jnBYnpwcZDVOqOMcV945gx4hTLWy7MVpUYALoDKHjFEhD5I5wvy_nI_wlvyd684LudpiR0gvU-cUuKozyQ9EcwVfJxK32WUJqzj367r4QV_DeR4RSeqv1d/s400/64(3).jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444507913484079778" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> In December 1932, I sat for the High School Final Examination which also served as selection examination for entrance into the University of Rangoon. I passed with a couple of distinctions which I knew was a disappointing result for Father, though he did not say so. Some years later two of my younger sisters were to pass, with the maximum five or six distinctions each. My excessive playfulness in school, combined with a life-long superficial quality of work led to the poor result and I could only make a pledge to myself that I would do better at the University. The main thing was that I could now leave the convent walls and enter University life in full. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The obliteration of the walls made an end to the long, long silences during eating, dressing, walking, bathing and tidying; an end to the bed-bug catching and the cane lashings with plain cane or knotted cane; an end to the constant dread that a younger sister might get punished for bed-wetting; an end to the feeling of being a second-class inmate; and end to accusations of disobedience, deceit and ill-intended mischief. No wonder children then would sometimes sing the jingle: </p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">No more English, no more French,</p><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">No more standing on the bench.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">If the master interferes,</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">Pull his hair and box his ears.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The University of Rangoon had started going up ever since the University Amendment Act had been passed in 1924, following the successful first stand of the Nationalist movement in the University boycott of 1920. 450 acres in Kokine beside the waters of the Inya Lake had been ear-marked for the rise of what certainly seemed a model campus for Asia. The Arts and Sciences teaching blocks, the large dormitories called after ancient capitals of Burma, the staff houses with gardens and sometimes a tennis court, the playing-fields, students' union building, library, gymnasium, post office, bookshop, sanatorium, the impressive Buddhist congregation Dhammayone, and even a servants' village, made up this lovely campus for us. Though fine grass, sacred to the great universities of England, could not be grown nor tended in such an extensive estate, giant trees like the Tetrameles nudiflora, Polyalthia longiflora and Delonix regia stood up here and there above grassy stretches., the undulations and slopes of which combined with the shores of the lakes to present a most inviting prospect to youth. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Perhaps, what made the shining feature of this campus to all who knew it at the time was that, here alone in the capital city, was a Burmese population in bright and beautiful evidence. The other peoples who passed high school went in greater numbers to seek quick employment in the commercial companies, in services such as police, customs, railways, nursing etc. So that it was indeed Burmese of both sexes who predominated the university scene. No nondescript population, they were young, they held themselves as fortunate beings privileged enough to attend the Tekatho, the Taxila of modern times, they were conscious of the growing pride in being the indigenous inhabitants, a consciousness just beginning to burgeon now with the first successes of nationalist efforts. They took seriously the attendance of this Tekatho, in company of the opposite sex. They came from all parts of Burma to lodge in halls named after such historic capitals as Ava, Sagaing, Pagan, Tagaung and Pinya and to be instructed by highly learned staff both from home and abroad, and they showed their sense of this privilege by dressing up to the part. A few male students might follow the international style of trousers, shirt and neck tie, but the real attraction lay with the young men who wore silk longyi in pastel colours with collarless shirt and light-weight Burmese jacket of formal wear. Without strictly laid down rules of inter-sex behaviour, they had their traditions of decorum somewhat similar to that of Jane Austen's England, and of Buddhist deference; both, however, being structured with the stout Burmese tradition of female power in money, property and participation. The girls wore a never-ending change of bright-flowered longyis, unfailingly plain white muslin jackets, starched and ironed to stiff transparency, through which they showed the tucked, shaped, laced and elaborately decorated bodices which held bosoms securely covered but strongly enough outlined for admiration.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> And how was I in this bright scene?.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> A few girls who had been brought up to play games as vigorously as I, had been allowed by easy-going parents to enter University with their hair just tied or plaited. My parents, however, were old-fashioned. They made me spend the six months' interval between school and university in practising the dressing of my hair into the formal and traditional sadone. This was shaped like a hollow cylinder right on top of the head like a slender top hat, combed smooth but with a fluffy side-tress fixed to dance coquettishly to announce that I was unmarried. I rather liked the effect of this style an my face, and so got up the dexterity not only for daily morning hairdressing, but to make the sadone last day-long, without going askew from my energetic movements.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I had got a room in Inya Hall which faced the Lake. The rooms were single and adequately furnished. They had wood parquet floors and for a small tip the sweeper woman of the Hall would put a high polish on to your floor and furniture. Though I guessed that now my parents were no longer as well-off as before, my results would most probably entitle me to a bursary though not to a full scholarship, and meanwhile, my Uncle San Lin stood ready, to start his family duty of helping Father in his turn by making up whatever would be needed to cover the modest hostel fees, tuition and spending . Money I might need. He had already bought me a bed-side rug, and this made me feel it was really a new life I could plunge into.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> For was I not going to plunge into this wonderful new life with all the excess of energy seen in my stars since birth? Alas, there came a most unexpected deferment of all pleasure.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Soon after term began, a notice went up. It stated that a few selected students should take the two-year Intermediate course in one year. Despite the lack of more distinctions in my High School results, my name was in the list. When I read the notice I gave not a shout of joy but a groan of dismay. Of course I must take advantage of the short-cut and a year's saving in time and cost of education the chance allowed. But there was a snag and I give a detailed explanation to show both the low place the Burmese language held in the scheme of education then, as well as the haphazard conditions which prevailed in an administration devoted to order. Students educated as I had been, using English as medium of instruction, were classified as following the 'European Code' in distinction from the 'Anglo-Vernacular' or 'Vernacular'. In the last of which no English at all was taught. The European Code's syllabus prescribed the standard of its High School Burmese at approximately the Middle School level of the A-V Code, whose English was approximately levelled at the corresponding Middle School stage of the European Code's English.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Not only was this low standard prevalent, but Burmese was called the 'second language' of the European code, and so French could be studied in its place. I know one Burmese woman who studied French and never even learnt her Burmese letters. At University level, both English and Burmese would be the same for all in theory. The lag behind in English would not matter so much, as the standard of erudition in it was far below the standard set by Burmese Professors for Burmese erudition. The problem was not so large a one In application, as might be thought, for Indian, Chinese, Sino-Burmese, Indo-Burmese, Eurasians and anyone with infusion of foreign blood was allowed to take lower Burmese at the University. The same let-out was given to purely indigenous minorities as the Shans, Chins, Karens, Kachins, etc. My family belonged to the Mon minority. but Mons, among all indigenous peoples were the first to give literacy to Burma so no such let-out was sought by them. Still, one was not illiterate, and so it should be no problem to catch up in one's own language study. However, there was also the examination system which made my dilemma almost a lone one. The Intermediate was a two-year pre-degree course. You took the examination for entrance into the degree course only at the end of two years, not a year at a time. If three books were prescribed for the 'Junior Inter', three for the 'Senior Inter', you were examined in six books at the Senior Inter examination and not just three. The books were not prescribed as a series in step by step progress. Each had its entity and required time for its serious study. Time was the important factor, and of it I had half of what everyone else had. Let me explain this with an analogy from the study of English literature. Suppose an English child learned Shakespeare from a reading of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. and was then faced with the Variorum Edition of Hamlet, where a ten-inch long page of notes followed the two lines of text. The child will not be able to read the Variorum Edition straight through as he does the Lamb. He will need time to ponder over meanings of text and to study explanations offered as to more depth of such meanings. My six Burmese books, including epistles from past centuries, religious suttas, and a horror of a long history of Burma in the style of Burmese state-chronicle writing. Chronicle writing, whose facts also needed memorising -- all these books would have to have religious allusion and Pali root-words explained before one appreciated the shining nugget of admonition or instruction. Where could I begin? Our two Burmese lecturers were of the old school, scholarly men who declaimed the profundities of the text at break-neck speed in eloquence which ranged the empyrean, way up above me. Yet I must tackle the two-year course alone if only to make up to Father for the disappointing High School results. I went to my cousin U Lu Pe Win, a senior Staff in the Pali department. He was not pessimistic at all. He told one of his star pupils in the Pali Honours course, Ma Ohn, to take me in hand. Thereafter, every weekend, as early in the morning as I dared, I went to her room. She let me in, bolted the door firmly, then took out the exercises she had prepared with my cousin. She was a good Buddhist and did this just because her Asariya, her revered Teacher, had asked her to do so. What a gift of her time was given me in the explanations, corrections, spelling tests and interpretation of Pali words. I owed her so much that I can only be thankful that I have kept up relations with her through all the decades and still find myself turning to her for help. I decided to forget all the swimming, games, cinema trips, shopping trips and eating at the snack bars strewn throughout the campus. I cut all the classes I dared in other subjects just to work on the exercises set me by Ma Ohn.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I told myself that after this one year of swotting I was going to go crazy with enjoying myself. The degree course was normally two years, but for a very select few, amounting to a handful only an additional year was given to study for an honours degree in a subject for which strict vetting was done after the intermediate examination. Thereafter you sat for your examination in your chosen subject only at the end of the third year.. I would have no more study except for my chosen subject which I would of course do with enjoyment. What a prospect I promised myself indeed.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> At the end of the hard working year of self-denial I passed the Intermediate examination even if a few grace-marks had to be given me by a moderating board. I was declared fit for admission to Honours classes in Economics or in English. I chose the latter.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> It was 1934, a. momentous year for the University, as in that year Aung San who was to charge Burmese nationalism with dynamic force, decided to make the University his platform for entering the national scene.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Looking back, it seems as if his youthful intensity ushered in a revolutionary time. Young men like him, though they denounced British imperialism, took ideas from intellectual England.. They read books from the Burmese equivalent of Britain's Left Book Club, and to them the words of the English poet were not at all hackneyed as they quoted:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive </p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;">But to be young was very heaven."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Recently, one of my domestics crept up at night and said that a child from the family of Shan-Chinese refugees who had found shelter in our compound after fleeing from Communist areas in the north, was crying as no one could tell her the answer to her homework. Her teacher had asked "How is General Aung San related to Burma?" I pondered awhile to make a brief enough sentence that would include all. The teacher had used the word 'taw', which means related, by blood, marriage or other ties. told the maid to say 'Bogyoke Aung San is the Father of the Sovereign Republic of the Union of Burma.'</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Perhaps it is only a young-hearted nation of Orientals like the Burmese who persist in investing with a father-figure's attributes a young man who was dead by the age of thirty two. Yes, he was nineteen when he entered the political area and had been assassinated by the time he was thirty-two. In between those short years he had led his country right out of the mighty British Empire, thus beginning the dissolution of it in various ways; he had revived the martial tradition of the Burmese race, in contrast to the British denial of training to them while giving it to the upland minorities; and he had begun, though he could not. live to see, the fusion of these many-peopled areas of Burma into one Union. This astonishing performance needs some pondering for an explanation of how it became possible. In his autobiography, ex-Group Captain of Britain's RAF, Peter Townsend, seeks to explain some extraordinary incidents of his life by his theory of Time and Chance. He chanced to be at certain places at certain times, and this was why he was caught up in such unexpected episodes as his life showed. Many have used this Time and Chance theory to explain Aung San's achievement. He entered the arena at the right moment, events of world history created his chances, and he was there at the correct time for reaping the results of such events. This is true enough, but there must be more. There was the total commitment and the refusal to accept the view that all avenues of action were blocked. What others considered unwise or impossible to attempt, he would do, and to do it, he would use any methods to hand. His commitment to this must have begun early.