Under the Dragon (4 page)

‘Forgive me,
Saya
,’ her father pleaded when they reached his office. ‘I am an ill-educated man, but at what are you aiming? Please tell me openly.’

‘I am telling you that the thief sold your bicycle to the repair shop, then ran away,’ snapped the officer. ‘And that if you wish it to be returned, then you must repay the hundred kyat.’ At the time a hundred kyat was the equivalent of two months’ rent. ‘Furthermore I am willing, in the cause of good civic relations, to accept the money on his behalf.’

‘
Saya
, are you saying that I must buy back my own bicycle?’ Ni Ni was surprised to hear disapproval in her father’s voice. He tended to acquiesce in the face of difficulties. ‘That does not seem to be the right way.’

‘Younger brother, I am trying to help you to find the best way,’ said the officer. Ni Ni wanted to hide her tingling fingers in her lap, but they had not been invited to sit down. ‘If you refuse, then the bicycle must be sent to the police and a case will be opened. As you know, it will be kept in their care as evidence.’

Ni Ni knew that once it was in their hands, the police would use the bicycle as their own. They would replace its good tyres with old punctured ones, strip the gears and maybe even steal its Flying Pigeon bell. To expedite the case her father would need to make frequent visits to the police station, bringing presents for the detectives on each occasion. His time and money would be wasted. In the end it would cost as much as three hundred kyat to reclaim his bicycle by legal means. The officer knew this too.

‘I am afraid that I do not have a hundred kyat today,
Saya
.’

‘Of course; it would be foolish to travel with such an amount.’

The warrant officer scribbled a few words on a leaf torn from an old diary. ‘Please sign this paper here.’

Ni Ni helped her father to read the handwritten promissory note. He asked her to repeat its words to him twice. ‘But
Saya
, there is no mention of the bicycle here.’

‘That is not necessary. This paper says simply that the repairman has loaned you one hundred kyat and that you will pay him back – by way of myself – at the end of the week. When you return with the money, you may have the bicycle.’

‘The law comes out from their mouth, not from the book,’ Law San said later that day. He had loaned the money to Ni Ni’s father, aware that there was little prospect of repayment in this life. He hoped that the act might perhaps gain him merit in the next one.

‘We do not own our home, our children, even our possessions,’ hissed Ni Ni’s father, making light of a Buddhist precept. ‘They are only given to us for a short time, or until they fall into the grasp of the
Tatmadaw
.’ He and Law San had learned that the thief from whom the cousin had bought the machine had been a soldier. The warrant officer had become involved not to right a wrong, but because he had not wanted the soldier alone to profit from the robbery. He had seized the bicycle so as to get his own cut.

‘
Malok, mashok, mapyok
,’ Law San sighed. ‘Don’t do anything, don’t get involved, don’t make yourself trouble. That’s what I advise,
Akogyi
.’ In the end both he and his cousin had lost a hundred kyat. ‘Let’s get back to work.’

Later Ni Ni tried to comfort her father, asking him about massage oils and encouraging him to teach her his techniques. Although it stung her hands she massaged his shoulders, chatting to him about her dowry of coins, but his thoughts drifted away from the Prome Road. The soldiers’ crime had kindled his discontent.

It was towards the end of that summer that Ni Ni’s father lost his job. He was accused of discussing politics with foreigners, an allegation invented by a younger masseur who coveted his post. The hotel manager dismissed him without a hearing. It was better to sack a man than to risk trouble with the authorities. The irony was that Ni Ni’s father, while kneading bronzed Swedish backs and easing tired Thai muscles, had indeed been criticising the regime.

In the spring of 1988 Burma’s military government had suppressed a small demonstration with bestial brutality. Peaceful protestors were beaten and driven into Rangoon’s Inya Lake to drown. The
Lon Htein
riot police stormed the university and arrested truckloads of students. In prison men were tortured and women gang-raped. Forty-one students suffocated to death in a police van. The official inquiry found that only two protesters had died, further incensing public opinion. A curfew intended to control the students misfired. Stall-keepers were prevented from reaching the markets. Food became scarce. A
pyi
of rice tripled in price over the summer. The daily wage of a manual worker remained fixed at 6.50 kyat. People could no longer afford to eat.

