Under the Dragon (16 page)

In the third issue she decided to have Ko Lin’s photographs printed, big and bold on the front page. Robert Frank, the American photographer, wrote her a review on them. It was very satisfying to see them in print, though maybe a little indulgent. She also published a number of cartoons, and remembered her husband’s tendency to laugh at his own jokes. Sometimes, of course, her imagination failed her. In the fourth edition, which was eight pages long, there were too many articles on prison routine.

One day, Ma Swe told herself, I will share the magazine with Ko Lin. I will read him every issue, every article. It will be ours to keep, together, for ever. Throughout her incarceration, in the face of brutal repression, the magazine kept her sane. It also helped her to find her voice. Over the year of her imprisonment she produced eleven issues, missing only one month after a difficult period of ‘re-education’. Her body might have been worn down but her mind had remained intact. One hot Thursday morning, half an hour before the magazine was due to go to press, she was released without explanation into the sunlight.

The sky was high and the sun so bright. Ma Swe stumbled out of Insein dazzled by the light, blinking, stretching, laughing because of her trust in the words now woven inside her. There was nothing to keep her in Rangoon. She would return home. Her only possession was the little radio, which a neighbour had kept safe for her. Ma Swe retrieved it and tied it to her inner thigh, hoping that the soldiers at the checkpoints would not be brazen in their searches. She was lucky. The Pagan line-bus was stopped only once, by a yawning new recruit near Prome. He was willing to let the vehicle pass for the price of a pack of cigarettes, and afterwards the passengers travelled in silence, unmolested through the rest of the night.

It was dawn when the driver dropped her near the Ananda Temple. Ma Swe followed the route by memory. She turned off the main road, hurrying along the familiar footpath into her lane, skirting the caves where she had once played. She hoped to be in time for breakfast, to hear the family’s news, but the lack of sound caught her attention. She stopped and listened. No cockerels crowed, no children laughed, no farmers called from the fields. She did not hear the monks as they went on their morning round with alms bowls and blessings. The unexpected silence disoriented her, jolting her back to Insein. She panicked, taking her bearings from the temples. She recognised the range of hills, placed herself, and then in the half-light saw the outline of the rhyming tree. It was wilted and downcast, dying as if from a lack of love. Ma Swe stepped beneath it. A scorpion scuttled in the dust. The garden fence which had once surrounded the tree was gone. She could not see her bamboo gate. There was no family home, no village hall, no neighbours’ houses. She stood at the edge of a dark, barren field, once the site of old Pagan village, alone.

Suffering is an unavoidable aspect of existence, the Buddha teaches, and life is
dukkha
, or unsatisfactoriness. The world is characterised by
anicca
, that is impermanence, and
anatta
, which translates as insubstantiality. Buddhism helped its people to cope with their disappointment. It was no wonder that the government promoted public adherence to its principles. A religion based on the acceptance of the status quo posed no real threat to its power. Happiness, Ma Swe reminded herself as she turned away from the tree, is a temporary state.

She crossed the bare field and retreated into the corridors of the Ananda. She stole into its lightless recesses, hid herself in her secluded corner and listened. In the darkness a bat fluttered back to its perch. Outside day broke with the buzz of cicadas. The dull ring of a brass gong echoed from the small temple monastery. She heard the flat slap of feet on the inner stone floor and a worshipper’s whispered devotions. ‘I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in his teachings.’ A single broom swept away the night’s dust from steps and stairs. Somewhere a child cried. An hour passed in silence, then another, and Ma Swe made no sound. The squeak of a pony-cart’s wheels reached her ears and she heard the cool swish of new silk. Coins dropped into a donation box and camera shutters snapped. A foreign voice guffawed, its haw-haw too harsh for the temple’s soft peace, and heavy footsteps idled away. At midday the sounds became hushed again, the intense heat of the sun drawing the coolness out of the dark alcoves, like breath from a body, like life from the soul. Ma Swe tucked herself deeper into the dark embrace and felt the building exhale around her. Its old walls sighed, its tongue of bricks clicked and a wordless draft whispered through the cool interior and past her ears. She listened to a heartbeat, whether hers or the temple’s own she could not tell, and felt a numb comfort encircle her. Her hearing stretched to the edges of the Ananda, as if encompassing the whole building within her, her ears hearing everything, missing nothing. She listened to the rustle of unfolding prayer mats, felt the scratchings of beetles, sensed evening crickets chirp around her walls. She dozed and strained and half-heard again soft whispers and the rustle of clothing. Through the long night she listened for lovers’ sighs. She overheard eternal promises murmured in a moment’s passion. Day came and passed and came upon her again, no inkling of light penetrating her retreat, the passage of time measured only by changes in sound. Temple bells chimed easily in the breeze at dusk. Tired labourers dragged themselves to work in another dawn’s dusty shuffle. Stray dogs panted in the muffled exhaustion of mid-afternoon. At night she remembered the two statues of courtly dancers and the frozen grace of the dance which Ko Lin had loved. She listened for the sound of their finger cymbals, heard the banging of the drum and in her mind felt them spin around and around the rhyming tree, repeating her mother’s poems, swaying to the music of words.