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> He grew up in Central Burma where the dry air hangs with intimations of all Burma's past history, pp and down his area. Besides filling a youthful imagination with the sense of history, the areas offered a first-hand knowledge of what British development of Burma meant in its most glaring form. Nowhere else in the country was there the juxtaposition of British commercial wealth and the lot of the Burmese workers. The oil company personnel lived very well then, on the principal that oilfield stations were hardship stations, and staff posted to them deserved better than normal housing, and provision of facilities not available locally. I have seen such stations and felt their arid life, but to me the aridity appeared to be that of at intellectual desert and a cultural vacuum. I have mentioned earlier my impression that British government officials had a somewhat sentimental feeling that life in the districts should conform to the plain living with which they associated it. Not so the commercial British. The Burmah Oil Company provided comfortable and well-furnished staff houses with modern bathrooms, carpets, padded furniture, goad curtains and adequate table appointments. In the dry climate of central Burma, some such houses might even have a small swimming pool of their own. The houses on their respective hillocks were connected by well-maintained paved roads, and the entire area was a model of community development with its hospital facilities, club and stores. Naturally the workers' conditions side by side with such a development would bring home sharply the difference in living conditions between British management and Burmese labour. A young man with dreams of getting his countrymen free from such an economic and political inferiority as he saw in this proximity to his home will be expected to have his determination reinforced to succeed in his task at all costs.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Aung San arrived in College in 1932 and two years later his actions showed a sense of urgency which hindsight feels tempted to ascribe to his premonition that he had not much time.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The elder nationalists had been busy with some success but their inch-by-inch gains such as the system of dyarchy, franchise terms and separation from India did not suit Aung San's need for a rush tempo. Such constitutional gains were not yet his concern. He began instead by working to gain control of the Students' Union and having got that platform, he set out to test his strength, and the following he would get if he led a movement of sheer rebelliousness against authority when it swooped down in what he considered unfair action. The issue he chose was therefore not the vital point. He became Editor of the Union Magazine, there was a scurrilous article in it about the Burmese bursar known to be a protégé of the English Principal. Aung San as Editor was called to reveal the identity of the writers and he felt it within his rights to refuse to do so and the Principal, Mr. Sloss, an authoritarian figure, expelled him as he, Aung San, had expected him to do. He thereupon called out a strike which succeeded so clearly as to establish his ability to command a strong following. In this act of rebelliousness, I now ask myself: Why did I who had been so rebellious during the convent years completely let pass by me this call to rebellion? Because, first of all, looking from a self-eye view, which was the only viewpoint I used in those days, in contrast to the convent I saw nothing in the University to rebel against, and much to revel in. Besides this, all during the year when I had kept my nose to the grindstone of my double quota of prescribed Burmese texts, I had found out for myself the most wonderful discovery of my life hitherto. It was such a discovery that lit up my whole prospect and carried me far beyond the proper bounds of exhilaration which came in a natural degree with release from convent restrictions. That was, that after all the growing childhood years when family, elders, school teachers and schoolmates had combined to convince me of my sad lack of beauty, I found on arrival at the University, that beauty did not matter at all in attracting members of the opposite sex. Men did not seem to choose favourites according to looks. I could have all the friends I wanted, from among the best- looking males too, merely by being myself, frankly enjoying such company as I did, ready to participate and talk to them without self-consciousness. If they enjoyed your company, circumstances would be contrived for further meetings and you could sense that admiration had crept in. Meetings did have to be contrived. The usual thing was for a boy and girl to talk softly in between going to classes, in a spot well-seen from every side. It was a chat in just audible tones lasting - fifteen minutes, or longer if both decided to cut the next class. Anything more private than this had to be even more contrived, like a visit of about five or six together to a matinee cinema show. It will be hard for young people here today, or for most people from the west, to imagine how sweet were the ways of love in our non-permissive Burmese society.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> We had to observe such decorum, we had to be so silent concerning inmost feeling that we had to rely on looks to convey our feelings, we had to read signs in every movement of the person in whom our whole interest was for the time invested. But how sweet indeed were the rewards. To turn suddenly and see that he had been gazing without special reason at one's face for some time. Obviously the step had been taken from admiration to desire. From this point, specially infatuated couples would go to great lengths to sneak entirely private meetings away from home or hostel and they might then know some of the physical side of love. My upbringing, the culture in which I live, and my age, will not allow me to write of the physical side of love at that or any other time of my life. But I must dwell on my incursions into the sentimental and romantic aspects of loves. Embarrassing and unnecessary this might seem to some, but my dalliance must in conscience be noted in connection with the charge of inconstancy in youth. This dalliance taking up whatever remained of my thoughts from immersion in study and social rounds, wove the cocoon of self-interests tighter round me and explains why I was so insulated against the momentous nationalist events that brewed almost under my nose.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Still, if only one had gone and listened to Aung San talk at the Students Union, there would have been the spark of communication such as came in later years when. I heard his torrent of Burmese which swept me off my feet. But the Students' Union did not interest us much except for its excellent snack shop. Proceedings at the time were in English, so unless one was bent on a mission like Aung San was, or was caught there perforce, the proceedings appeared halting and not inspiring enough. My only participation in the Union was anything but nationalist. The committee which ran the Union before the year of Aung San's secretaryship arranged a debate in English, and having been asked to speak by the members of the committee, I dutifully complied. My friend and I spoke for the independent stand women should take regarding work and a career. Knowing no better, we modelled our points on talks from the West, where women did not enjoy nearly as much of financial or social status or career rights as Burmese women did. The competing college brought along their staff to support them from the floor. At the time I had not yet heard so much of my friend Ma Than E about whom you will remember much from my first chapter. You won't be surprised to find her here the chief scene-stealer, as always. She had returned recently from training in England and was talked about for her daring and socially free ways, not giving a damn for decorum but going where and as she liked.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I had finished my little prepared talk and was tidying my papers when I heard roars of applause. The shouts and clapping were of quite a different order. I looked up startled and saw that a beautiful woman from the staff of the TTC had risen. She had a silk shawl wrapped round her. Her lovely face with wide cheek bones, its perfect nose, and a generous mouth, was framed in a hair-style neat and smooth. The TTC stand was for women to remain dependent, shy and modest as the violet. She plugged this line hard, as she switched those sloe eyes from side to side at the cheering male students. When she ended with the summing up that women should not be 'heady like wine' (as she was well reputed to be), but clinging like a vine her voice caressed like a clinging vine as with the shawl wrapping her body, she clearly brought the house down. We won the debate on points, but there was no doubt as to which had been the star attraction of the evening. As I prepared to leave the hall, this beautiful woman came and touched my arm. She said, "My dear, you speak very good English. I hope I wasn't too much of a distraction. But I had to back up the side, and a scatter brain like mine could think of only that act. You had finished your talk anyway, and it was a fine one." She went off as quickly as she had spoken.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Well, far from hearing Aung San speak at the Union where in 1934, he had become General Secretary, we did not give ourselves a chance to hear him speak at all. A great game among the butterflies of the time like me was to give warning that 'Aung San! Aung San! Aung San's coming!' and then make a mad dash to get out of the way. We made a show of feeling frightened that he would vent his anger against our frivolity, for by now his image was established. He belonged to the Thakins, a group of young nationalists who dressed to show national protest. Their formal lightweight jackets were of homespun cotton, their longyis of hand-loom cotton, not silk, their slippers were wooden clogs with stout leather thongs unlike the velvet straps of the usual male slippers. Though this male Thakin dress was a direct contrast to the normal silken longyi outfit of the male students, the news went around that Aung San also condemned the frivolity of the women students who bought longyis by the score from stocks imported by the Indian capitalists, In this I was guiltier than the average female. Not only was I making up for having come too late to a dressy Burmese scene, not only did my uncle San Lin ignore my bursary and give a full allowance, leaving a lot for snacks, clothes and cinema shows, but my 'partner' or best friend of whom we all had one, led me to go in for excessive silk-piece shopping. Girls always went everywhere in pairs, never alone. It was proof that you could not be going to a purely private, and therefore a possibly sexual encounter if a companion were with you. My special partner was Shin Min Thu, from a Moulmein convent. Her name was an exceedingly high style echo of courts centuries old, and in naming her in English for her convent,. her father chose the equally impossible Honoria. No wonder we called her Honny. Honny was fair-complexioned, petite and weak. She had a weak heart. But she was game. Oh, how game she was. She breathlessly kept up with my fast strides along miles of corridors, and she went along with me to tennis and basketball where she sat at the side-lines till I should finish, and we could walk back together. She laughed at my antics and never seemed to grudge me my energy. I can only hope that the pace she kept alongside me did not contribute to her early death in her fifties.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Honny's parents were dead. Her elder brother lived with her and two unmarried elder sisters in a beautiful wooden house near their printing press in Moulmein. The sisters ran a shop of fine Burmese fabrics in their front room where the floors and few pieces of furniture were kept highly polished and dustless. The two elder sisters enjoyed normal health and always concerned themselves with Honny's well-being. They dressed alike every day when she was home, each in turn choosing the longyi design for the day. When Honny and I shopped, therefore, for longyi pieces at the wealth of Indian textile houses she would let me choose the one we would buy, then quietly add to my order for two pieces, her order for two more for her sisters who awaited her return each vacation to see what new designs they would wear. We had a good friendship and Honny sometimes surprised me by her firm opinions in uncertain situations. Some of our colleagues formed an association like many associations of ethnic, religious, district of origin or field of study, all of which made for increased social life and meetings. Now, my friends formed what they called the 'Can-Bro', with girl students educated at convents and boys from the corresponding 'Brothers' schools', It was not a seemly thing to do from a nationalist view, but Honny to my surprise, told me quite feelingly that company is always welcome, and if one has become a 'half-frog half-fish', what other compensation is there in the situation except to know that there are enough half-frogs half-fish to form a good crowd?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> One feature of my half-frog half-fish breeding was that I was continually condemned as hoydenish in my behaviour. One day, a close friend from childhood years, said a boy she knew was laid up in the sanatorium and she wanted my company to visit him there. I went along, we stood politely exchanging perfunctory remarks on his health and terminated the visit in less than half an hour, Next day my cousin the handsome Ko Kyi Maung Win called at my Hall to my surprise. He scolded me for having gone on that visit to the sick. I was taken aback and said so. I described the very proper distance we had kept from the sick-beds. He said "That's not the point. The point is, don't you know what he is being treated far?" I didn't and said so. My cousin came closer and said as if in fullest explanation, "He has VD." I kept quiet, knowing better than to say I thought the nature of the disease had nothing to do with the propriety or impropriety of my visit.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Another time my elder cousin who had supplied Ma Ohn as my teacher called me and asked if I could not drop basketball. He pointed out that tennis was something I could now play unlike at school which had not had full facilities. So why did I have to play basketball as well, when tennis could be played in a longyi whereas I had to get back into a skirt to run and push about in basket-ball. Even my Uncle San Lin proved surprisingly strict. He watched :my behaviour from afar and reported it to Father. I was surprised one day to hear from Father who by now belonged to another world as it seemed, that perhaps my enthusiasm for the University Football Team should not carry me away in wild shouts and standing cheers at the public stadium.