Under the Dragon (3 page)

For me only a subjective view enables us to begin to understand – and empathise with – an unfamiliar people and place. So to record the true events I had to go to Burma, in spite of pressure discouraging visitors to the country. The evil unleashed by the country’s unelected rulers had to be assessed and articulated. I knew that the journey could be dangerous, and not just for us. The political reality would oblige me to conceal the identities of people about whom I would write. To protect their lives, and to tell the truth, I would have to weave a necessary fiction.

‘We’ll start at the beginning,’ I answered Katrin. ‘In Rangoon.’

IN FRONT, BEHIND. In front, behind. She recalled his hands, so large that they had held her as a nest holds a bird. In front, behind. She felt his touch, his lips on her neck and thigh against hip, and let her head roll back in surrender. The gesture had excited him, making her laugh like the bulbuls that hid in the green groves of peepul trees. She felt foolish, always laughing at the wrong time. In front, behind. He had cupped her, clutched her, then found her again. Twist into upright. His urgency had scared her yet still she traced an ear and knotted a finger into a thick curl of fair hair. She felt the white heat blaze out of him. His broad limbs wrapped her to him, pulled her body hard onto his own. In front, behind. Leave the end. Lay in a new strand. He rose inside her, so deep that she thought she might burst, weaving himself into her flesh, coming with a sudden violence that made her want to cry out loud. In front, and behind the next stake. He fell silent, was unable to move, yet held her with no less intensity, his pale skin folding around her own burnished brown. Through the fevered February afternoons it had been that single moment of stillness which had touched her, knitting their fingers together as she now wove her baskets, her small copper hand contained within his palm. In front, behind. She had believed herself to be safe in his arms, as secure as she had felt with her father. The two men of her life – her lover and her father – had protected her. Now both were gone. Ni Ni finished the weave, working the bamboo in pairs, picking up the right-hand stake as she moved around the border, and tried to remember; was that what it meant to love the right way?

It had begun with theft, and ended in ruin.

Ni Ni had grown up alone with her father in two small rooms that opened onto leafy Prome Road. She was an only child because her mother, who had never loved her husband properly, had run off with the refrigeration manager of the Diamond Ice Factory. The manager’s cold demeanour had made Ni Ni and the other children shiver. It was his icy feet, they had whispered, which cooled the bottles of Lemon Sparkling and Vimto which no one could afford. But he had been a bolder man than Ni Ni’s father, with better prospects. He had also come home at night to sleep, an important consideration for any young wife. The desertion had condemned her father to an existence on the periphery of life, for it had left him not tied to any woman’s heart. Yet he continued to try to provide for his daughter. She may have worn
longyis
of plain cotton, not Mandalay silk, and sometimes found no
ngapi
fish paste on the table, but they seldom went hungry. Ni Ni wanted for nothing, except perhaps for less sensitive hands.

Ni Ni ran a small beauty stall from their second room selling lotions, balms and
tayaw
shampoo. Her hands had earned her a reputation for preparing the township’s finest
thanakha
, the mildly astringent paste used by Burmese women as combination cosmetic, conditioner and sunscreen. She would have preferred to go to school – pupils at Dagon State High School No. 1 wore a smart uniform with a badge on the pocket – but her father didn’t make enough money to pay for the books, let alone the desk and teaching levy. So instead she helped to earn their living by laying her fingertips on her customers’ cheeks. She leaned forward, willing from them confessions and complaints, then prescribed the ideal consistency of
thanakha
. Her sensitive touch could also advise them on a change of diet, even tell if they had eaten meat or made love last night. In a tea shop she could pick up a coffee cup and know if it had last been held by a man or a woman. Sometimes though the sensations became too painful and she could not bare even the lightest touch. The breath of air from a falling feather might send shivers to the ends of her fingers. A cooking fire’s warmth would scald her. She dropped things. Then she would withdraw, her young laughter disguising adult tears, and wish away her paper-thin skin. She longed to have hard hands like her father.