The resignation that July of General Ne Win, the despot who had wielded absolute power for twenty-six terrible years, came as a complete surprise to the nation. The Burmese had as a rule accepted both misfortune and bad government with stoicism. Suddenly it seemed that they
could
unravel themselves from the economic decline and arbitrary cruelty. There could be an end to the reign of terror. A general strike was called in the hope of dislodging the rest of the military government. On 8 August – the auspicious 8.8.88 – a million hungry, hopeful people took to the streets without fear, with only elation in their hearts. Ni Ni’s father walked among them, pushing his bicycle.

On the day of the strike Ni Ni was told to stay at the shop, not that there was anyone to buy her lotions, as even loquacious May May Gyi had joined the marchers. Ko Aye sat with her for an hour, few people needing one-eyed haircuts either, and told her of the importance of the strike. His enthusiasm made her feel foolish. She had asked to go with her father, but he would not listen. They had argued for the first time, just as he and her mother used to argue, and her fingers had quivered. Ni Ni wondered if her mother and the cool ice factory manager had joined the demonstration.

She ate a little rice at midday and tried to nap through the hot afternoon. But sleep would not come, and so, unnoticed by Ko Aye, she stole away into the town. She hoped to catch sight of her father, though not of course to be seen by him, but in the central Maha Bandoola Park there were too many people. They poured in from all directions, cheering, clapping, marching in their thousands towards the city hall. Dockworkers walked alongside tailors, air force pilots joined hands with housewives. Students formed human chains around groups of soldiers, protecting them from the marchers, shouting, ‘The People’s Army is our army!’ Three columns of monks carried their alms bowls upside down, to show that the whole nation was on strike. Ni Ni walked behind them, alongside pupils from Dagon State High School No. 1, her right fist raised too, calling ‘
Do aye!
’ – our cause – and watching out for her father.

‘You have never seen anything like it,’ rattled Law San in the early evening. He had returned home soon after her, so excited by the unprecedented events that he cooked up a steaming cauldron of
Shan hkauk-hswe
and passed around free bowls of the noodles. Her father had not been with him.

‘We walked at the head of the Prome Road demonstrators. Your father carried the portrait of Aung San on his handlebars.’ Aung San was the national hero who led the struggle for independence from British colonial rule and from the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. ‘There were township banners from Yankin, Bahan, North and South Okkalapa, everywhere.’

Student leaders had made spontaneous speeches beneath the Sule Pagoda, their banners calling for democracy, for an end to one-party rule and for freedom for political prisoners. In the late afternoon the Rangoon district commander had appeared on the portico of the city hall. He had ordered the people to disperse, threatening that otherwise his troops would open fire.

‘But there were too many of us. The crowd just grew and grew,’ thrilled Law San. He could not contain his amazement. ‘We chanted, “This is a peaceful demonstration. No provocations,” and General Myo Nyunt went away. He just went away.’ People found the courage to take hold of their destiny. ‘Then a young man unbuttoned his shirt and addressed the troops. “Shoot me if you dare!” he said. I tell you, Burmese soldiers will not shoot Burmese civilians. The government will cave in. It will collapse tonight.’

‘And my father?’ Ni Ni asked. “Is he all right?’

‘All right? Of course he’s all right.’

Ni Ni laughed, both out of nervousness and relief. ‘Then why didn’t he come back with you?’

‘Because he couldn’t tear himself away, Ni Ni. And I understand him. I understand him well. This is a lucky day in our history. He will be home later. Have another bowl of noodles.’

But Ni Ni’s father didn’t return, not that night or the next day. Instead terrified neighbours stumbled up the Prome Road, their
longyis
stained with blood. In hushed, hurried tones they recounted the horror of the massacre. Not long before midnight, army trucks loaded with troops had roared out from behind the city hall. Armoured cars had driven into the heart of the crowd. Soldiers had stepped down from their vehicles, taken up position and opened fire. Machine guns had cut savage swathes through the mass of unarmed civilians. Hundreds had fallen as they ran to escape. Monks who stood their ground had been bayoneted. School children had been beaten. A scattering of lost sandals had littered the gory pavement around Bandoola Park.

