Under the Dragon (32 page)

‘I was once a photographer, long ago.’ I then noticed the two old, deep scars: the first slashed across his throat, the second at the point where the skull met the spine. Both had been stitched together with broad, rough sutures. ‘I became a monk in 1988.’

His words reminded me of the man pushing a green bicycle, the demonstrators marching under multi-coloured banners, the crude news sheets spread out on the pavement in front of Rangoon’s city hall like a mosaic of truth. I remembered the photographers who passed rolls of film to foreign journalists. As tourists jostled behind us I recalled too that it was disrespectful to step on a monk’s shadow, especially the shadow of the head, and wondered if it was also considered discourteous to ask direct questions.

‘You want to know why?’ he asked for me. ‘Because as a layman my life lost meaning. I needed to search for the truth.’ I tried not to stare at the scars. I could only guess at the horrors which so many Burmese had endured. He relieved me from further speculation by asking, ‘Do you think that our visitors are searching for something similar? Or are they maybe running away?’

I glanced back at the other travellers, then thought of those we had met in Pagan and Rangoon. ‘There are people who do just want to escape,’ I said, knowing that for the affluent modern tourist, travel is not a necessity. Few of us really need to strike out into the unknown, except out of desire to inject the exotic into our regulated existences. ‘But I think many travellers are looking for a truth too, trying to know themselves by understanding parts of the world that are unfamiliar to them.’ I shrugged, ‘It isn’t a particularly original thought.’

‘Is that why you are here?’

‘I suppose I’m trying to untangle the threads that tie together the disorder.’

The monk focused the camera on me and released the shutter. ‘Once I came very near to dying. In that experience I realised that it was only for my body that I had been working. I had wanted good food, better clothing, the best house; and all that covetousness led to greed, which frustrated me and made me angry with others. I could not differentiate, or judge.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I strive to work off these evil things. Today I have only four needs: one meal each day, a robe, medicine and shelter – all of which are here in the monastery.’

I admired his clarity and abnegation. Its simplicity appealed to me. But it made me question my feelings. What does the fortunate visitor feel, travelling among the betrayed? Embarrassed by the chance of birth? Or guilty? Even fearful? How does the maltreated local react to the invasion of tourists? With anger? With bitterness? Or maybe with relief at being able to speak out against the stifling darkness? ‘To us you tourists are like stars in the night sky,’ the Rangoon
biryani
bar owner had told me. ‘We hope a little of that light will shine on us.’ Burma’s history had seemed so distant from our own. Yet the bitter tragedy of the nation, the vain hope of its people, the greed of their rulers affected me so deeply that my emotions rose and fell like the wind before the monsoon. The Burmese dreamed of a better tomorrow, for without their hope and labour there would be no future. I felt the injustice, and wanted to help. But not with platitudes. Or sympathy. Or by donating money. Such gestures seemed only to draw attention to our material comfort and their distress. It seemed to me that maybe the only way to redress the balance was by listening and seeing, by trying to understand the betrayals, by accepting responsibility for preserving their memory, and stitching the past to the present to find a new way forward.

A longboat sped a group of Israeli tourists away across the broad waters. ‘In our travels around your country we have learned a little about the tragedy of 1988,’ I said to the monk, more quietly now despite the roar of the diesel.

‘The Burmese say that if a man has no education he becomes a soldier. If he has no brains he joins the police. And if he has no luck he goes into a monastery,’ smiled the monk, handing me back the camera. ‘As you will have seen, there are many monks in Burma.’

Our canoe sliced away from the monastery and into a canal. Channels wound through the fields, between the hyacinth and betel vines, to far pagodas. Stilt houses hovered above the water, the family boat moored beneath as cars park under raised houses elsewhere. Our canoe came ashore at Mang Thawk. Its lakeshore produce market attracted new foreigners. The monk had suggested that, after our travels, it might be of more interest to us than the souvenir-hawking touts at the Ywama tourist emporiums.