An old monk found Ma Swe a week later. In exhaustion she had slumped over, switching on the radio which had remained lashed to her thigh. Its batteries had retained a last spark of charge. Distant voices and cheerful jingles had blared through the ancient corridors. The monk had followed the scream of static down the maze of darkened passageways, through the child-size openings into her tiny alcove. When the man had spoken she had called out in her delirium, then wept in the blackness.

The monastery took her in, giving her a quiet haven, allowing her to live by herself but not alone, sheltering her within the bamboo walls with a dozen other women who had been widowed or orphaned by the elimination of the village. In return for sanctuary the women cared for the last, chaste monks, sweeping, cleaning and preparing their meals. Ma Swe spent her hours in the company of the elder who had found her. His eyes were bad but he liked to keep up with events, as much as precepts and censorship allowed, so every day she read aloud for him articles from the
Working People’s Daily
and stories from the copies of
Asiaweek
left by passing tourists. She once found a back-issue of the
Economist
and so learned of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house-arrest, of her party contesting and winning the election, of the SLORC’s annulment of the results. Sometimes, when the monk’s concentration drifted away, Ma Swe was tempted to recite from memory a passage or poem from her magazine. But she never did. There was no one with whom the eleven imaginary issues would ever be shared. The past was past and she tried to look forward, giving what she could as deeds of merit. She learned to be content with her lot, and rarely left the environs of the Ananda, except when she tuned her radio.

On the wavelengths she travelled the world. At night alone in the dark she listened to the news from Moscow and heard poetry readings from Bangladesh. Over the airwaves came the music of Zakir Hussain’s table and Cape Breton Island fiddles. She turned the dial around and around, reaching out beyond the borders, drawing the precious strands of dialogue towards her. The Soviet Union collapsed, Nelson Mandela was released and Winnie Mandela appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Seasons and events slipped away without touching timeless Pagan. Nothing changed until one evening when, as she dozed, she heard his voice.

Over the intervening years Ma Swe had imagined Ko Lin in the muffled half-sleep of dreams. He had often drifted into her thoughts, laughing at his own jokes, repeating his disdain for the complicity of silence, asking her again to marry him. But now his words were fresh and new and their clarity shook her awake. It was not a fantasy, rather it was as if his ghost had come back to life, as if he had laid his head down on the pillow beside her. He was talking to her from another world. He was reading her the news. Ma Swe sat up holding the radio, gripping her husband in her hands. The movement knocked it out of tune. A growl of interference, hiss and whistle, quickly, 11850 kHz 25-metre band. She retuned her receiver. Again she heard him, finishing the bulletin, then conducting a short discussion on recent political arrests and finally, when the news was done, starting to tell a story. ‘Long ago there lived a prince named Bhanlatiya who was fond of hunting,’ he said over the airwaves. ‘One day while wandering far from home he came upon two
kinnayas
, weeping by a shallow stream.’ Ma Swe heard her words, carried in her husband’s heart to safety beyond Burma, read back to her from another world. ‘A great storm blew up out of nowhere and the river swelled into rapids and the
kinnayas
were cast onto opposite banks, unable to reach each other across the angry water, hardly able even to see through the rain.’ The temple bells of Ananda chimed above the monastery walls and Ma Swe no longer felt afraid. She wanted to speak out, to tell Ko Lin about herself, to recite to him every issue and article and story in their wished-for magazine. But he could not hear her. He was with her, yet he would for ever be too far away, out of hearing. ‘We spent one night apart,’ said the wanderer across the ether, ‘and we have been crying every day remembering our loss for over seven hundred years.’ He finished her story and wished his wife – and the rest of their poor, golden country – goodnight from London.