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yes; dear Father was in a sadly different world, having retired now. Early on, he had bought out the two other heirs to Grandfather's Thaton mansion and now owned it together with my elder aunt who had continued to live there. Father's choice of Thaton as his retirement place was, in fact, the ideal choice for a Burmese pensioner, as it contained scenic countryside, cheap food suppliers, numerous pagodas and monasteries, and the proximity of a big; town in Moulmein. In addition Father had his rubber estates and his house. However, it was with some fears that I went home for my first vacation after his retirement. I feared a sad change, with just my parents, aunt, and a servant or two rattling around in that big mansion; no more kitchen brimful with domestics; and Father with no trappings of office. I was agreeably surprised when Mother who met me did not hire a pony cart such as we had always ridden in Thaton, but went instead to a blue 'tourer' car in which a pleasant young chauffeur waited. Mother explained that car and chauffeur were necessities as Father visited the rubber plantations far oftener than our aunt had been able to do. When we got home, however, I felt sad to watch Mother bending, over her bunch of keys to get the front-door open. When a house is full of people, someone is always near enough to the door to be at hand for arrivals, but when a large house contains only two or three people one has to lock up in case the home-stayer wishes to relax out of earshot. I had half-imagined that Mother would have made some sort of sitting room in Grandfather's Buddhist design for living, but no, she left the main room as its old self, kept free for assemblies with the Sangha. Now that I am older and wiser I think she did right in leaving it its beauty of round teak pillars rising to the high ceiling, and the shine of the foot-wide floor-boards uncluttered by chairs and small tables. On the front verandah, stepping down from this were a few arm-chairs and two deck-chairs for Father and Mother to rest in side by side. On the mornings that Father did not drive out to his rubber estates, he put on a topi and walked around the town, often finishing up at a monastery where he might sit and chat awhile with the monks, or visit other pensioners. I found him thin and a bit quiet. A disease caught long before, and thought to be cured, was troubling him without our knowing it. Mother told me years later that she did not know that some diseases needed additional courses of injections as follow-up treatments. Still, when my sisters also came home on holiday, Father organised picnics at the rubber estate bungalow as well as at Zingyaik where waterfalls and boulders make such a dream setting for children at play. I was therefore not deeply worried about his health but decided that I really must do superbly in university examinations from now on, ignoring romance or politics, to raise his spirits.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I remember Thaton was full of picnic spots, but I remember it also for being the starting point for our great friendship with one English family. This friendship which is still lively till now, dates from those colonial days. The Deputy Commissioner there, Mr. F.S.V. Donnison, was fairly young, and so was his wife Ruth. She somehow learned of Mother's presence in Thaton, and invited her over to tea. After getting to know her, she asked if Mother, being older, more experienced and truly bi-lingual, would please act as President of the Maternity and Infant Welfare work in Thaton.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "You can have me as a secretary so that I can do the running round for you."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Mother was quite taken aback, her upbringing as a junior official's wife making such a suggestion preposterous.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "No, no, you are the D.C.'s wife. The D.C.'s wife must lead and I will help you whenever you need."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> They chatted easily together, Mother ever ready to tell Ruth about Burmese food and fruit preserving, and Ruth urging her to bring the children to choose books suitable for holiday reading of which she had many. When we went there for that purpose, we sometimes saw the host, tall, good- looking, smiling gently, and keeping in the background, for Mother would have drawn back into her shell if he had come more forward. The measure of what she felt for him was revealed to me nearly forty years later, when she told me, "Later, when he became Financial Commissioner, (that is very high, you know), I was walking Into the,Secretariat in Rangoon one day to get my rubber quota. I felt sad because I hated to go there and with your Papa ill and all. When I was half-way from the gate to the building, Mr. Donnison, drove in, in his car. Oh my, he stopped the car, and he leaned out and said, 'Isn't it Mrs. Chit Khaing? What are you doing here?' He even offered to take me to the quotas office but of course I did not accept that. But it made me feel so much better to think he knew me and wanted to help me.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> When I returned to college soon after the beginning of the academic year 1936, I received a letter which influenced my erratic searchings for romance for years to come. The letter bore an overseas stamp and had been mailed from a ship en route to England, and it was from a friend I knew well. He was extraordinarily old-fashioned and punctilious, even for Burmese society, for it was not till page six of the closely- written letter that recognised it was a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage. Even then, the writer was able to propose only by quoting an Old English verse called Alvsoun's Song, substituting my name at the very last word for Alysoun. 0h I was excited, my first proposal at the age of twenty after only three years in college. Why from a ship? Because he had won entry into the top Civil Service which was so highly classed that it was called 'heaven-born.' He had waited till he left for the two years' training he would get at Oxford. Now I hugged the letter to my heart. What girl would not be swept away by the thought of having had, without knowing, for a whole year, someone looking on never giving a hint, but all the time admiring and desiring one. Now safely far out at sea, and sure of the best prospects In life, he felt confident enough to speak out. But despite such punctiliousness I knew with a sinking heart, it would never do. I did not even spend time wondering more about its possibility. He was a Roman Catholic and of mixed European and Burmese blood. His sister had been my close friend in school, and though she had gone on to nursing instead of coming to college, we still maintained our friendship. This, and his having met my uncle who spoke English freely, made him hope that my family was broad-minded enough not to mind our differences of race and religion. But they would most certainly mind and even without asking them I minded for their feelings. I just folded away the letter sadly. Everyone will agree that fruit put out of your reach offers delights to the imagination, real and fancied.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> To show the desirability of such 'heaven-born' service officers as marriage prospects at the time, I mention a visit to a cousin. During our visit, she was sewing silk pillow-cases for the trousseau of a girl engaged to someone of that service. My cousin, said to us,</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "So you see, if you behave well, if you are known to be modest and virtuous, and best of all, if you are lucky enough to have parents able to provide a house and car for you as her parents are doing, then you get such a husband."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I hugged my secret close to my heart, for without my parents being either able or eager to give a dowry for me, and without my wearing an air of modesty or cultivated virtuousness, I had received my twelve page proposal from a very good-looking 'heaven-horn'. I kept the proposal a secret in case Father and Mother would hear some wrong news about it and sadden them. But at that time, the gods were filling cup after cup for me. That first proposal was followed by friendship in which people could see all the advantages of my first proposal and wherein I myself could see every attractive quality in the person, but not as a proposal for marriage for I was not yet mature emotionally. The way it came about is still fresh in my mind.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I had a sparring friend among my class-mates who was always looking for chances to put me into a spot, though we were supposed to be good friends. One day he saw an advertisement for a face-cream which began with the striking statement that to those of us who are beautiful by nature no aids are necessary, but to those of us less endowed, there was a face-cream. Just fill in the form below and order the cream and one's appearance would be made. He found the shyest among: their group of Honours students, said to be brilliant, and undoubtedly good-natured and good-looking. I don't know what inducement made this young man agree to fill in the form with my name and address and send the whole page of advertisement to me. When I got it I was indignant, and went around boldly asking class-mates to identify the handwriting, I tracked down the writer and sending a note to him by name asked him to meet me without fall at a certain corridor. There I told him what I thought of such a rude,, silly and cruel joke and asked him how it would feel to have been told all your life about your lack of beauty, to start forgetting about it at last, and now to be reminded again, so unnecessarily.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The dear young man had never met a girl, I was full of anger and sense of outrage. This worked on him better than any sweet words, and very soon I got an invitation to go to a cinema show with two or three other friends and him as the host. I went along, and a friendship began which should have made me or any parents happy. But after my sheltered childhood and my seclusion in the convent, I just could not feel ready to consider developing any friendship into intentions towards marriage nor to feel I had seen enough of the world after only a few years on a University campus. What about seeing the original country-side of that picture I had looked at for years as I chewed my silent meals in the convent? For that matter, what about Mongolia, and the Bosphorus, and all the lands I dreamed of in all the years of living in imagination. I knew what marriage would be like as far as the social setting was concerned. I had so loved It as our parents provided for us. Mother had set me an example which I did not follow. She had a moral purpose in life, to raise a family with a good man in the same dull routine of small towns which gave children and marriage maximum security. I was not prepared to immerse myself in such a life as she had done --- at least not yet. Perhaps I lacked moral purpose altogether? There was also the thought of the forbidden fruit I had put away. I did not long to taste to see which apple was sweetest, but having denied myself- something so irrevocably and decidedly made me unwilling to make any other irrevocable decision as yet. My new friend, after graduation, like all bright young men, would sit for the Civil Service examinations and would probably be selected into the 'heaven-born.' In fact, this did come to pass, but even this did not change my wayward course in search of what I knew not.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> One thing only was sure. I had begun working seriously with the idea that this time I would get a brilliant degree. Especially was my resolve strengthened when one day Mother came to see me together with my Uncle San Lin, especially to tell me that Father needed sustained treatment possible only in Rangoon and for this she must rent a bungalow close to where the English physician lived and would prefer us children to wait to see Father only much later as the doctor said he was undergoing a nervous breakdown due to the inroads of disease. I turned away with tears in my eyes, thankful only for Mother having her brother-in-law who of course would do his utmost to stand by and help in every way.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> My studies in Honours English had begun. By that year, 1936, I had finished with all subsidiary subjects and read only English language and literature. The three years of classes without an examination in sight for all that time, with only a long essay perhaps once a term, bad been bliss for me. Now it was to be my last of the three years and in a bit of a panic I decided to read without a stop till midnight each night and wake up to start again at six the next morning. This was the happy activity which filled my general feeling of a vacuum at not knowing where I was drifting emotionally and about Father's breakdown. They were happy hours when I hunted around in the library and happiest when I spotted a book which had escaped the hunting of my sparring partner who went around to remove books, not to read but to get them out of my reach. To show this was not really bad will towards me, he told me about it with a lot of glee. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Our studies then were directed by a good British staff. In later life I have been told of the eminence of Professor D.G.E. Hall in the world of historians, Dudley Stamp in the world of geographers, Gordon Luce in the world of scholarship generally, and I had my own clear perception of the quality of my English professor, F.W..V. Rhodes who was like no other. He was a New Zealander who had been a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford and suffered from severe bouts of epilepsy. He was a bachelor, and having a need to be constantly attended by someone if he should suffer from. a fit, he chose a few congenial students to spend holidays with him summering in the hill-stations during vacation. In term-time, though he shared a house with another unmarried Englishman, he would invite such students to take the regular walk along the lake shores with him. An admiration for Swift and a conversational style of sarcasm against the Establishment made him appear a cynical mysongynist, which he was not. In later years we became good friends, but I spent earlier years under a cloud of his dislike for me, due to a cruel trick played by one of the male students in whose regard I must have stuck out like a sore thumb. My spirit of over-exuberance during these years led to many such reactions. This was the joke played on me.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> I would be late and rush into the class at the last moment, quite breathless and in need of time to find the place in the text which the lecturer had reached. It was the custom for male students to pass up notes requesting girls up front to ask for meanings of words they did not understand, it seemed natural, for no one really enjoyed framing a question in English unless they spoke the language fluently. One day, at the Professor's class, no sooner had I at down than such a note was passed Up. The contents were in Burmese, with just the English words needing clarification written in English. I was requested to ask for the meaning of the words 'fistula' and 'codpiece'.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> If I had glanced at the text I would have suspected a joke, but I did not take time. Straight away I asked “Please Sir, what is a codpiece?” Perhaps today the question sounds ordinary, but my Professor turned a violent red.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "Upon my word," he stammered, "Well, really!" He began moving sideways on his platform from one end to another twice with repetitions of "Well really" Then he closed his files and walked out to a great uproar of male laughter and thumping. Who says the days of youth are care-free and happiest?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> It took a long time for him and me to reach an understanding but we ended up as friends.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The idea had been to put me on the spot, and not the Professor. In this, I was merely getting what I myself gave out to others sometimes in my exuberance. Since Convent days I had had a classmate and rival in an almost purely Irish girl called Kathleen Bruen. She always stood ahead of me in class but would sometimes say, "You don't work hard enough and you don't take enough care. If you did, you would beat me."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> When I decided to attend the English honours Class I was already sitting in it when she appeared to do likewise. Suddenly, looking at me, she said, "No, we've had enough of each other," and she went off to the Geography Department.