Under the Dragon (17 page)

‘You cannot sell your radio,’ said Katrin, appalled by the thought. To give up the radio was to lose her hearing, as well as her sanity.

‘You like it?’ Ma Swe asked, hesitant.

‘It is very nice,’ replied Katrin.

‘It is good one, but you are right, I cannot sell it. In Rangoon I could get two thousand kyat but here no one will buy it. Everyone is too busy with tourist-working to worry about the outside world.’ She picked up the little radio. ‘So maybe you would like to have it?’

‘I can’t accept it, Ma Swe,’ said Katrin, startled by the offer.

‘But I would like you to have it.’

‘It is more important that you keep the radio.’

‘We met a boy who believes that your husband fills the sky with lies,’ I told her. ‘Is that true?’

‘Even in a small place you have to – I do not want to use the word – you have to be brave. You have to stand up. The boys say wrong things. I tell them right, but they do not listen.’ She pushed the radio into Katrin’s hands. ‘Please, it is for you.’

It was wrong that Ma Swe should have to sell the radio; even worse that she should try to give it to us. We managed to persuade her to keep it, then offered to help her finance her house. At first she refused, but we insisted. She would build herself a house for the same cost as a good lunch in London.

Ma Swe then began showering us with gifts of local
yun
lacquerware: two trays, a miniature chest, a matching pair of vases and an octagonal-topped folding table. ‘To remember me by,’ she explained. We tried to decline her gifts, explaining that we had only one small rucksack, but she could not be dissuaded. The giving seemed necessary; to refuse would be to deny her her deed of good merit.

‘You do not like lacquerware?’ she asked, her tired eyes protruding in her thin, bony face. ‘Pagan lacquerware good quality.’ To demonstrate she squeezed together the rims of a bowl. It suffered no damage. ‘All tourists like.’

I explained that although the lacquerware was beautiful, we were searching for a specific basket. A maker in Rangoon had directed us to Pagan, where we hoped to find it. We had been told that she might be able to help us.

Katrin showed her the photograph. Ma Swe shook her head. ‘Sorry, not Pagan style,’ she apologised. ‘But you go to Mandalay. Maybe you find in Zegyo market. Then afterwards you come back,’ she insisted, pressing two small lacquer betel boxes into our hands, ‘and stay in my house, not hotel.’

‘Has the post gone yet?’ demanded the tanned, middle-aged German couple at the hotel reception desk. A thin boy, his head bowed, loaded their monogrammed suitcases into the Air Mandalay minibus. ‘It is not good if our cards arrive home late.’

‘The postman will pick them up this afternoon,’ promised the receptionist. She chose not to point out that the censor’s inspection would delay their cards in any event. ‘Have a good trip. Goodbye.’

‘
Auf Wiedersehen
,’ replied the wife. ‘Try to say it in German, not just English. Next time we come you will say it in German.’

The Ministry of Hotels and Tourism – under the direction of Lieutenant General Kyaw Ba – ensures that all independent and package travellers are catalogued, controlled and contained. Each evening every hotel and guest house in the country is required to produce thirteen copies of their guest register, to be distributed to”

External Passenger Control Unit (one copy)
Immigration Office (one copy)
Township Law and Order Restoration Council (four copies)
Ward Law and Order Restoration Council (one copy)
Police Station (five copies)
Navy Intelligence Unit (one copy)

The thirteen copies have to be submitted by seven o’clock every evening. If a guest arrives at a hotel after that time, thirteen amended lists have to be prepared and delivered to the authorities before midnight. In addition, once a week a full roster of visiting foreigners needs to be lodged with both the Military Office and the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism. In this regard alone tourists are treated in a similar manner to residents. Every Burmese household also has to register with the Ward Law and Order Restoration Council, and no guest – family or friend – is allowed to spend the night in another place without obtaining permission from the local chairman. Ma Swe’s invitation to us had been sincere, but foreigners are forbidden from staying in private homes. The intrusive system ensures that every journey is made under surveillance. Tourists alone retain the luxury of itinerancy. The Burmese travel only out of necessity.