Every evening Ni Ni’s father rode his battered Triumph bicycle into the fiery Rangoon dusk. He worked nights in a central hotel for foreigners near the Sule Pagoda, massaging tired tourist bodies. The hotel collected his fee, paying him only a small retainer, but he was allowed to keep his tips. So sometimes at dawn Ni Ni awoke to the vision of a ten-franc coin, an American Quarter or a pound note, tokens that her father had been given during the night. Over breakfast
mohinga
he told her about the faraway places from where the money had come, not with resentment for those who could afford to travel or with a craving to see other countries himself, but out of simple curiosity.

‘They are all yours,’ he told her with pride, ‘so when you marry you can be free to love your husband in the right way.’

‘I will always stay here with you,’ she assured him in childish devotion, then cheered away poverty’s imprisonment. ‘The right way is just to care for each other.’

The notes and coins were tucked into the matted walls and Ni Ni’s father curled up beneath them, their sleeping room not being long enough for him to lie out straight. She and her father owned the two rooms and two
thin-byu
sleeping mats, a rice pot and betel box, her beauty stall and the bicycle. In a world so large they were content with their peaceful corner of it. Desire did not blind them, like the pickpocket who sees only the monk’s pockets.

Ni Ni was thirteen years old when the bicycle vanished. Her father had left it leaning against the gate for no more than a minute. He had woken her with a crisp hundred-yen bill and returned to find his cycle gone. None of the neighbours had caught sight of the thief, not their friend Law San who owned the Chinese noodle stall or even the hawk-eyed gossip May May Gyi. Only Ko Aye, who ran a makeshift barber shop under the banyan tree, claimed to have seen an unfamiliar khaki lorry pass by, although nobody paid much attention to his observations. He had lost an eye back in 1962, and for more than twenty-five years had confused running children with pariah dogs, earlobes with tufts of knotted hair.

All that morning and half the hot afternoon Ni Ni watched her father standing beside the Prome Road looking left and right then left again. He glared at every cyclist who clattered past him. His suspicions were aroused by any newly painted machine. He chased after a man who had turned to ride off in the opposite direction. Ni Ni had been taught that the human abode meant trial and trouble. She understood that the theft, though unfortunate, was not a tragedy. Yet the disappearance of the bicycle made her fingertips tingle, as if she could feel her father’s Triumph being ridden far away.

The bicycle is man’s purest invention, an ingenious arrangement of metal and rubber that liberates the body from the dusty plod to ride on a cushion of air, at speed or with leisure, stopping on a whim, travelling for free. Its design is simple and its maintenance inexpensive. Yet for all its ease and economy, the bicycle possesses a greater quality. It offers the possibility of escape.

Without his Triumph, Ni Ni’s father had to walk to work. He could not afford the bus fare, and needed to leave home two hours earlier to reach the hotel. At the end of his shift he returned long after Ni Ni had risen, ground the day’s supply of
thanakha
and opened the shop. Foreign coins no longer jingled in his purse. Tourists grew dissatisfied with his tired hands. Instead of sharing the world with his daughter he slumped, weary and grey, onto his sleeping mat. Ni Ni stroked his brow but the noises of the day – the droning of doves, the throaty hawk of Law San, the call of boiled-bean vendors – began to disturb his sleep. He tossed and turned through the long afternoons. She traded her favourite silver dollar for a small chicken from May May Gyi, but not even aromatic
hkauk-hswe
served in coconut milk could lift his spirits.

Some ten days after the theft Law San scuttled across the street from his stall. His abrupt, sideways walk reminded Ni Ni of a yellow-toned crab. When she was smaller she had believed that Law San cut up his vermicelli with his pincer-like hands.

‘
Akogyi
,’ he jittered, addressing the older man with respect, ‘are you awake?’ No voice replied from the dark room, so he added, ‘I have found your bicycle.’

‘Where?’ cried Ni Ni’s father, sitting up in the shadows. Ni Ni hurried in from the shop and, in her excitement, dropped a jar of shampoo.

‘You remember my cousin who owns the bicycle repair shop in Mingaladon, off Highway No. 1?’ said Law San, jerking down onto his haunches. ‘I asked him to keep an eye open for your bike. It is a particularly uncommon model, after all.’

‘Mingaladon is miles away,’ said Ni Ni, scooping the coconut liquid back into the jar. ‘No one would ride it that far.’