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> She was a brilliant girl, subject to ups and downs of temperament. I could not resist teasing her when she was high. The geography department was in one year joined by an attractive young bachelor called Slater. One fine morning I found myself crossing the grassy slopes near the lake shores keeping to our left the Geography wing as we walked on. Kathleen and another girl were with me. The drains, built solidly like all on that campus, were quite two feet deep and in this fine weather, quite clean and dry. The morning air must have sent me a bit wild. Noticing that Kathleen was wearing high-heeled pointed shoes which required careful walking, I whispered an idea to the third girl to ,join me in shouting, "Oh Mr. Sla-a-ter" loud, long and yodelling. As soon as we shouted we jumped down into the drain and crouched out of sight. We wore flat Burmese slippers and did this easily. If Slater came to the window he would see Kathleen only as she could not jump into the deep drain with her high-heeled pointed shoes. Raising our heads, we again called out the same yodelling call several times. Poor Kay ranted and fumed, and told us not to be ridiculous. She had to end by removing her shoes and hiding in the drain and this made her all the angrier.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> But in return for such cruel jokes that I played, see what could happen to me again.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> There is the sweet Burmese custom of handing letters to a girl whom a man falls in love with, so that, 'love letter' is synonymous with giving a declaration of love. One day in the library I was approached by an enigmatic character. He held out a letter and said, "People hand letters to declare love. I want to hand this to you to declare dislike." I took the note without flinching, but my heart was chilled.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Despite such possible encounters in that library I had some of my happiest hours there. To come across a rare comment in literary criticism which accorded with my own opinion, then to go through my texts with a fine comb till I found evidence bearing out the comment, to scribble that passage down and later, on the flat of my back in my hostel room, to learn that, passage by heart. All this happy study was mine, but it had always attracted me anyway. What I strove now to do more to ensure good results for Father was to listen to and try to get deeply interested in the philology lectures. These were given by our Indian lecturer Mr. Gopal Krishna Aiyar. He was called 'Hot Lips Alyar' because of his thick protruding lips which seemed accentuated by his Indian rendition of certain consonants,'Vowel' was pronounced 'Wow-vel', and so on.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Nowadays it is customary to call the education we got then 'slave education', designed to produce not nation-builders but good service-men. The education was not in itself slavish, it was us students, who had been slave-tradition-oriented, attaching prestige and desired office to liberal arts and law subjects, and neglecting to elect science courses. Few had the imagination to do the latter, and I remember the few Eurasian girls who studied biology, always complaining about their Professor Meggit, known as a great faller of students. U Ne Win, President of Burma at the time of writing was among the rare ones who elected to study biology, and if the Eurasian girls could not bear the edge of Meggit's tongue, certainly Ne Win could not. It is not surprising that Ne Win decided to terminate his studies and devote himself to nationalist efforts before he could sit for his degree,</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The academic year 1936-37 was to be my final year in college. The very beginning of the calendar-year 1936 was to see the great University Strike in which Aung San made his debut as a political leader of resource and daring, with ability to command enthusiastic following. I have mentioned above that the issue on which he took out the strike was not in itself important compared to other burning issues which the government as well as nationalist leaders who had won elections and office along orthodox lines were trying without success to rectify. However its success in getting examinations postponed was undoubted. It made both the young leaders and the university authorities realise that it could be done again any other time. Moreover, the method chosen for upsetting examinations without violence and big demonstrations but merely by using the Burmese aversion to stepping over a prone male was seen to be a sufficient method of picketing.. Nearly twenty female students, in addition to hundreds of male students joined the strike.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The Principal Mr. Sloss, a huge man with an authoritarian manner, lived next door to our hall. He came over to lead girls who were to take their examinations to the examination block. Honny and I tagged behind to see what would happen. We got to the small back gate leading to the teaching blocks and found three young men lying prone across our path.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "Come, boys, don't be ridiculous. Get up and let these harmless girls go to their exam," One boy said to another in Burmese, "Don't pay any attention to him."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Mr. Sloss continued in the same vein of playing it lightly, that the boys were perhaps playing a joke in such childish behaviour. When he saw that they would not get up no matter how he urged, he appeared a bit confused. He looked this way and that and then his glance came to us and tried to meet our glance. We quickly averted our eyes.. If he were trying to gauge the likelihood of our stepping over a recumbent male the answer was "Never." So he said, "Oh alright, I've never seen such nonsense." And we returned rather flatly to the hall hoping that somehow agreement could be reached on holding exams. It was reached. Exams were postponed while the authorities agreed to appoint a Committee to investigate the conduct of the Bursar about whom the article had been written, The writer, having revealed his identity himself, Aung San was obviously no longer at fault. His right to maintain silence being acknowledged by reinstatement. The article had been more sensational than serious in its charges of immorality on the part of the staff member. 'Hell-Hound at Large' had been its title, and its main accusation was the lack of decorum towards girl students in lecture references and too great a measure of intimacy in inviting the same two girls to his house where he lived with his wife, I had gone home when the University closed temporarily during negotiations. I was staying at the house of Aunty Khin's relatives. The Bursar had been a resident of one of the towns where Father had worked and when he was selected for the top civil service and was sent to England for training, Mother had made him a few Burmese pickles to take along. As a mark of regard for this connection he had now and again invited me to play tennis at his house, I always went along with two other girls with whom I was friendly. They were both attractive and one, Khin Saw Elaing, who had been in the same convent with met was somehow always sought out by men though no prettier than others. We played tennis, chatted and returned to the hall. Now the Bursar's wife turned up at Aunty Khin's to ask my help. She told Mother that some of the charges against her husband included these tennis invitations and she would be grateful if I could go to testify my occasional presence there and the innocence of the gatherings. Mother called me and said that of course I must go along and speak out the truth. But my Uncle San Lin who was there on leave came out and took a say in the matter. "Tell me, " he said to the visitor,"do the strikers mention three names or only two of the girls invited to your husband's tennis parties';"</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "Well, two."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "My niece was not mentioned?"</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> He turned to me. "There you are. Keep out of what does not concern you and stay home quietly. Everyone including the strikers, knows that you are a great simpleton. That's why they haven't included your name. Its very decent of them indeed. Otherwise, think of the shame to your family in having your name bandied about in this connection. And by the ways aren't you often invited to tennis along with the same two girls by U C and U Y?" He mentioned two elderly rich men, one of whom knew Father and who I thought invited me for that reason.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "You don't know anything that's going on. Just don't go about so much. Next time people may not be so kind or discerning as these strikers."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> With negotiations and investigations successfully concluded, the postponed examinations were held in due course. In March 1937, with things going smoothly, I sat for my own examination. I</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">did my very best and went home for the holidays. The young English lecturer who was assistant to my Professor Rhodes was a good friend of mine. He lectured to us on Donne and also gave us readings of current writers, Isherwood, Eliot and Auden. He wrote now of results to me:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> "You have done excellently all round it seems. You are to be awarded a First Class Honours degree as well as the Gold Medal, and when I say you have done well all round, I mean in every subject. That includes full marks in Philology. Gopal Aiyar wept tears of joy to see that after all the years he has been teaching his loathsome languages, at last comes a student who listened to his maunderings right through from the Aryans to the Anglo-Saxons in the dropping of an h here and the picking up of an e centuries later. I hope you are happy."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Happy? Of course, but Father was not yet himself and I would have to carry all my life my tardiness in vindicating his belief that I should become the first Burmese Professor of English in Burma.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> After passing this degree examination I returned briefly to the campus in the academic year of 1937 to appear for the interview calling for candidates to be selected for sending as State Scholars to England. English Language and Literature was not listed among the subjects chosen for study: Though selection would be based on the results achieved in the degree examinations, which for me was of course English, I decided to appear for the interview. I caused a slight confusion in the selection, the details of which I give to mark the political climate that prevailed in the University by mid-1937. The panel of judges told me that places for the chosen subjects of study had all been filled with candidates who had obtained the best degree in the subject concerned. There was one odd subject, however listed as Household and Social Science which would offer a bachelor of science degree of the University of London. The choice was designed to bring back the trained candidate to lecture in the post-graduate Teachers Training College of the University to teach the post-graduate course of B.Ed. I would have found it more attractive if it had been a simple Home Economics course they proposed. Mother had brought me up to respect her house-wifely qualities enough to welcome the chance to fill out my great ignorance of all domestic matters. This contrived Bachelor of Science degree as it appeared to me, did not attract me so much, in its need for studying Physics, Chemistry, Biology etc. and I said so. This was taken as a lack of interest and I left the room. Following me went an Honours graduate in Geography, a girl who was fair-skinned like Levantine English. She expressed great interest in the course and I think there was agreement that as the geography training would be given to my old classmate Kathleen Bruen who had a better geography degree, this Olga George should be awarded the Household and Social Science training. While waiting outside I told myself I had been foolish. Surely I wanted to go abroad to study. Surely I could master any training and pass required examinations while enjoying other aspects of English training which really interested me more. Bold as ever, I asked permission to enter the room again and spoke of my change of mind.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The chairman of the Board said "Well, your degree is so good. Perhaps you should Get a chance of further study if you wish for it,"</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> He looked around and there were nods. So I On the scholarship, thinking in my heart of hearts that this unorthodox process of selection could hardly have been adopted if I had been not Burmese but Eurasian. The respected nationalist gentlemen who had in the year previous won the long- awaited Separation of Burma from India, who won election rights for Burmese to a Lower and Upper House of Legislature, even if with safeguards of minority and foreign interests, they and the strikers had changed the climate of political feeling in the University of Rangoon to this extent at least, so that I felt discrimination by the academic body, not against me the Burmese candidate but against Olga the fair-skinned girl. She later married the handsome geography lecturer Slater who became Rector of Durham University.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The male students organised a grand dinner to honour the dozen or so State Scholars to be sent abroad. Thirteen young men and Kathleen Bruen and myself were feted. But the song sung by the dancer on stage accented the girls only. "Oh Mi Mi, Oh Kathleen, how admirable, how such for us to be glad about."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> We also got a grand send-off at the wharf. One of my sisters started to cry, was followed by the other two, then Cousin Daisy, and then all the University girls joined in the crying. One of the men who was going with me, Ko Tin Thein, went round to each teary girl saying, "Don't be so upset, You know I'm coming back before too long."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Khin Saw Hlaing, who was one of the girls I had accompanied to tennis at the house of the Bursar, stamped her feet and said, "I'm not crying for you, you fool. I'm crying for Mi Mi." My refusal to testify to help her out was no bar to good feelings. There is always goodwill and a spirit of letting bygones be bygones among us Burmese.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>Khaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1268814056130960772.post-31825646863610583062009-12-09T17:08:00.000-08:002009-12-13T13:50:16.964-08:00KIDNAPPED BY THE BRITISH ARMY<!--This file was converted to xhtml by OpenOffice.org - see http://xml.openoffice.org/odf2xhtml for more info.--><style type="text/css"><br /> @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin-top: 0.7874in; margin-bottom: 0.7874in; margin-left: 0.7874in; margin-right: 0.7874in }<br /> table { border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; empty-cells:show }<br /> td, th { vertical-align:top; font-size:12pt;}<br /> h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { clear:both }<br /> ol, ul { margin:0; padding:0;}<br /> li { list-style: none; margin:0; padding:0;}<br /> li span.odfLiEnd { clear: both; line-height:0; width:0; height:0; margin:0; padding:0; }<br /> span.footnodeNumber { padding-right:1em; }<br /> * { margin:0; }<br /> .P1 { font-size:10pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; }<br /> .P2 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; }<br /> .P3 { font-size:16pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; text-align:center ! important; font-weight:bold; }<br /> .T1 { font-style:italic; }<br /> .T2 { font-size:12pt; }<br /> .T3 { font-style:normal; }<br /> <!