Return to Mandalay (24 page)

‘And you?’ Eva asked him. ‘How are things at the factory?’ He seemed very polite this morning and so she decided to reciprocate. He was wearing a black-and-yellow checked
longyi
and a white short-sleeved shirt which looked crisp and cool, considering the heat outside.

He nodded. ‘Everything is good,’ the hint of a smile touching the corners of his mouth. But not, she noticed, his eyes.

They passed a small wooden monastery and he stopped the car so that she could take a photo.

Eva decided to take advantage of his good mood. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, when she’d climbed back in.

‘Oh?’ He raised a dark eyebrow, glanced in the mirror and drove on.

‘About the chinthe.’ She risked a look across at him.

He was focusing on the road ahead, which was narrow and steep with sharp bends. But now he was frowning.

‘Do you really have a plan to get it back?’

Ramon let out a deep sigh. ‘You are still thinking about that?’ he asked. He didn’t wait for her reply and he didn’t look at her. ‘I must tell you, Eva, to forget about it. You have done enough for our family in returning the other.’ He braked sharply as a car came from the opposite direction. ‘You can do no more.’

‘But I could help,’ she said. ‘They don’t know me. I’m not involved. I could at least—’

‘No.’ The car had passed and he drove on.

She blinked across at him. She’d had some thinking time since they’d last met. Couldn’t she use what she was doing here for the Emporium as a cover? If she pretended she wanted to
buy
the chinthe … Wouldn’t they be interested? They sounded very greedy. She suspected they would, if the price were right. And if she could draw them into the open, wouldn’t they at least have a chance of getting the chinthe back?

‘I know what you are thinking. But you must not become further involved.’ And, once again, she was surprised by what sounded almost like tenderness in his voice. Taking his eyes off the road for just for a second, he pressed his palm on to hers in a swift and unexpected gesture. His hand felt so warm. ‘You must leave it to me. You must trust me, Eva.’

Eva watched as he moved his hand back to the steering wheel. She would like to trust him, but he hadn’t tried to get the stolen chinthe back before. Why would he do anything now?

‘What will you do then?’ she asked again. ‘What are you planning? Can’t you at least tell me that?’

He shook his head as the car continued to crawl uphill. ‘It is dangerous.’

Which was all very well. ‘But my grandfather—’

‘They are dangerous.’ His voice hardened. ‘Do you hear me, Eva?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘We have our own ways of doing things here in Burma. I told you. You must not pursue this matter.’ The road was getting even narrower and he bent forwards over the wheel. ‘Please leave it alone, Eva.’

Eva sat back in her seat. But it meant so much to her grandfather to reunite the chinthes. She couldn’t let him down. She couldn’t just let it go, at least, not without a fight.

‘Many Burmese people come here to Sagaing.’ Ramon spoke in a clear voice, obviously determined that the subject be dropped. ‘They spend weeks, months or even years in quiet contemplation.’ He didn’t look at her. ‘Daw Moe Mya’s grandmother, Suu Kyi, came here too at the end of her life.’ He swung the car around a tight corner. On either side of them were traditional Burmese houses, simple but smart, tucked away behind bamboo fences and palm trees.

Despite herself, Eva’s interest was piqued. ‘How long did she live here for?’

‘For the five years before her death. She ended her life here in Sagaing.’ The car continued to crawl uphill. And they passed a golden pagoda, blinking in the sunlight from behind a thicket of trees.

‘What was she looking for?’ Eva tried to imagine.

‘Enlightenment,’ he said. ‘She had been through much suffering. We call it
samsara, karma
is the force that drives it, the cycle of birth and death and the suffering therein.’ He shrugged as if to lessen the intensity of his words. ‘Many
people come here to meditate and to live the right way, the non-harmful way, to find wisdom.’

Eva nodded. She could see that after the turbulent life Suu Kyi had lived, she would have wanted to end her days in peace and tranquillity. And she realised why Ramon had wanted to show her this part of Myanmar.

At last they came to the top of the hill and Ramon stopped by a golden temple.

‘This is the highest pagoda,’ he said. ‘Shall we go in?’ He shot her a broad smile.