We scattered an armada of ducks off the muddy landing and ambled up between the half-hearted, half-empty stalls. A fisherwoman sold carp by the brace, lashed through the gills with a twist of bamboo. There were a few baskets of peanuts and tamarind sprouts, a single platter lined with banana leaves full of Inle watercress and mustard leaf. A sleeping ironmonger sold nails by weight. A pair of Palaung women hawked odd containers of tea leaves. There seemed to be little to arouse our curiosity. We began to idle back to the boat, thinking with pleasure of an afternoon nap between clean white sheets, when the market’s meagre ‘gift’ stall caught our attention. On a dirty blue cloth the stallkeeper had laid out a few tired items. There were the usual reproduction opium weights, a tatty carved Buddha, a tarnished set of monks’ gongs – and two dusty baskets. We blinked at them in disbelief. They were both identical to the one in the British Museum.

‘This…these are Palaung?’ I asked, too shocked to say much else.

‘Pa-O,’ yawned the stallkeeper, gesturing away to the east. The Pa-O were ethnic cousins of the Karen, another of Burma’s twenty-one distinct racial groups. ‘From the hills about a three-mile walk from here.’

‘Three miles?’ We inspected the baskets: the design, shape and weaving were a perfect match. ‘Are you sure they’re not Palaung?’

‘Palaung baskets are different,’ replied the stallkeeper, shaking his head. ‘Palaung baskets have no lid.’ He took one of the baskets to show us. ‘This is Pa-O.’

‘And the maker? Would you be able to take us to meet the maker?’

‘Not possible,’ he laughed. ‘The baskets are maybe one hundred years old.’ All the makers are dead.’ We asked him the price. ‘Maybe $20?’

‘Can we afford it?’ asked Katrin. In Burma it took a labourer three months to earn $20. At home $20 wouldn’t fill our Escort’s petrol tank. I shrugged away the question. Of course we could afford it. In comparison with the stallkeeper we were wealthy, and the discrepancy as usual made me feel uncomfortable.

‘You can bargain,’ he volunteered, misinterpreting our hesitation. He was anxious for a sale. ‘You could offer me, say, $10.’ His negotiating technique lacked resolve.

Katrin spoke first. ‘$20,’ she said.

The stallkeeper looked surprised. ‘Forgive me, lady, but I only asked for ten.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but we’d like to pay twenty.’

‘$10 is a fair price,’ insisted the stallkeeper. ‘I cannot sell it for more.’

I pulled two crisp ten-dollar bills from my wallet. We had decided on which of the two baskets we wanted. ‘Twenty,’ I said. ‘For this one.’

‘It isn’t in good condition, sir,’ he whispered, showing us the worn corners. ‘And there is a tear in the weave here. $10 will be sufficient for me.’

‘We have been looking for this for a long time,’ explained Katrin. She put the basket on her shoulder, let it swing by its carrying strap and rest against her hip. It told us that James George Scott had probably travelled to Inle. ‘But we will only buy it if we can give you twenty.’

The stallkeeper stared at us, then at the basket and the money. He blinked twice. He bit his lower lip. ‘Lady, sir,’ he said slowly, ‘if you wish you can give me twenty.’

‘Good.’

‘I will keep ten for myself, for the basket, and give ten to the monastery.’

‘Won’t you keep it for your family?’ I asked.

‘Or to buy your wife a present?’

‘The gift will be better spent earning merit in the next life,’ he decided, ‘so our faces will be open and all people will welcome us.’

We paid the stallkeeper. To bring good luck he then slapped the bills over each item in his shabby display.

‘Are you happy?’ I asked.

‘Very happy. I make good business today.’

The rain came long after midnight, falling in torrents, the great fat drops of water drumming on the hotel window and coaxing rich, humic smells up out of the earth. I half-expected to awake to find that our basket had been caught by a gust of wind and blown away into the lake. But in the morning it sat on the table, looking dusty and not particularly special. Its discovery still seemed too remarkable to be true. After enduring dysentery, Phahte’s pistol and a cornucopia of medicinal drugs, the object of our search had been found – at a tourist destination an hour’s flight from Rangoon. If we’d booked a one-week package holiday from London to Inle we would probably have happened upon the Mang Thawk market. The basket would have been found with ease.

But there were other discoveries that would never have been made on a package tour. Our journeys had enabled me to understand the dichotomy between the Burmese people’s kindness and their unelected masters’ cruelty. In the past Burma’s kings had exercised a brutal authority, but only within their court. At the same time a tolerant, affable Buddhist lifestyle had prevailed in the country’s heartland. But the tools and weapons of the modern state enabled the SLORC to extend its control beyond the central court. It would be an over-simplification to suggest that the generals were upholding a regal legacy. Their motivation to seize power was personal, ‘un-Buddhist’ ambition. In stark contrast to their claims, the State Law and Order Restoration Council – and their arrogant army – were the main obstacle to the country’s progression towards a just, pluralist society.