-- ODF styles with no properties representable as CSS --><br /> { }<br /> </style><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P3"> </p><p class="P3"> </p><p class="P3"></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">It will make a better story if I recount my life, not straight from its start to its present, but begin instead at that crucial period of it which I now think of as the time when I was kidnapped by the British Army. If my many English friends feel pain at my use of the word “kidnapped”. I ask them to please note the inclusion of the word “Army,” which is in contrast to their good individual selves.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">It was in that distressed period of my life that I made the decision which has set my whole the on the path it has followed these past forty-five years. And my decision was made under the influence of events of this same period. This same distressed period also held for me what I have heard many writers describe as the “moment of truth.” Why use a phrase which I know to be so well-worn?. Because it fits the circumstances precisely. Not one, but several truths faced me during those few short weeks. The truth of the moral inadequacy of my life to date, with my changing from one friendship to another in a search for romantic love; the truth of my countrymen's sufferings and problems to which I had blinded myself in preoccupation with personal and largely selfish pursuits; the truth, however limited, of the world's politics which I had persistently and successfully ignored all my adult years.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">World War II brought the British Army into Burma. In its train came events and actions which lit up convincingly enough for the blindest, the truth of nationalists' accusations of gross arrogance and discrimination against the subjects of Empire. Already, reverses suffered by this army and its allies had shattered the illusion of power, so strongly impregnated in Burmese consciousness, that one lone Indian watchman, without arms or uniform, could without recourse to higher authority, keep the public from entering or despoiling any government edifices. Besides this, even the non-political animal that I was, had seen quite early on, the ridiculousness of expecting the Burmese to feel that this war was in any way their war.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The only concern of the Burmese people with this war was the safety of their families from invading Japanese or withdrawing British armies. They exerted themselves to find residence in towns which would be free of both.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">My mother, then a widow with three daughters younger than I, had decided to go to Henzada on the west bank of Irrawaddy river. It was indeed out of the paths of both powers. She heard that her younger brother, a senior police official, had been posted there. He was childless, and his wife was a gentle, sickly woman always glad of extra company. My three younger sisters had not yet completed their education and were still entitled by Burmese custom to help from relatives able to give it. Mother took them along, leaving me with some of the family property, saying she would send for me when the position proved tenable. Though, at twenty-five I was still unmarried and needed chaperonage, my brother and his wife who were always close to me, remained in Rangoon. So she left me.</span></p><p class="P2"><span style=""><br /></span></p><p class="P2"><span style="">It was while I awaited a call from her that I attended a fateful dinner, at the house of a most senior British official, Mr. Swithinbank. This friendly and scholarly gentleman was known to befriend promising young Burmese who were prepared to bask in such sunshine. Going to an Englishman's dinner in this fashion at a time when nationalist fervour for Burma's great past was being revived by the martial standard raised by the Thirty Comrades who had taken hard military training from the Japanese in order to push the imperialist British out, will seem despicable conduct. But my mind was filled with social trepidation only, as I was the youngest Burmese there, and the newest entrant to the Swithinbank coterie. My nervousness was so great, my silence so noticeable, that I was not surprised to hear later of my host's expression of disappointment that I, reputedly an outstanding speaker of English, had contributed so little humour to the evening. And no wonder. The top of the table rang with laughter and talk. Beside the host was his favourite person Ma Than E. I did not yet know her well, but I knew all about her. She had just made a series of records in which she sang songs about the delights of Burmese seasons and woodland flowers. The tunes were imports of the current hits of the west, such as Lambeth Walk. The music was Tin Pan Alley. But the singer sang on and on like the joyous bird which was her spirit.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Now she laughed her whole-hearted laughter and everyone joined in with her. Quite near her was the musicologist U Khin Zaw who had just revived Burmese nursery songs. He spoke English witticisms with a broad Burmese accent which never failed to charm his listeners. Our end of the table was silent by contrast. There was the handsome Shan lieutenant who had got me the invitation to this dinner, and about whom more, lots and lots more, will be told later. Next to me sat silent most of the time, a Major from one of the Gurkha Regiments which had entered Burma. His wife, a gentle woman sat next to the host who was her cousin. This dinner was given so that Mr. Swithinbank could open to his relatives a wider world than their narrow one of the British army. Indeed the Major confessed later that his reaction on seeing U Khin Zaw enter in silk turban and silk sarong, had been exactly what <span class="T1">memsahibs</span> are believed to say: “Now who on earth are these people?” on seeing a group of indigenous subjects enter their social precincts. At the dinner, however this Major and I exchanged only a few sentences. But something must have communicated itself strongly enough to call for a second meeting. This occurred a few days later. The military had taken over the buildings of the University which had been shut down and I made my way to his small office in one of the halls.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">After greetings were over I sat waiting with great curiosity as to why this Major MacConachie had sent for me.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Do you know the Women's Auxiliary Corps?” he asked.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Yes, I even know it is referred to as the Wasbee, with B for Burma.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Have you joined it or thought of joining it?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“No.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“No, of course not. The only Burmese woman to join is Ma Than E, and I was told she joined only because she wants to chauffeur a military car. I was asked to oblige. Not wishing to lose such a rare volunteer, we have obliged.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“I have something different to ask of you. Without joining the corps or coming under army control you can help us.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“The Corps, is lodged in Inya Hall, previously the chief women's hostel of the University as you know. Up to recently, they have been under some sort of discipline with Miss Hannay as Warden.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Miss Hannay has now deserted her post. The Hall gates are open to all hours.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The Major looked down at his papers and kept his eyes trained on them as he continued to speak without a stop now, his tone dead level except for the Scots accent.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Nowhere else in the Empire has the union of British and indigenous blood begotten such a beautiful result as here in Burma. These girls who form the majority of the Corps members, they look so pretty, they smell so sweet. Here on this estate they work side by side with men in our offices. It is no wonder that the heads of our men get turned. And here is the rub. The destiny of the British Tommy must lie along a different orbit. He needs a wife with strong arms and hardened knees on which to get down and scrub floors. A slender bit of prettiness won't help him. I ask you now if you can take Miss Hannay's place and keep better discipline with the gates being shut at six pm and no more meetings after that.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I thought for a while and then said “I'll try it till my family commitments call me away,”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“You will?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The level voice was heightened to a suggestion of gaiety and a smile broke out in which the thinning hair, the sandy freckled face and even the blue eyes were gathered into a smile of positive attractiveness. As we shook hands this smile decided me I would run like Miss Hannay only when my mother called and not for fear of girls, soldiers or bombs.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">My first sight of the Eurasian girls at my old University Hall revived sad memories of boarding school convent days when such creamy skins, such soft wavy Chestnut hair and other features of Anglo-Saxon ancestry had won their possessors favour and far better treatment than our dark skins, and straight black hair had ever got me. They now joked in the corridor as I stood by. They were completely easy. One girl, as I learned later, was called Beryl Moment, and another, from a family of beauties from the top strata of Eurasian society swept out, dressed and perfumed.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Oh. Moment Divine!” she called out in a passable adoption of an English voice. It was indeed their moment divine. My Major had been off target when he impressed me with his analysis of the common British soldier's destiny and these lovely girls. Outside the gates were gathered now not Tommies but officers up to the rank of Lt. Colonel. Unlike Major MacConachie who was of medium build and open sandy countenance, one or two of these were of a noticeably tall height with the aquiline features which must have appealed to the girls as the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon quality. The gates were closed, but not yet locked. Noticing that it was nearly six, I went with some misgiving to locate the Indian watchman known to everyone as <span class="T1">durwan</span>. He came forward towards the padlock.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Hey wait!” said one officer, and then to me, “Did you tell him to lock the gate?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Yes.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Well now tell him to stop and leave it open.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“No.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Good God!” exclaimed the officer.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The man beside him was a tall slim fellow with a small cap set jauntily on his head. He played with the riding crop with which he struck softly at his trousered leg, as he drawled, “Could this be the young Burmese woman installed by MacConachie?” The other rejoined “The damned Scot!”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">They took no notice of me but continued to swear as tears welled up in my ever-teary eyes at the arrogance which could ignore someone they talked about as she stood by. But thank heaven for that imperial institution of the Indian <span class="T1">durwan </span>who is trained to work by routine and given orders. He snapped the lock shut with the same finality and sense of duty as he did against the young Burmese students who had to take leave of girlfriends at this hour right through my university days.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I had not long to suffer the unpleasantness of this job. While I wondered why my mother still had not sent word to me, the British forces were abandoning stand after stand up the Tenasserim coast to Moulmein, then across the Sitttang very near to Rangoon as February 1942 set in and I turned twenty six. We were not too surprised to hear one day that our luggage must be packed ready to send up-country to Maymyo, to which town we also would entrain two days after the luggage was sent. Maymyo was about five hundred miles up but I was not unduly upset,. My brother was junior in service, but he was in the top class of official selection in the Burma Railways which was a strong, adjunct of the Government. It would be easy to communicate through him and in any case he had proposed sending his wife with two younger sisters of hers to Maymyo earlier. I sent for all my clothes and packed them thoughtfully.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Like all Burmese young women of my kind in those days, I had stacks of longyis (sarongs), with fabrics of every kind bought from Indian Gujarati merchants who were now no more. The fine white muslin-jackets all identical, and made by the dozen at each order, also stacked in neat starched flat wafers Burmese dress was then undeviating and without such uniformity, no woman felt ease of mind.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">On the evening, after our trunks had been sent by train up-country, a bell summoned us all to the Hall for an important announcement. We sat, and shortly after, my Major walked in. An air of expectancy and suspense hung over us. The Major looked straight ahead and in his level tones he said, “Due to recent developments in the war situation, it has been decided to send you all„ the whole corps of the Women's Auxiliary Service, to India by sea, together with families of the armed forces.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">A gasp went up. For me, though the earth gaped and I felt the despair of sinking into it, a thought also arose, “My clothes! What clothes except Burmese clothes can one wear?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The Major lifted his eyes to the back of the room and without change of tone went on. </span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Ma Than E, if you are going out to ask Mr. Swithinbank to get you exempted from this order, don't trouble yourself. I shall only have the painful job of refusing any such request.” So the only other Burmese woman there, though she had no mother or sisters to be bound closely to, but only two brothers whose kinship sat lightly on them, felt just as I did about leaving native soil. If we could not escape our dreadful fate, we could at least share our misery. But I had not yet given up hope. My facile brain, seeking no Swithinbank for help, was working while the Major continued.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“We have to cope with matters of vital importance, so believe me there will he no going back on this decision to get women and children to safety first. Very soon buses will come here. You will pack whatever clothes you have left with you and board those buses at half past four tomorrow morning. Four of you who are on chauffeuring duties will drive the buses.” He read out the list of drivers. They were headed by Ma Than E.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“On board ship you will travel as a corps under your Commandant Mrs. Dean. You will be under military discipline for the task each of you will be assigned. Above all, remember this. If you obey the Army, the Army will love you and look after you. But if you try to disobey you will only run into severe trouble. Gates by the way, will be locked and a patrol will keep watch tonight. Good night.