Ni Ni stopped every passer-by outside the house, asking if they had seen a man pushing a bicycle – ‘A green bicycle, with a Flying Pigeon bell.’ But they simply shook their heads or hurried past her without a word, or fell into trembling as they tried to speak. No one had seen her father. She retreated into her room, her hands tucked up into her armpits. She curled up on her mat, unable to move, to touch or be touched. She tried to remind herself of the Buddha’s saying, that anger can be held with a heart of kindness, but when May May Gyi visited in the late afternoon Ni Ni cried out in pain as she tried to take her hand.

‘He can ride very fast,’ Ni Ni thought, to comfort herself on the drive back into town. ‘Faster than any soldier can run.’ In the pick-up no one spoke. The passengers were too frightened. Two women wept. Their lips trembled but they did not make a sound. Only the lick of tyres on wet asphalt broke the silence. Barricades had been set up all over the city. The Toyota navigated around the new checkpoints, and between the cairns of broken concrete piled at the places where people had been killed. The twists and turns made Ni Ni feel nauseous.

‘He will have cycled away and be hiding somewhere.’

She searched for him first outside the city hall. She touched the black asphalt and shivered. The dead and dying had already been thrown into lorries and driven away under the cover of darkness. Rain and water hoses had washed away the stains of butchery. The square was deserted, except for the passing khaki trucks filled with soldiers. Their rifles pointed outwards, and behind them Ni Ni glimpsed women with bound hands. She darted around the park, praying that she would find her father’s bicycle leaning against the railings. Instead she caught sight of a band of defiant demonstrators emerging from beside the Foreign Trade Bank. A gunshot rang out and their fighting peacock banner fluttered to the ground. Ni Ni had never before seen a man die. He lay curled on the glistening stones as if asleep, and she wanted to shake him awake. A second report echoed off the buildings and the remaining protestors took to their heels. She too ran, but in the opposite direction, hoping that the sniper would not notice her in the sudden downpour.

Along the backstreets, down the alleys and in the deserted open-air market she searched for places where her father might be hiding. She tucked herself under a flight of steps, in a place too small for her father to fit, while a
Lon Htein
patrol passed the Theingyi bazaar. In the flats above she heard the muffled whispers of people confined to their rooms, imprisoned by fear, nursing wounded bodies and disbelief.

Outside Rangoon General Hospital the bereaved thrashed through the crowd, hunting for missing relatives. A dozen students crouched on the pavement, bleeding from bayonet gashes. A mother cradled her son. His smart high school uniform was shredded and his body stiff with rigor mortis. The naked male corpses with shaven heads were monks whom soldiers had stripped of their robes. Medical staff hammered a banner above the emergency unit: ‘Doctors, nurses and hospital workers who are treating the wounded urge the soldiers to stop shooting.’ The words were written in blood. Ni Ni watched a group of nurses gather to demonstrate against the killings. They stepped forward carrying the national flag. A
Tatmadaw
truck approached them. There was a single shot, then automatic-rifle fire. The soldiers sprayed the hospital building with bullets. Ni Ni stole into its dank corridors, running past dying marchers and bloodied white tunics, looking for the cyclist with hard hands, touching nothing, lost and afraid.

‘He is waiting,’ she later told May May Gyi, while grinding
thanakha
. It had been madness to try to look for her father, so Ni Ni had returned home. ‘Lying low until it is safe to come out of hiding.’

‘Maybe he has escaped with the students to Thailand,’ the gossip suggested, not wanting to smother her own optimism. Her son had not come back either, and she hoped that he was among the thousands of demonstrators who were fleeing to the border. ‘But it may be some time until your father can return.’ May May Gyi knew that the beauty stall alone brought in little money. ‘You’re almost fourteen now, Ni Ni. You should try to find a job.’

The girl shook her head and did not smile. ‘I will wait too,’ she replied. The laughter had been stolen out of her.

Ni Ni was wrong in thinking that she had time. Late one Thursday evening the lights went out in the houses on either side of Prome Road. At first no one paid any attention to the blackout. The country’s electricity supply was erratic. Then seventy-five heavily laden army trucks rumbled along the road, carrying from the port crates marked ‘Allied Ordnance, Singapore’. The weapons and ammunition were a gift from the state arms company of a fraternal nation. They would enable the regime to reinforce its power at a time when it hadn’t the money to buy guns. The military government had not been dislodged. Ne Win, in spite of his sham resignation, still retained control.