We could have flown to Mandalay, of course. We could have dropped our knapsack into the thin boy’s arms and joined the German couple on the back seat of the minibus to trade stories of plum-size cockroaches and egg-on-sugared-toast hotel breakfasts. We could have confused landscape and historical remains with the living country. Our credit card could have been debited and a round of drinks ordered. Peanuts and crispies would have been served in the departure lounge. We could have checked in, taken off, touched down and still had time to take in Mandalay Hill before lunch at the Novotel. But instead we decided not to luxuriate on the ATR 72-210
Hintha
Golden Flight. It wasn’t a question of saving the cost of the airfare, or even our response to the rumours that the airline had been financed by the profits of arms trading. It was for a greater reason than that. We had the freedom to choose.

The next morning, at the hour when – as the Burmese say – ‘one first sees the veins on one’s hands’, we sat in an Isuzu bus beside the Irrawaddy, yawning. In the cool dawn a drowsy mother lit her breakfast fire. The match hissed, kindling crackled and her child called out in its sleep. Waking sparrows chattered. The ebony sky turned to ash grey, tinged itself with rose then burst into morning bloom. Voices warmed in the sun, growing excited with the heat. Our driver detached himself from a circle of conversation and slipped behind the wheel. He was a cut above the usual line-bus driver, wearing a dusty tailored blazer with his
longyi
. His ticket collector sported a flutter of banknotes around his fingers and a T-shirt which read ‘Top of the Heap’. The engine shook itself awake and, with an alarming shriek of gears, the bus eased forward along the low, muddy riverbank.

The Irrawaddy rises in the southern Himalayas, winds its way through the Kachin Hills, curls around the rice paddies of the Shan Plateau and crosses the arid central plains before uncoiling, like the frayed end of a rope, into the Andaman Sea. In an earlier age our dashing driver might have captained one of the forty steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. At the height of British rule its ships carried nine million passengers a year along the river. But instead of sounding a polished brass whistle, he tooted his horn to encourage a bullock-cart out of our path, and startled a heron fishing in the shallows.

The bus gathered speed, racing along the single-lane carriageway and swaying onto the cinder shoulder to pass oncoming lorries or local pick-ups with live pigs lashed to their roofs. The wild motion shook us with such violence that our vision soon became blurred. Our bodies bounced out of contact with the hard bench seat. Within thirty minutes our brains felt as bruised within the bone of our heads as were we inside the metal box of the bus. The appalling road was a long, weaving Morse-code line of contact and non-contact, and after an hour our comfortable Pagan hotel seemed a lifetime away. A stone punctured the muffler, releasing a deafening blast of exhaust. The wearying movement created an impression of great distances travelled, but after four hours we had covered only forty miles. ‘I think I need a new bra,’ Katrin groaned as we shivered and jolted into Myingyan, our lunch stop.

The Burmese passengers scrambled out of the bus and into the café to wolf down plates of curry. We took longer to collect ourselves and were besieged by a clamour of street vendors, balancing on their heads trays of plastic-wrapped quail eggs, bunches of grapes and fierce ruby-red sausages. Katrin ate a tiny boiled egg and I managed to stomach a
samosa
, its fried pastry stuffed with pigeon peas. We drank three bottles of purified water (‘UV Treated for your Good Health and Extra Comfort’) while our driver finished his second ‘brain sweet’ bread pudding. Across the road a gang of villagers thatched a house with toddy fronds, and we remembered Ma Swe.

The journey after lunch was no more comfortable, but because the morning had numbed our senses, it became easier to think. I noticed again that, as on the Meiktila line-bus, children slept on their parents’ laps undisturbed by the vicious motion. Their calm reminded me of the words of Major Grant Allen, as quoted by Scott in
The Burman
. ‘Unlike the generality of Asiatics,’ Allen had declared with a Victorian’s certainty, ‘the Burmese are not a fawning race. They are cheerful, and singularly alive to the ridiculous; buoyant, elastic, soon recovering from personal or domestic disaster.’

Allen’s assertion that the Burmese were ‘not individually cruel’, yet were ‘indifferent to the shedding of blood on the part of their rulers’ intrigued me. Watching the children, dozing innocents in a harsh environment, I began to wonder if the tolerance of tyranny could be a legacy of the past. Was the present military dictatorship simply a modern version of the old despotic monarchy? If this was the case, then could the 1988 uprising, with all its hopes for democracy, have been more the result of Western influences than a response to an intrinsic Burmese need for freedom? Neither Allen’s nor Scott’s words could explain the central dichotomy of Burma: that the gentle generosity of the people – the constant offers to share food, to give us presents and pay our bus fare – was at odds with the grasping brutality of authority.