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">He walked out neatly as usual. A rush of women followed. They stopped him in the quadrangle of the Hall. He dealt kindly but firmly with each protest or query, but when it came to the turn of an elderly Polish, woman who blubbered in distress in broken English, his face softened a trifle. He gesticulated vividly while asking a series of questions.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Your husband? With hair like this? Yes? And moustaches, Yes? His eyebrows like this, Yes?” as the woman excitedly echoed “Yes!” to each query. That smile of positive delight again broke out as he assured her. “There, you see, of course I know him and can find him. He will know tonight that you are going to safety, and he can write to you at a given address.” I had waited on the edge of the group, wondering if I dared say what I had thought of saying, as desperate thoughts raced through my brain during his announcement. He dealt briefly with the few remaining women, and I was left the last.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Well now,” he said with a smile, “what is it you want to say?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“I don't want to go to India. In fact I simply can't go to India.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“But why not?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Well, you see, I had decided to get married, and well, suppose I was starting to have a child I have got to be here in Burma.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Oh, shameless, shameless lie, for which Nature would punish me a hundredfold later. How shameless it was can be gathered from the fact that two friends and one cousin of mine had committed suicide as the only way out for pregnancy in an unwed girl in the climate of moral opinion then. I deserved everything, even abandonment by my family for communicating thus with a British officer.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">But how efficient the Major was. “If you are going to be married, you must get properly engaged, unless you are already. No? And may I know who the fortunate young man is?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I named him.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Good!” Again the suggestion of gladness lifted his voice, “Now, I will have him found, and then you both can come to dinner at Mr. Swithinbank's where I am still staying. Betty tells he often acts in <span class="T1">loco parentis</span> for young Burmese. I have some papers to go through with Mrs. Dean, and while I do that, you get ready for dinner. I will take you along in my car of course. But meanwhile, sit down for a moment and let's talk seriously.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">In a daze I sat beside him on the dining hall steps, up and down which I had jumped so many hundred times as a carefree college student.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Now,” said the Major, “Tell me truly why you resist so much being taken to a place of safety.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">So he had not believed my silly lie. But I had established to myself my determination to try at all costs to remain In Burma. Now I broke out with the truth.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“You can't imagine what a calamity this is for me. It would rend any Burmese heart to leave Burmese soil at a time of tribulation, but I am also deserting my mother and younger sisters. And worse, I have to go to India. Oh, how I dread being a dark-skinned subject of the British Raj. I know we are British subjects here too. But even in your short stay you must have seen that things are different. As long as we don't want to join those silly clubs like gymkhanas and things, we don't have to confront any hurtful personal situation. I have never met a single British trader to suffer discrimination. The only three English people I have known apart from my good English lecturers have been kind to us. One of them, Mrs. Donnison actually defers to my mother's age and experience. Up to now I have never met a British soldier either. I know you feel kindly towards me, but you are at present within the environment of Mr. Swithinbank and his like. The army officers I have encountered across these gates are quite different. It is their India which I don't want to go to, and in India you will have to return to that fold. I can't bear the thought of being poor, despised, abject and in a foreign country of that sort.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">He heard me out, then said,</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“You will never be despised or abject. I could make an out for you as you have not joined the military corps, but I don't want to leave you in the Rangoon that is now burning outside this estate. So you must go along. I will do what I can to ensure some extra consideration. I'll tell Mrs.. Dean to give you officer status on the ship, but later on, your own character will find you a suitable niche. And only when I have seen that ensured will I return to my fold as you put it, the military social environment where I belong. Come now. I'll finish my papers in fifteen minutes, and I'll pick you up at the porch.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">He got up, had a second thought and turned back again.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“I'm a professional soldier you know. I claim no ideals of covering other peoples to bring them benefits which we ourselves enjoy. My job is a clearer one.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">So I went to dinner and got engaged. Mr. Swithinbank even produced a good sapphire for me. As for the hastily summoned fiancé, a bewildered air hung over his usually handsome person.. Perhaps he did not believe what was happening. How often before we talked of marrying, only to have me retract each time my mother went to a close friend of mine, wept and asked her to make me desist from such a choice. This imperious looking stranger came from remote regions, unfamiliar social background of monarchic traditions, with polygamy and pearly creamy cheeked women adept at love potions against which her brown-skinned daughter would have no protection. Why could I not settle for one of other admirers who had normal good looks, pliant manners, senior official service with high regular salary, and the background of official life she knew so well. Well, now we got engaged. And my air of tragedy on what should have been a happy evening was forgiven as my fiancé came with understanding to say softly “Don't take it so hard. I'll find a way to join you somehow, and after we are married we will be happy. And one day your mother will accept me entirely.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The buses which we boarded at four-thirty the next morning tools us through the deserted and silent streets of the town. All the houses were shuttered. I had not been down town this far since the air-raid of 23rd December 1941 had brought home to us the soft vulnerability of human flesh to sharp metal impact. This had been the first air-raid of the war with such casualties. Earlier raids had been innocuous, and no preparations had been made for quick removal of victims from the streets. We saw every spilled horror of innards and this was when Mother decided on a quick move to Henzada. Now, though no corpses lay on the streets, they wore a desolate air which matched our spirits. We were all silent as the bus continued to the dock area. My own thoughts were on the land of India from which hundreds of thousands of its people had come each year to seek a better life in this green and golden land which now we must leave.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">At the littered and silent wharf we quickly boarded Ship and went as directed to our cabins. Kind influences had put Ma Than E and me together. She bustled in. Never would she repine for what was not to be got. She tried to cheer me up, then left briskly to roll-call where they would be assigned their jobs for the voyage. The news she brought back of the assignments was hardly to be believed except as a parody on colour and race discrimination.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Four categories of tasks were allotted, and each category had its prestige and status value equated with the skin colour of the women in ascending or descending order. Thus the first task was the care of wounded, some of whom we carried in a sick bay. They would be tended by the purely British women, a noble task of caring for the wounded. Waiting at table on the families of the armed forces was the next category of work. It was not so noble but neither was it menial nor taxing. This was assigned to the strata where in a family of several sisters one might by chance emerge with near blonde hair and a suggestion of grey or hazel eyes. The creamy complexioned straight Anglo-Burmese mixtures, girls like the Blackmores, Smiths, Mearys and such, were assigned the cleaning of the cabins. Fourthly, the cleaning of lavatories and bathrooms was given to the really dark-skinned de Souzas, Pereiras and Sequiras. Ma Than E, the Burmese oddity, had been placed in the second category.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I said it was a saving grace that the only Burmese had been rated with the highest of the mixed-blood orders. She told me of a more important saving grace as far as she was concerned. </span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“That nice young English wife, Natalie Lawson, refused to join, her kind. She said she feared that any patient she tended might die of her ministrations. She also said at least one tough Englishwoman would be needed to deal with those ghastly British brats at meal times. THINGS she called them. So I'll have her for company in my table-waiting.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Natalie proved her point at least once when one of the THINGS refused to eat his porridge throwing bits of it on the floor. She grabbed the boy's neck and held his face firmly down one inch above the steaming, porridge, threatening to push it right in till he begged to eat it.<br /></span></p><p class="P2"><span style="">Thus, except for me, the Wasbees worked their way across the Bay of Bengal. Who knew in which obscure corner the usual ship's crew were lying in the midst of liquor bottles they had brought, with no one to claim the crates on arrival. Every now and again, a sailor would stagger into my cabin, open a drawer below the bunk, and stumble out with a bottle of gin. Otherwise I was alone. My now valued friend Ma Than E had taken out a book of French lessons, telling me there was nothing better than learning a new language to forget one's woes. She herself needed practice. She said, “When I return in the afternoon I shall ask you. Que Fera … ce soir, madamoiselle?” She quickly taught me the pronunciation of various vowels and consonants, and left to myself, I quickly spotted an answer for her: “Rien.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“What are you doing this evening?” Nothing of course. It would be <span class="T3">“Rein” </span>to every question about my activities. I let the book fall and concentrated on thinking out the factors which had got me into this predicament. The seeds of my wilfulness I knew well enough. But I also had to think why my mother had not sent for me. Could it be that, as the major had suggested at dinner the evening before departure, she did not need me at all? Perhaps, thinking of it, she did not want me with her either. Perhaps, She was faring very well. My uncle was comfortably off, but he was ill-matched with his weak wife, being a man of rude health, hard drinking and successful bandit-catching abilities. He always needed more response to the monologues of his drinking hours than she could give him. Mother spoke little, but she was strong like him. She could manage his domestics better than his wife could and sit through the monologues with less fatigue to herself. My sisters were at their sweetest years, from the one of twelve up to the petite one of eighteen. They would serve him to his delight. Whereas I was supposed by now to be earning my own living, and my contrary behaviour of recent months would make my mother fear perhaps that I would spoil the easy atmosphere of this set-up. Perhaps while I thinking myself indispensable, worried for her, she, in her love worried for me, especially if she was faring all right with her brother as she might well be. I was glad the major had suggested sending word by my brother who still controlled trains in Rangoon, let her know I was being taken to safety. “If you meet any Japanese, don't fail to tell them your family is staunchly Buddhist, as they are Buddhists also.” had been one of mother's reminders to me on parting.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Mothers love offspring more than they can ever be loved in return. I thought in my twenty-six year wisdom, and to know I was safe would make her forgive me much in her gladness. I did not include any word of intending marriage in my message to her. So I comforted myself. Having a sanguine disposition and an accommodating conscience it is usually possible to put the conscience to rest for a spell while I engage myself in new plans to forget misery. But this time the new plans could only mean bleaker prospects. No clothes to wear!</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Even then, I thought of the allowances which had been promised and the blouses I could design for an Indian <span class="T1">dursey </span>to match my longyis passably till I could in time cut and sew my own Burmese jackets. But no. Worse news came at the end of the voyage. We were to go to Simla, over 8000 feet above sea- level. We would need warm coats, and coats were sent for to be brought to the Grand Hotel where we lodged for the night in Calcutta. As only to be expected, the English women took first turns at trying on the coats. I watched bitterly as I saw them trying on soft warm jackets in ivory, grey or beige tones, leaving the dwindling, pile to show more and more of magenta and puce garments of the stiff paper-like fabric, like billiard cloth, without being a nice bright green but these horrible puce tones most unflattering to a dark skin like mine. Ma Than E tried to cheer me up again.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“We can buy what we like later on, dearie. This country hasn't got a war on you know.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“With what money?”</span></p><p class="P2"><span style=""></span></p><p class="P2"><span style="">“We may find work.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Here? Where we don't count for anything as you can see by this distribution of clothes.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">How she laughed then. “O Misery Me! Don't give up, I tell you. Remember there is always the oldest profession in the world.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I must have looked shocked, for she laughed even more merrily. “You don't have to join. I'm sure I can find enough for two.” How could I be sad in such company? Peals of laughter followed on this last thought of hers. How could I help not laughing too?