The search for the basket had shown me that it was the influence and identity of Buddhism which defended the Burmese against both domestic injustice and the acids of imported materialism. The people had also remained good-natured and quiescent through the decades of political repression because of their natural optimism, which had been heightened by the opening of their tarnished land to tourists, and because of their desperate need for outsiders to understand the horror of their situation.

Another revelation had come at Mang Thawk market when Katrin put the basket on her shoulder. The gesture had carried me back to the first morning in the storeroom in Dalston, to the smell of jasmine and caraway. At the time I had noticed that the museum card index had listed Scott’s find as a ‘shopping basket’. I was familiar with shopping in the West. Katrin and I have trailed through the markets of London and Tuscany dragging overladen carrier bags, clutching great heads of cauliflower, granary loaves and half a dozen Granny Smith apples. Scott’s basket had always seemed to me too small for the task. But our travels through Burma had shown us that most Asians survive on much less than us. Their baskets carried home from market only a little rice, a handful of soot-black soyabean cakes or the few ingredients for a peanut curry. In many cases it was all that could be afforded. In Asia physical space – in a line-bus, in a house, even in a basket – is a luxury.

Our search had never been for the basket alone, although it was a beautiful keepsake. Instead it had been an attempt to understand the ordering mind and the controlling hand. Baskets reveal our longing for organisation and completeness, our attempt to take charge of the world, to contain and be contained. They, like love, make order in the chaos.

On our last day in Burma we walked past the guards and into the leafy walled garden on Rangoon’s University Avenue. At that time the gate was still open. Troops had not yet re-erected the barriers. The Military Intelligence officers only glanced at our passports. We sat with others under a bright canopy, listening to a doctor speak about maintaining a healthy heart. The authorities had permitted his talk because of its ‘educational’ value, but rather than its medical tips it was his advice on staying true to one’s own heart that the audience heeded. The speaker’s ambiguous turns of phrase made the Burmese laugh like the bulbuls that hide in the green groves of peepul trees. In spite of the cordon of soldiers, the garden was the one place we had seen in all the country where people behaved as if they were not confined. In the front row, smiling with her countrymen, sat Aung San Suu Kyi.

At the time ‘the Lady’ was not under house arrest. The military did not forbid her from leaving her family home. But when she did go out they arranged for her car to be stoned by thugs. When she tried to travel to Mandalay her carriage was disconnected from the rest of the train. So she remained behind the garden wall, deprived, like most other Burmese, of her freedom. She was a prisoner of conscience, but her courage reached far beyond her containment. It drew the country and the world to her – and to her party – through weekly speeches and meetings.

The tragedies and wrongs encountered during our journey had convinced me that there was no hope for democratic reform. The Burmese were too subdued, the generals too well armed. But when the talk finished and Aung San Suu Kyi walked through the crowd to welcome us to her home, I believed that their evil would be defeated.

She wore an elegant purple
longyi
. Her fine black hair was woven around yellow blossoms. She asked us about our travels. I responded by praising the generosity of individuals. She told us that, as visitors, we would not have seen their fear.

‘We have sensed it,’ I replied, ‘and have tried to understand.’

‘We’ve seen a great deal of personal courage,’ said Katrin.

In a light voice, at once controlled and thoughtful, she said, ‘That is what we must do: maximise courage, minimise fear.’ Behind her an NLD – National League for Democracy – supporter wore a T-shirt which read ‘Fear is a habit; I am not afraid’.

I didn’t ask Aung San Suu Kyi any probing questions. I didn’t query her about her clarity or her faith. I didn’t pry into her six years of imprisonment, into the aching isolation from her husband and sons. The questions had all been asked before. Instead I wanted to give something to her. So I told her what we had seen: that the people needed her, that they felt her love protected them, even if she might not be able to free them, that she was the embodiment of their hope. I tried to tell her that she upheld the only force, apart from fear and greed, strong enough to bind the diverse Burmese into one nation. She knew all this, of course, though she was too courteous to say so, but it was all that I had to offer.