The man’s moods could change in an instant. But nevertheless, Eva got out of the car, put on her wide-brimmed hat, slipped off her leather sandals and followed him up the smooth dusty steps to the pagoda. And when she saw the view in front of her, her own frustrations instantly evaporated. The hill was cloaked with green and gold. She could almost feel a sense of quiet spirituality settling over her. This was it, she realised. This was what Myanmar and its people was all about. And it was something that she also longed for, for herself. That sense of peace.

‘Where did she live?’ she asked Ramon. He was gazing down the hill, past the bright pagodas and lush valleys, towards the wide silver curve of the Irrawaddy River and its two bridges, and he seemed lost in thought, as affected by the landscape as Eva, though he must have seen it many times before.

‘You see the temple which looks like a giant cup?’ He pointed, moving closer so that they shared the same sight
line. ‘Now go to the left.’ He bent his head next to hers. She could smell the scent of him, oil and wood with the faintest hint of cardamom, and feel the heat of his dark-olive skin.

‘Yes.’ She followed his gaze.

‘There is a tiny red-roofed building.’

‘Like a Chinese pagoda?’

‘A bit.’ He smiled. ‘That is the monastery where she lived her few final years. We can drive down and see it from the outside if you wish. But we cannot go in.’

She nodded. ‘I’d like to.’ It was her history too, she thought. Her grandfather was inextricably linked with Ramon’s grandmother. They had moved apart for almost their whole lives, but it seemed that what they’d shared was somehow greater than that.

Beside the steps to the temple, a woman was selling
thanaka
, the traditional Burmese make-up. Eva paused and watched her pounding the bark it was made from.

‘You try?’ the woman asked.

Eva stepped forwards and the woman smeared some of the light brown muddy substance on to her cheeks. It felt cold and grainy. Unlike Western make-up, it wasn’t rubbed in, it was more like a tribal marking. ‘It will protect you,’ the woman said.

Ramon smiled when she got back into the car. ‘Very nice,’ he said. He touched her cheek. ‘It will make your skin soft.’ For a moment their eyes met.

They drove down to the monastery and stood outside, absorbing the atmosphere of the place. Despite the exterior
glitz, it was a simple building. In the yard, a line of saffron robes were drying on a rope strung between two coconut palms, and a mangy dog was sleeping in the shade. Someone was cooking a huge vat of food over an open fire and one of the young novices was sweeping the floor with an old-fashioned broom. Eva could see the long tables in the refectory where the shaven-headed young monks would go with their black rice bowls for their lunch.

‘They fast after midday,’ Ramon told her as if he’d followed her thoughts. ‘That is when they study English language and Buddhist Scriptures.’

Eva remembered what Klaus had told her about the monks. ‘Were you a novice?’ she asked him. She couldn’t imagine it somehow.

‘Of course.’ He nodded. ‘For a short time. In our culture it is thought an important part of development to make your
shin pyu
.’

‘Your …?’

He smiled. ‘
Shin pyu
. It is the highest way to pay respect. To your mother, to Lord Buddha. That is what Buddhists believe.’

With some difficulty, Eva visualised Ramon with a shaved head and a saffron robe. But he wasn’t the type, she suspected, to be content just being a scholar. He was a worker, a master-craftsman. And she guessed that he was a good businessman too.

‘We have one of the highest rates of blindness here in Myanmar,’ Ramon told her. ‘Hundreds of thousands wait
for cataract operations. There are charities. European eye surgeons come here to this monastery to operate and help us.’

‘That’s great.’ They needed that sort of help, she realised. It would be a long time before the country would catch up on medical advances, before their people could expect their health to be looked after as a matter of course.

As Eva took a last look around the monastery buildings, she wondered about the woman who had lived here, the woman who had first received the special gift of the two chinthes from Queen Supayalat, the last queen of Burma. Suu Kyi, Ramon’s great, great grandmother. She had wanted enlightenment. Would she also want Eva to try and get the chinthe back?

*

From Sagaing, they took a small ferry over the river to Inwa, where the roads were red dirt tracks and the people got around by horse and cart or bicycle. ‘This was once the capital of Myanmar,’ Ramon told her, ‘from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. For me, the place most represents the past and what we, the Burmese people, have come from.’