</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">In Simla where a train took us, we were lodged in a hotel called Longwood, which was given over completely to the Wasbees. There were long views, good walks and books to read. There, during my reading of one book that I remember well, an incident took place which set the tone for the friendship which would continue all our lives between Ma Than E and me. The book was about the first Mrs. Judson, wife of the founder of the American Baptist Mission which reaped such a rich crop of converts among the hill peoples of Burma. My later readings revealed Mrs. Ann Judson as a woman greatly sensitive to Burmese refinement, Burmese friends, Burmese dress which she wore from early days on, and Burmese language which she spoke on her final bed of pain. But the writer of <span class="T1">Ann of Ava</span> was a simple minded Christian who put his own thoughts into Mrs. Judson's mind. How dreadful, he said, that she should see the gaudy gold Shwe Dagon in place of the soft grey of her church, and hear the heathen pagoda bells instead of the tolling of the church bell. Pagoda bells shaken by a soft breeze tinkle in the sweetest way in our ears and I burst out indignantly about the barbarism of the writer. Ma Than E's her deceased mother, and her two brothers were helped greatly in their education by Baptist missionaries. Such a sophisticated glamorous personality as hers makes one forget these missionary associations in her life, but she herself has a core which will not deny her God or her benefactors. Without a break in her smile she walked over to me, took the book from me and carried it to the open window and dropped it way down. The houses of steep-sided Simla may have the front-door opening to the street level, and on the other side, looked several stories down to the back street. <span class="T1">Ann of Ava</span> dropped plumb down those stories to the lowest street level.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“That book would be an incessant topic of argument between us, so let it go.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">She would always cut off ruthlessly anything which annoyed her, so hardly ever got annoyed. I would worry, what about returning the book, what right had the writer to utter such assumptions etc. So I would be peevish while she laughed.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Her friendship with Natalie Lawson with shipboard waitress days continued and made me a friend of Natalie's too. When the news came as we expected, that the corps would be disbanded, leaving those who wished to rejoin to do so afresh while others went their way, Ma Than E said she would go to Delhi and offer to broadcast in Burmese for the Allied cause. The medium was still new in Burma and like all other fields of work it has its own language which irregular listeners were not all conversant with. I asked my friend fearfully,</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Can you manage all the terms?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“What if I can't?” She replied. “I may make some horrible bloopers. Everyone who hears me in Burma will say 'Poor girl, she has to tackle work she can't manage, just to avoid starvation. It is obvious that she has NOT joined the oldest profession in the world which would have been much easier for her to work at.” Lots of laughter came with this last thought.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“People, you know, do think the worst of someone who is happy though unmarried.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Natalie Lawson had quite a different plan which she broached to me.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“You know they are giving railway fares to those who are leaving the corps, to any destination they choose. Why don't we take full advantage of that and choose the farthest place we can to go to. I've always wanted to visit Kashmir, haven't you? Do go with me,”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I asked what we would live on in that legendary and remote place.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Here is my point,” said Natalie. “They say the army is withdrawing in good order and before long our men should be here. They are giving allowances to wives, to be deducted later from the husband's pay. With my Peter a captain, I can draw five hundred rupees a month. That will be enough for two to live on, on a houseboat in Srinagar. Do come, as I won't go with anyone else from here. After all, you are soon going to marry an officer too. Just bad luck it didn't happen before this.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Now it was an English woman offering to share all her scant allowance with me. What cause had I to brood?</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The train that sped us along towards India's Northwest frontier was taking us farther and farther away from Burma, but Natalie's words kept echoing in my ears,.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“After all you are soon going to marry an officer.” An officer. A wildly attractive officer. A properly educated officer with no Caucasian blood in him. A Buddhist officer. A Buddhist. A <span class="T1">Buddhist! </span>I was not going to do anything immoral or un-Buddhist. Surely my mother would bless me.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">The dreadful landscape we travelled through, a sandy waste, ravaged by Mohammedan goat culture, was as different as could be from Burma's green and pleasant land, different enough to satisfy my thirst for strange places.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">We reached the railhead at Pindi where one gets into a car, usually hired entirely by the affluent or white travellers. Natalie's bright russet hair caused a sensation all the way as we sat in a bus with poor passengers, As soon as we reached Srinagar we hired a houseboat, then made inquiries for the office of the Resident British Officer in this state of a Maharajah. Natalie had been told it was he who would disburse allowances to British wives.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“Would you believe it?” she said to me on returning from inquiries,</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“His name is Harrington-Hawes.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Mr. Harrington-Hawes lived up to his name (important) more than to his years (young, thirtyish). He took out the Blue Book to look for the name of Peter Lawson, “Can't find it,” he said, “What regiment did you say?” Poor Natalie started to falter as she explained. “Oh, an emergency commission,” he said witheringly,</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“We don't have any arrangements for those.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">But Natalie was obviously true blue British and could not he abandoned. He gave us a lecture on our recklessness in setting off on a venture like this with no assurance of its soundness.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“I'll have to give you something I suppose. You can't he left like this.” He hummed and hawed a bit more and then said he would give us four hundred rupees a month. “This should suffice till your husband arrives, but you'll have to live carefully. No fancy purchases.” He looked at Natalie's hair. “No visits to the hairdresser, mind you. I'll have my scouts around to inform me if you come too soon for more money.”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">We were happy enough. Every time we hurriedly bought some creamy pastries, or a papier-mâché powder bowl, Natalie would look sideways and murmur, “Quick ... Mr. Harrington-Hawes on the lookout.”</span></p><p class="P2"></p><p class="P2"><span style="">She talked much to me of her background, Though I had spent three years studying in England, her world was quite new to me. Her folk were theatre folk associated with vaudeville, and her liaison with Peter Lawson had continued for years before he decided to marry her. This was also a new world to me.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">We could not afford any except the cheapest of excursions, but going around the Dal Lake was enough to show me what a truly blessed land Burma was.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T2"><span style="">The Kashmiris wove beautiful articles of wool and silk and fashioned attractive wares of wood and</span><span class="T2"> p</span><span class="T2">apier-mâché which were all for offering to visitors, mainly Europeans and British whom they pestered to buy. They themselves wore only drab and mostly soiled voluminous garments. So different from Burmese who made wares for their own daily use and wrapped around their waists the fabrics they wove in colour, with little interest in selling to other peoples. I am glad to say our friendship lasted unimpaired despite the cramped space on a houseboat. When the telegrams arrived, first for me, and then for her, we were still enjoying each other's company. I had to ask for money for my rail fare to be despatched but lost no time otherwise in joining the lieutenant who had succeeded in getting out early.</span></span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">I now skip forward in the story in order to mention my last important contact with the British military about whom this chapter is written. This contact would be my goodbye, no more connection with it for the rest of my life. So let me say that after we were married we settled in a house near the broadcasting studios of All India Radio. The house was filled to its seams. U Khin Zaw whom we met earlier at the first dinner had come to bolster Ma Than E's pioneer broadcasting efforts. A Christian Sino-Burmese woman had also found her way to this house as many others would later do. There was also the Englishman Mr. Kinch who had long ago renounced his family of the Establishment order and lived among Burmese on Burmese-style income. Then there was Ma Than E. Though she lived on her own, she had recently sprained her ankle and had moved here to save a long cycle ride to work each day from her New Delhi room.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">One night, at an hour when young people sleep their deepest, the rattle and jingles of a tonga as the Delhi horse-carts are called, woke us. Then above the driver's shouts to his horse, an authoritative voice called, “Quo hai!” in the best Urdu as spoken by British officers of the army. I recognised the lift in the voice when something good was expected by its owner. Lt. Col. Alan MacConachie, no doubt, of the Fifth Gurkha Regiment, a product of the Staff College Quetta, young service as ADC to the governor of Baluchistan and later on D.S.O. I told Ma Than E of the arrival. She shook the sleep off her, dressed quickly and emerged, Chief Charmer at 3 am. “Tres gai.” she said as the visitor jumped from his front tonga seat, holding aloft a reading lamp which was his wedding present to us.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">“These trains from Simla arrive at ungodly hours,” he said. “Can I have a bed in this house?”</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Mac, as we all called him now, had two weeks' leave which he spent with us. He sat in the garden and read Lear aloud and in unison with young Rosemary Khin Zaw on holiday from boarding school. He ate meals of my inexperienced providing, cooked and served by only one nervous servant. After he saw I was doing all right, with a job of my own to boot, he left us to rejoin his kind. Only when we lunched later at the house of his colleague where he roomed till his wife could rejoin him did I realise how poor our household conditions were, compared to that. He had so happily accepted our life.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Now and again he made sallies into our world, and our friendship deepened to the point where during long, walks together, he promised to show me the highlands of Scotland if I ever revisited Britain. By the time I went there in 1951, however, he had emigrated to farm in Southern Rhodesia. Much later, his daughter whom I did meet in Scotland told me her father had given up farming and now read piles and piles of books, as many as he could find in Salisbury. That was the last link. It was so long ago that now there is no way of telling If Zimbabwe Rhodesia still holds him or not.</span></p><p class="P2"> </p><p class="P2"><span style="">Now I must annoy the reader by going back in time in the next chapter. I myself feel impatient when an author does this instead of getting on with the tale. But as I said, writers of autobiographies, take themselves seriously. They search their souls to clarify to themselves why they acted thus and so. Later, when quite different troubles fell on our family, we were to ask ourselves “Why did we remain here to get into this jam?” Going back in time partly answers that important question for me. Also, if I were to go forward, the reader might find it more entertaining to hear of encounters with interesting westerners in India, but he will get an incomplete picture of this writer who, though she failed to join nationalist struggles, has lived happily and fully and with no pretences in extremely nationalistic Burma, and would still choose to live here through every reversal of personal fortune, even though chances occurred again and again to go to rosier prospects elsewhere.</span></p>Khaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1268814056130960772.post-16435307003247060472009-02-08T18:53:00.000-08:002009-02-08T19:08:22.312-08:00The Gyat Aye Nursery Rhyme<span style="font-size:85%;">Mi Mi Khaing wrote </span><span style="font-size:85%;">about childhold and nursery rhymes of Burm</span><span style="font-size:85%;">a:</span><br /><br />... Or the jumping nonsensical rhyme about Gyat-Aye, who got beaten up by her mother and wept in a dark corner and started a train of kaleidoscopic events, for every time a line ended with a clanging rhythm it suggested a rhyming word to shout out and continue its own associations, and when you got back to a rhyme for Gyat-Aye, you had to start all over again, and poor Gyat-Aye got beaten and cried as long as children's voice held out.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Gyat-Aye</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Thu amay yaik lo</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hmaung maik hma ngo</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Ko Lu Byo</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hta-yan pauk ka</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Chay-dauk ko-swe</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Twe-le!!</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Twe-le ye</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Nay ba ohn</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mo tway ka chon</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mok Lon!!</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mok lon ye sekku kat pa lo</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Kya-ka-lat hnin hsun-daw tin</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Pa-lin paw ka myauk kalay,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hshin chi lo pyay</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Gyat-Aye!!</span><br /><br />Gyat-Aye<br />Beat by her mother so,<br />Cries in the dark corner "O,"<br />Young bachelor Ko<br />Through hole in the mantel<br />Pulls at her ankle,<br />Dangle!!<br />dangling yet wait awhile,<br />The rain clouds pile,<br />The heavens clang.<br />Meringue!!<br />Meringue with paper stuck below<br />Offer at altar in lacquer bowl,<br />From throne seat the monkey gay<br />Runs down and off with it away!<br />Gyat Aye!!Khaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1268814056130960772.post-27330906074088792222008-11-23T14:15:00.000-08:002008-11-23T14:22:25.708-08:00The Five-Day Bazaar<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Originally published in The Guardian Newspaper of Burma, 1970s</span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">THE FIVE-DAY BAZAAR as a system operates most conspicuously in the Shan State, though other regions reaching down to Central Burma have their own five-day meets. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The Shan bazaars, within a radius of 10 to 25 miles or so, are held on successive days in different centers to give most scope for commerce.