MA SWE SERVED US EACH a bottle of Pepsi, though she would drink only weak Chinese tea herself, and sat talking in a beam of dusty sunlight which filtered through the open shutters of the cool teak monastery. The shortwave radio lay on the smooth floor at her side. There was no one else to overhear her recollections, apart from the old monk who leaned against a wooden pillar eating rice and beans. The stray cat circling his low table probably had better hearing.

‘My house was very old,’ Ma Swe remembered, her features serious, her inflection light. A Citizen ‘Electronic Big Ben’ quartz clock chimed the quarter hour. The year in prison had marked her, yet her voice remained polished and thoughtful. ‘It was Grandmother’s Grandfather’s house.’

‘Your family had lived there so long?’ asked Katrin. We were still dismayed that a whole village and its people could vanish.

Ma Swe dipped her head in a nod. ‘When I returned to Pagan the house – and my mother – were gone.’

Immediately after the 1988 uprising the government had begun to promote tourism, in part to resurrect its tarnished image abroad, but primarily to earn itself hard currency. The generals and their allies had confiscated hotels, requisitioned bus franchises and built airlines with the profits from opium sales. Rangoon, Mandalay and Pagan were chosen as the three destinations to be opened to tourists. To make way for the visitors the 5,200 residents of Pagan were evicted from their homes around the ancient temples. The number was small when compared to expulsions elsewhere in the country: a million civilians were relocated within the capital, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. But the method employed was similar. The army simply announced through loudspeakers that the village was to be resettled. The residents, many of whom had lived in the same house for generations, were told to pack their belongings. Compensation of only 250 kyat – about $2 – was to be paid per property. No money was given for the buildings themselves. The owners of the Mother Hotel received nothing. Two weeks later the lorries and bulldozers arrived. The people were taken away and two hundred homes destroyed. The old village was replaced by a tourist enclave of modern hotels catering for dollar-bearing foreigners. The dispossessed residents were given plots of barren land three miles away in ‘New Pagan’.

‘There were no trees in New Pagan,’ said Ma Swe. ‘It was very hot and, when rains came, very wet. Some people, their land wash away. Three four five old people die every day. My mother given land but she sick and with no family cannot work. She die the first monsoon.’ There was dignity, even grace in her controlled, direct speech. ‘The old monk save me and I meditate every night – to Buddha, to the monk – and if I forget I cannot sleep. I am happy here but now I must leave.’

‘To live on your mother’s land?’ I asked.

Ma Swe nodded. ‘I have no choice. It is forbidden for women to stay on in the monastery.’

‘But why?’

‘Because tourists come, and we are not photogenic for them.’

In the seven years since the resettlement, New Pagan had found an identity of sorts, expanding to supply old Pagan with waiters and souvenirs, tour guides and pony-carts. The palm-frond huts were replaced by breeze-block guest houses. Migrants moved in from Meiktila and Thazi to profit from the growing tourist business. The receptionist at our hotel came from Taunggyi. She had trained as an archaeologist but earned more money working on the front desk than she would restoring temples. The old community had been destroyed.

‘I will build my house,’ Ma Swe said, tucking a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. Her mother’s small lot lay behind the modern Paradise Guest House. ‘My friends will help and we build in five days. But first I have to save enough money to buy the bamboo. The matting and walls cost twelve thousand kyat.’ Our four nights in the cheapest room at the Thante Hotel had cost us $100, the equivalent of twelve thousand kyat at the black-market rate. Foreigners were allowed only to stay at ‘dollar’ hotels. ‘So I must try to sell my radio.’