Beyond the bus’s dust-caked windows the scorched plains gradually yielded to tilled land. Against a backdrop of sunflower fields a goatherd leaned on a bush and lowered juicy new shoots to within his herd’s reach. Chalk-white egrets fed in emerald-green rice paddies. Beneath a stern but imperfect red and white sign – ‘anyone who Gets Riotustive and Unruly is our Enemy’ – we entered Mandalay on sore, bruised bottoms.

‘This city is at the centre of things,’ insisted Michael, dislodging the familiar downpour of dandruff onto the car’s upholstery. ‘It is the heart of the country.’

I had decided to meet him again, despite Katrin’s objections. We knew no one else in the city, and needed someone to translate for us at the Zegyo market. Katrin had not enjoyed our night with him on the Leo Express, and had agreed to see him only on condition that we didn’t visit his shopping malls.

‘Did you know that 60 per cent of all the country’s monks live in this area?’ Michael enthused, as his chauffeur cut a straight path through the weaving traffic. The self-help paperback,
The Leader in You
, was tucked into his pocket. ‘That makes for good karma. Makes it a prosperous place to live, too.’

Mandalay was booming. Its broad, dusty streets bustled with new Nissans, old bicycles and packs of stray dogs. But good karma alone did not explain the profusion of high-rise office blocks. In 1990 the government had granted a four-month tax amnesty. Individuals were permitted to declare their unexplained assets by paying a 25 per cent profit tax. This legal method of money-laundering earned $66 million for the SLORC. It also allowed illegal earnings to be invested, which resulted in a boom that increased property prices tenfold. Trade in the ‘red, green and white lines’ – rubies, jade and heroin – lay behind the dramatic growth.

‘Then why does it feel so foreign?’ I asked. Mandalay had once been the most Burmese of the country’s cities. It was the last pre-colonial capital. Its residents were said to speak the finest Burmese. Yet in spite of its history and central location the sprawling city seemed to be teetering on an edge. It felt like a border town.

‘Mandalay is a crossroads, not only for Burma but between China and the members of ASEAN – the Association of South-East Asian Nations,’ said Michael. ‘It is a centre for all of Asia. Now, shall we see my shopping mall?’

‘I just want to go to the market,’ stated Katrin, who was not in good humour. The chauffeur wheeled the car around and swept up to its entrance.

‘Scruffy old place,’ Michael complained, kicking the dust from his shoes. ‘My mall has marble flooring and air-conditioning.’ He guided us across a barren lot where a straggle of boys played football, towards a nest of low wooden stalls. There were trees here, and it was cooler in the shade. He eased his squat, suited frame along the narrow passageway between the sheds, past jumbled clothing stands and neat Chinese jewellers, a disdainful grin on his lips. Our search entertained him. He saw that there was no profit in it, but in spite of himself and like all Burmese, he enjoyed being of assistance to strangers. ‘I made some enquiries on your behalf,’ he explained, then stopped at a jam-packed stall and said, ‘And here we are.’

Crammed together with sieves, waste bins and brooms, cradles and fans, bicycle baskets and food carriers. Wok whisks nestled in fruit-picking baskets. Fish traps enclosed canary cages. Stacks of bamboo hats, woven in two different plaits, towered above
thin-byu
sleeping mats. Strapping-tape carry-alls hung with cane shoppers. There were rolled walls, partitions, even woven doors and floors. We had never seen a shop like it, stuffed from hard earth to stitched ceiling with baskets made from bamboo, plaited in palm and plastic, multi-coloured or monotone, produced in Monywa and Amarapura. Every imaginable shape and variety seemed to be available to us, except a basket that resembled Scott’s.

The stallkeeper and Michael pored over our photograph. The stallkeeper’s wife left a customer to voice her opinion. The daughter of the jaggery stand owner opposite came over to help us out. Together they decided that Scott’s basket was not from Rangoon, Pagan or Mandalay. It was not even, Michael translated for us, pure Burmese.

‘It is Palaung,’ he informed us.

The Palaung are one of the country’s smallest ethnic minorities. They live about two hundred miles to the north-east in the Shan Hills, a fertile region renowned for its tea plantations, teak forests and poppy fields. They are a gentle people, once unfavoured by the British because they made poor soldiers. Their women wear remarkable turquoise and midnight-blue coats, velvet caps adorned with silver and heavy scarlet hoods.