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Some of these bazaars, in villages especially, are the true fifth day occasions. You drive past them on four out of the five days and see nothing but rows of open sheds, which stand or lean in the ranged and desolated silence of a big square. On the fifth day, long before you reach this village, you are impeded by people, livestock, carts, and buses which have set out since the pre-dawn hours. You arrive, and what was yesterday's sorry emptiness is now a great concourse, lively with the hum and bustle of a fair. In a town like Taunggyi at the other extreme, there is an adequate bazaar every day. If you see it on the four intervening days you can hardly believe that the five-day system still operates. Then comes the fifth day. The market swells; produce, people, carts and buses, color, flavor, noise and congestion all multiplied make it unmistakably the Bazaar Day.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Though Taunggyi is the largest Shan State town, its bazaar is <i>nouveau riche</i>, its origin comparatively recent, its associations the least romantic in a system reaching back to the most evocative traditions. Taunggyi was set up only at the turn of the century by the British who wanted a cold-climate administrative capital The principal bazaar towns in the Shan State centuries preceding, however were the “state capitals”. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> These states, ranging from huge (Kengtung 12,400 square miles) to minuscule (Kyone 24 square miles) are of course no longer distance entities. Their capitals, usually sited in the upland valleys with most rice potential to ensure control, held bazaars on the same day. Subsidiary centers, situated at road junctions or in other valleys with good crops and pastures, held bazaars on the successive days between. All these centers continue to function, with new bazaars added in modern times.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Now, for example, the day following Taunggyi Bazaar Day sees the Bazaar Day at Taungni, 19 miles to the north. It is a small village but lies in a wide plain with a variety of crops and enough pastures. Next day you will find the Bazaar at Shwenyaung, 11 miles down the hill. This is, like Taunggyi, a modern town, born of the railhead there. Next come Bazaars at Hopong, 11 miles to east, and at Yawnghwe 18 miles to south. These were both “sate capitals”, and their Bazaar Days coincide. The day following, there is Bazaar at Heho, westwards across another range, in a productive plain and at road crossing. The fifth day it is Taunggyi's turn again. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The fascinating feature of the system is that each old center has kept to the same bazaar day throughout centuries probably. If a full moon or sabbath, or as in current usage, a public holiday, falls on Bazaar Day and makes inoperative, the bazaar is held a day earlier. However, six days are then counted to the next meet. So an immediate correction is made and the original five-day count is unfailingly restored. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The origins of the system are not recorded anywhere. But is is natural to assume it came from regions bordering China. For one thing, Marco Polo mentioned meeting such a Bazaar, with villagers coming down all the hillsides to it, possibly near the Bhamo area about 700 years ago.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The sense behind the system is easy to see. Anyone can count on his fingers and reckon when Bazaar Day should come again. Also, the time interval is just right. Our hill regions have diversified agriculture, small holdings, and people of an independent spirit which cannot be dragged or enticed to work for another man. The yield from their small gardens is right for gathering once every five days. Generally it is of the right quantity to carry on one's back to market. The supplies bought with its proceeds will last well for about five days. Best of all, the gala day of rest from fieldwork and of outing for profit and pleasure comes once every five days --- that much oftener than the larger world's week. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Offices and authority keep to that week, but all in our regions who are free, like cultivators, carpenters, cheroot rollers, construction women and other piece or daily wagers, or housewives --- all these are thoroughly Bazaar Day oriented. Their days are easily counted by the accepted names 1-day-past-bazaar; 2-days-past-bazaar; 3-days-past-bazaar; bazaar-eve; and Bazaar-Day. Bazaar-eve is the day you pay off daily wages They will resume only one 1-day-past bazaar. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> As for housewives, it is nothing that they can each day buy their food requirements with calm and convenience. They have a compulsion to get in the crush of people each Bazaar Day, fearing to miss something fresh or rare. Sow they will not fix meetings, doctors' visits or luncheon hospitality on that day. They leave themselves free to inch their way to slightly cheaper purchases, or when forcibly wedged to a halt, exchange news with friends they never see except in such immobility. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The types of people who make up this crowd and who give a shape and system to these bazaars differ greatly. Perhaps the most attractive people among the different elements in a five-day bazaar are the villagers who come into town and who use the same bazaar throughout their lives. They use it with a forthright completeness, and a self-sufficiency which expresses their life-style.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> They are of different ethnic groups according to region. Around Taunggyi, for example, most of them are Pa-Os, distinguishable at once by their dress, which they do not forsake as long as black cloth is available.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> From villages as far distant as a dozen miles they come with produce. A detailed account would reveal how they always find something to bring, right through the year, much or little, from gardens, fields, hedgerows and woods. They walk, come by cart, or in jeeps which high school drop-outs operate cheaply by cramming people inside, tying baskets outside and running back and forth at top speed. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> These villagers reckon to spend up to seven hours on the bazaar day visit. If they have a lot of produce they dispose the bulk of it wholesale on arrival. The rest they retail as they sit on a bit of ground for a few hours.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> They sit silent and stolid. This is their usual demeanor. There is no hope of bargaining with such a closed and simple front. Take it or leave it --- and you usually take it because the produce is fresh, and you enjoy buying direct from the grower. The scale they use is in itself a mark of their aloofness. Not two balancing pans, but a stick with one end bigger than the other. On the thin light end are three or four hooks at intervals to denote quarters, half and one <i>viss</i>. The pan of stuff is hooked on to the required hook and the stick held up by a central handle. Other scales may be checked for short weight, but not these. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Past noon they pack up. They walk around, eat a full meal, buy needs such as rice, salt fish, kerosene, knives and bags. If a festival is in the offing they buy black cloth and have it made up by tailors perched on some of the booths. To this they add a bright and expensive towel for a turban. Before 3 pm. they have finished and are off home with a basket filed again. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> The antithesis of these worthy folk are another most attractive group. They are professional bazaar women who follow the circuit, going on successive days to a different bazaar within a radius of about 25 miles. They are usually Burmese plains-women. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> About 20 years ago, in driving all over the Shan State to the furthest borders, we never failed, even in remote bazaars, to find an Indian merchant, whether turbaned Sikh or smooth Marwari, moving by bus speaking fluent Shan.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> It is wonderful to think that someday Burmese women may be as ubiquitous. They do not yet go so far, as theirs is not a relentless pursuit of money. They follow their traditional enjoyment in buying and selling, and have so far discovered only the bazaars in the periphery of the Shan plateau proper. To these places they have brought the fun, verve and nimble wits that spring up naturally in them.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Ma Khin Su, my relative who came with me to the Shan State 25 years ago, is now 60, but she is still on the circuit. To stop would make her feel old and ill. She gets fish and shrimp products from her native Thaton, the best quality. A helper nephew, or she herself when in need of a jaunt, rides 30 hours by train each way to bring it up. Then to each bazaar in turn for four days. On the fifth day she stays home, picks over produce, sorts it, regrades it, packs consignments and meets the train for fresh lots.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> At each bazaar, in the intervals of selling, she goes round and buys what is cheapest there for sending to Thaton to pay for new stuff. Split peas and sunflower seeds at Taungni, asters, gerberas and tomatoes at Shwenyaung, potatoes, cabbages, chrysanthemums and coffee at Heho.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Her joy in this life is typical of Burmese women, but most are tied to home and husbands. You see some of these waiting at bazaar gates each Bazaar Day for the villagers. They swoop on the produce, having borrowed money which they must return at day's end with interest,. With armfuls of stuff they rush to the the best places in the aisles, to sit all that day and the next if needed. They are quite different from the Pa-O sellers. They laugh, chat, give you sales talk, let you bargain, got to latrines, wander round to eat and to visit while a neighbor looks after sales awhile. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Above these ground sellers are the stall-holders. In village meets they may be circuit followers with a paid-for section of the sheds. In town, they are there daily with dried foods. Burmese, Indians, Shans and Chinese, men and women. The muted colors of former times which gave such stalls a quiet glow with dark brown of tamarind, ocher of turmeric, pink skins of onion, red of dried chilly, the glisten of vermicelli and salt, the old of oil and the rich gray of shrimp pastes are now interspersed with flashy markings of ajinomoto packets, milk tins and carbolic soap wrappers.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> There are food shops of course, but the specialties of these Shan bazaars are distinctive. Meats and fish pickled with rice and providing a meal packet. Kneaded fish rice. Bean curds in many forms. Mustard pickles, soybean cakes, and rice noodles at their best.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> There are hawkers of everything. And buyers who create more movement than in normal bazaars because only the hordes of town wives are the normal buyers. The rest are buyers who are also sellers. Besides all the likable groups mentioned above there are the big brokers who come to snatch up sunflower seeds, corn, wheat, peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages. They are usually on the rim of the market, dealing with more affluent villagers who arrive by carts and buses. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Most village bazaar centers have mills near the market square. Some, like Taungni and Hopong, have great open spaces adjacent. Carts draw up here. The farmer dumps his paddy to be milled while he makes his round. Others bring cattle for sale. It is draft cattle; because beef animals are never happily sold as this is a hole-and-corner affair. With cart oxen everyone can gather round to inspect and advise. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> These cart and cart men give a crowning touch to bazaar day. It is then a really a country fair with oxen munching under the great flame of the forest trees and the whole ground filled up. Yet by 4 pm, nothing of this remains. The carts have gone. The bazaar people have left, buses carrying those who do not walk. Nothing remains but the sheds once again, though there is debris, and dogs who leave after they have scavenged this debris. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Except for one lone figure which still moves in the fading light. The richest woman in the village, a Chinese, goes round picking up the manure from the carts' camping. It will be dried, pulverized and sold later for a sum not despised by her entrepreneur husband. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p>Khaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1268814056130960772.post-29788605965638675132008-11-19T18:57:00.000-08:002008-11-23T08:09:08.681-08:00A Sawbwa Dies<span style="font-size:85%;">Orignally published in The Antioch Review, Fall 1962</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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. ...<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "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."<br /><br /> 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?"<br /><br /> "No, no, the ambulance is waiting, and he will go to the Haw."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> We pause to head off cars which bring more inquiring relations, and then follow the half-mile to the Haw.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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!"<br /><br /> "Surely not, he is there in the ambulance still. No one has said a thing."<br /><br /> 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!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> "Have you gone, Your Worship? Have you left us? Where are we now? Whom do we turn to?"<br /><br /> 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...<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "0nly one week's mourning? And for a Sawbwa!" This was unheard of.<br /><br /> "But why such a rush? Our father lay for twenty months, and he saw more than one year out."<br /><br /> "But there was a reason."<br /><br /> "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."<br /><br /> "If I may respectfully submit an opinion, sir, this brought no good to Kengtung State."<br /><br /> "Yes, it is true. My brother was assassinated before recognition came, and both had to be buried together."<br /><br /> So it was decided.<br /><br /> "And then, please, sir, the Haw in Lawksawk is too small to receive the funeral crowds."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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?<br /><br /> 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 <i>sidaw</i> 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.<br /><br /> But suddenly this music changed. A full jubilance of all the instruments tinkled, clapped, shouted, sang, and resounded as we went in.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "Will I not be intruding?"<br /><br /> "Heavens no! There is no such idea with us. The more people go, the better the bereaved ones like it."<br /><br /> Foolish Westerner's sensitivities persisted... "It seems not decent to go out of curiosity or just for a trip."<br /><br />"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?"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> Old voices behind us said, "Please, those who have stood long enough, give other eyes a chance also."<br /><br /> But there was nothing to see.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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?"<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "Isn't it beautiful, Sai?"<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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."Khaihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17969456445057178785noreply@blogger.com0