‘That’s right,’ moaned her father, slumping back against the wall and cracking his knuckles. ‘It would never turn up there.’ He then added, ‘Ni Ni, please make a cup of coffee for our guest.’

She calculated the amount of coffee powder remaining in the jar. ‘Please excuse me, but we have no limes,’ she told them. May May Gyi could have lent her one but she did not want to be sent away.

‘Not for me, no thank you,’ Ko Law San replied, shaking a knobbly claw. He was too agitated to idle over refreshments. ‘It
is
a long way away, but that’s the remarkable thing. Only yesterday a stranger brought into my cousin’s shop a machine exactly matching yours. He proceeded with caution at first, asking only a few questions, so as not to arouse suspicion, you understand.’

‘And what of it?’

‘Well, it turned out to be your bike,’ grinned Law San, jumping up onto his feet. ‘And I’m pleased to inform you that my cousin has completed all the arrangements. It is yours again.’

‘He’s really found it?’ Ni Ni asked.

‘I don’t understand,’ said her father, his optimism tempered by doubt. ‘Did the thief just hand it over?’

‘I do not know the specific details, my friend.’

‘And what do you mean by “arrangements”? Did your cousin buy it back?’

‘I cannot tell you that either,’ answered Law San, disappointed that his good news should be greeted by wary questions. ‘I know only that you are free to recover your bicycle tomorrow.’

The following morning Ni Ni did not open the shop. Instead she met her father on the main road after he had finished work. Together they caught a line-bus to the northern suburbs. The small pick-up’s roof was stacked with caged ducklings and its open flat back crammed full of traders heading to the Highway Bus Centre. Ni Ni managed to squeeze onto the bench between a monk and a conscript. The muzzle of the soldier’s rifle rubbed against the acne scars on his face. Her father rode on the tailgate.

The streets of Mingaladon are more pleasant than those of Rangoon’s other townships. The tree-lined avenues seem to suffer from fewer potholes. Its houses are in good condition and their gardens better maintained. Even the bicycle repair shop, which sat off a lane behind the Defence Services General Hospital, flaunted an unusual affluence.

Ni Ni spotted Law San’s cousin squatting on the front step, a dismantled bicycle between his legs. Her father introduced themselves, but the man did not invite them into his house, despite their long journey, nor did he meet their eyes. ‘I am sorry, but your machine is no longer here,’ he said, unwilling to look up from a broken gear-changer. He gestured towards a long dark row of spiny acacias. ‘It is there, over the road in the military compound.’ Beyond the shrubs, behind the barbed wire, against the wall of a barracks, stood the green Triumph.

Ni Ni had been wary of the army since the year two soldiers had tricked a neighbour’s daughter. The corporal had addressed his friend as ‘Major’, and the simple, trusting girl had believed the men to be officers. She had responded to his advances and, after the marriage, discovered that her major was an ordinary soldier. When his unit was transferred away from Rangoon he had left her with a child. The incident never failed to make Ni Ni laugh. In fact it was when confronting misfortune that her laugher came most easily. She had sniggered when first meeting the ice factory manager, even though he had torn apart her family, and thereafter giggled to drive away her father’s loneliness. Her humour helped her to rise above disappointment and to act with care, for every act had consequences for the soul’s future. But standing in the shade of a palm tree near the compound’s gatehouse she suppressed the urge even to smile. She knew that her father would never have brought her with him had he known about the involvement of the
Tatmadaw
. The Burmese army, once a respected and responsible force, had become the country’s corrupt ruling class. ‘I am staying with you,’ she insisted when he tried to send her home. Her concern for his safety was as great as his for hers.

The warrant officer was not in his office, and a sentry directed them along Khayebin Road to the Tatmadaw Golf Club. They were kept waiting outside in the midday sun until he had finished his round. Two Mercedes limousines came and went. When the officer appeared Ni Ni’s father bowed, addressed him as
Saya
, teacher, and beseeched him to return to the compound. The young man was irritable. He had been looking forward to lunch and at first feigned indifference to such a minor matter as a stolen bicycle. But he relented, then, on the drive back to the compound, began to rant about the need to uplift the morality of the nation. Ni Ni couldn’t understand the relevance of a lecture on personal sacrifice.