Eva sat in the back of the brightly painted cart, buffeted by cushions, as they rocked and rolled along the rutted track. And once again she thought she knew why they were here. It was indeed like going back in time. The fields unfolding beside her were still ploughed by bullocks pulling a wooden plough, the crops still picked by women wearing broad bamboo hats. And as they passed, the one and only tarmacked road was being re-laid by an old-fashioned steamroller and a
posse of women, some of them looking far too old for this kind of work, Eva thought, watching them load gravelly rock into wide baskets which they carried on their heads before throwing it on to the wet sticky tar.

‘Inwa is often completely flooded by the river,’ Ramon told her, and she could see that much of the area was one big lake covered in floating white water lilies and backed by distant romantic pagodas, whose reflected shapes fluttered on the surface of the water like a landscape from a fairy tale.

Eva tried to take it all in. It seemed to sum up the feeling of being in the tropics. Paddy fields and banana plantations; bullocks on the road, tied to a tree; ruined temples and ancient wooden monasteries. The palm fronds and banana leaves were so green, the landscape so simple and uncluttered. On the far side of the lake, she saw a small group of women washing. They had unwound their
longyis
, pulled them above the collar bone, refastened them and were washing underneath, in perfect modesty.

This was what Burma must have been like when her grandfather lived here, Eva thought. Apart from the invasion of British clubs and accompanying paraphernalia, of course. Here, she was aware of what he must have loved about the land. The gentle wooded hills, the red earth and the paddy fields of rice. The golden temples, the warm air, that sense of peace.

The horse and cart stopped at an old teak monastery and Ramon jumped off the cart and held out his hand to help Eva down from the back.

‘Look!’ A little girl materialised at the bottom of the steps. She held up a necklace for Eva to admire. Like Klaus in Yangon, Ramon had told her she should ignore the souvenir sellers, but it was hard when she knew they had so little.

‘It’s very nice,’ Eva told her. ‘But my suitcase is full.’ Which wasn’t far from the truth.

‘Very cheap.’ The girl grinned.

Eva’s heart melted. These children were so sweet but they shouldn’t have to become street sellers at such a young age. ‘How cheap?’ She smiled back at her.

‘Three million dollars?’ The girl laughed. ‘You are very beautiful and he is very handsome.’ She pointed at Ramon, who shrugged and walked on. ‘Three million dollars from the pretty lady for the necklace? It is made of watermelon seeds.’

Eva laughed too. ‘That’s too much for me,’ she said. And she offered a thousand kyat, a little less than a British pound. Immediately she was besieged by children selling crayoned fans, beaded purses and jade bracelets and it took her several minutes to escape and wave them all away. Ordinary Burmese people, she thought. Would the political reforms in the country help them? Or would they become greedy as they tried to extract money from rich Westerners? She hoped that in Myanmar, things wouldn’t move too fast.

Inside the cool dim interior of the monastery, the ancient teak carving almost took Eva’s breath away.

‘I thought you would appreciate this place,’ murmured Ramon.

And she did. Every doorway, every piece of panelling was exquisite and everything from floor to ceiling was made of wood, so that its sweet and musty scent filled her nostrils, pervading all her senses. She could almost taste the wood on her tongue. A ray of sunlight poured through the open door like a laser, lighting up dancing dust motes and the shaven heads of the boy novices who were sitting in the corner, learning from one of their elders. But this only seemed to enhance the feeling of calm.

The interior was high and cavernous and on a raised platform sat a gilded Buddha. Eva was about to step up for a closer look, but Ramon touched her arm and pointed to a sign. Ladies apparently were not permitted on the platform. Eva shook her head at Ramon’s meaningful look. Myanmar, she thought, had a long way to go. At the Mahamuni temple in Mandalay, only men were allowed to add gold leaf to the Buddha, Ramon had told her earlier today, with some relish, it had to be said. The knobbly Buddha not only looked impressive but his covering of gold was now apparently over six inches thick.

‘And is that a rule decreed by Buddha?’ Eva had asked sharply. Because if so, she hadn’t heard of it. ‘Or by man?’

‘Who knows?’

Eva guessed that Ramon wasn’t used to women questioning a tradition that had been in operation for centuries. Or perhaps he simply dismissed Eva as feisty, as if she were some circus pony, she thought grimly. But she had been
brought up to question things. It was the only way that any of society’s wrongs could ever be changed.